All posts by Ashley Whittaker

Raspberry Pi R2D2 console (plus tons of other Star Wars projects)

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-r2d2-console-plus-tons-of-other-star-wars-projects/

Diehard Nintendo and Star Wars fan electrouser301 is behind this customised R2D2 Raspberry Pi-powered console. Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is its brain, and a Nintendo GameCube was customised with spray paint and hand-cut stencils.

game cube painted to look like R2D2
A match made in a galaxy far, far away

Unleash your inner child

Telling the story of the build, electrouser301 said:

“When I saw what people were doing with Raspberry Pi and emulation it opened up a new world to me. If you would have shown kid-me that I could play the whole libraries of NES, N64, Arcade games, Genesis, SNES, etc. all on one console that you create yourself, to your own specifications, my mind would have been blown. That’s what this whole project was about, bringing back my inner child. I wanted to create and own something that no one else has.”

Inner workings of R2D2 Cube

Of course, you could just deck out a GameCube case with decals or paint and keep the internals the same if you don’t want to swap a Raspberry Pi in for emulation. But where’s the fun in that?

See the machine’s power circuit plugged into the Raspberry Pi’s micro USB power slot below. The red and green wires are LED wires, and the power switch wires are pink.

And here’s a side view of the guts of the project:

R2D2 makeover

Hand-cut R2D2-inspired paper stencils spray-painted onto the GameCube give it its instantly recognisable style. A unique retro device now adorns electrouser301’s gaming space, and new life has been breathed into one of Nintendo’s finest creations.

R2D2-approved blue and white colour scheme

Top Star Wars maker projects

Take a look at electromaker’s list of Best Star Wars Maker Projects – it’s where we came across this R2D2 GameCube mashup. Naturally, the list features a fair few homemade lightsabers, so check it out if you’re in the market for an upgrade; however, we wanted to share a few Star Wars-themed builds we hadn’t seen before.

First up, an animated Star Wars: The Force Awakens movie poster made with NeoPixel LEDs and an Arduino Mega. Steve from Making at Home coded a built-in motion sensor and customisable brightness settings. Check it out below, because this isn’t just any old poster with a few LEDs taped in the back, oh no.

Pimp my poster

You know we love wearable tech around here, so this DIY Boba Fett helmet with a built-in LED chaser was definitely going to be a favourite. This is a fairly affordable build too, consisting of a few cheap components like LEDs and resistors, while the helmet itself is made from crafty stuff found around the house. Crazy Couple created this project and you should check out their tutorial-packed YouTube channel.

“I am Boba Fett. The ship you seek is nearby.”

BB8 occupies a special place in our hearts, so we love this 3D-printed robot, which is controlled by an Arduino Uno over a Bluetooth connection from your smartphone. Watch maker Lewis’s video below and share in his love for this spherical droid.

Check out maker Lewis’ channel DIY Machines

May the force be with you

Drop some links in the comments to show off your Star Wars-themed builds so we can share in your intergalactic wisdom. Then go be friends with Electromaker on YouTube. Because subscribers of them you should be.

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Raspberry Pi thermal camera

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-thermal-camera/

It has been a cold winter for Tom Shaffner, and since he is working from home and leaving the heating on all day, he decided it was finally time to see where his house’s insulation could be improved.

camera attached to raspberry pi in a case
Tom’s setup inside a case with a cooling fan; the camera is taped on bottom right

An affordable solution

His first thought was to get a thermal IR (infrared) camera, but he found the price hasn’t yet come down as much as he’d hoped. They range from several thousand dollars down to a few hundred, with a $50 option just to rent one from a hardware store for 24 hours.

When he saw the $50 option, he realised he could just buy the $60 (£54) MLX90640 Thermal Camera from Pimoroni and attach it to a Raspberry Pi. Tom used a Raspberry Pi 4 for this project. Problem affordably solved.

A joint open source effort

Once Tom’s hardware arrived, he took advantage of the opportunity to combine elements of several other projects that had caught his eye into a single, consolidated Python library that can be downloaded via pip and run both locally and as a web server. Tom thanks Валерий КурышевJoshua Hrisko, and Adrian Rosebrock for their work, on which this solution was partly based.

heat map image showing laptop and computer screen in red with surroundings in bluw
The heat image on the right shows that Tom’s computer and laptop screens are the hottest parts of the room

Tom has also published everything on GitHub for further open source development by any enterprising individuals who are interested in taking this even further.

Quality images

The big question, though, was whether the image quality would be good enough to be of real use. A few years back, the best cheap thermal IR camera had only an 8×8 resolution – not great. The magic of the MLX90640 Thermal Camera is that for the same price the resolution jumps to 24×32, giving each frame 768 different temperature readings.

heat map image showing window in blue and lamp in red
Thermal image showing heat generated by a ceiling lamp but lost through windows

Add a bit of interpolation and image enlargement and the end result gets the job done nicely. Stream the video over your local wireless network, and you can hold the camera in one hand and your phone in the other to use as a screen.

Bonus security feature

Bonus: If you leave the web server running when you’re finished thermal imaging, you’ve got yourself an affordable infrared security camera.

video showing the thermal camera cycling through interpolation and color modes and varying view
Live camera cycling through interpolation and colour modes and varying view

Documentation on the setup, installation, and results are all available on Tom’s GitHub, along with more pictures of what you can expect.

And you can connect with Tom on LinkedIn if you’d like to learn more about this “technically savvy mathematical modeller”.

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Raspberry Pi makes LEGO minifigures play their own music

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-makes-lego-minifigures-play-their-own-music/

We shared Dennis Mellican’s overly effective anti-burglary project last month. Now he’s back with something a whole lot more musical and mini.

Inspiration

Dennis was inspired by other jukebox projects that use Raspberry Pi, NFC readers, and tags to make music play. Particularly this one by Mark Hank, which we shared on the blog last year. The video below shows Dennis’s first attempt at creating an NFC Raspberry Pi music player, similar to Mark’s.

LEGO twist

After some poking around, Dennis realised that the LEGO Dimensions toy pad is a three-in-one NFC reader with its own light show. He hooked it up to a Raspberry Pi and developed a Python application to play music when LEGO Dimension Minifigures are placed on the toy pad. So, if an Elvis minifigure is placed on the reader, you’ll hear Elvis’s music.

LEGO figures dressed as member of the band KISS
Mini KISS rocking out on the NFC reader

The Raspberry Pi is hooked up to the LEGO Dimensions toy pad, with Musicfig (Dennis’s name for his creation) playing tracks via Spotify over Bluetooth. The small screen behind the minifigures is displaying the Musicfig web application which, like the Spotify app, displays the album art for the track that’s currently playing. 

No Spotify or LEGO? No problem!

Daft Punk LEGO minifgures stood on an NFC reader next to a Raspberry Pi and a phone showing Daft Punk playing on Spotify
Daft Punk LOVES Raspberry Pi

Spotify playback is optional, as you can use your own MP3 music file collection instead. You also don’t have to use LEGO Minifigures: most NFC-enabled devices or tags can be used, including Disney Infinity, Nintendo Amiibo, and Skylander toy characters.

Mini figurines in the shape of various kids film charactera
Why not have Elsa sing… what’s that song again? Let it… what was it?

Dennis thought Musicfig could be a great marketable LEGO product for kids and grown-ups alike, and and he submitted it to the LEGO Ideas website. Unfortunately, he had tinkered a little too much (we approve) and it wasn’t accepted, due to rules that don’t allow non-LEGO parts or customisations.

Want to build one?

The LEGO Dimensions toy pad was discontinued in 2017, but Dennis has seen some sets on sale at a few department stores, and even more cheaply on second-hand market sites like Bricklink. We’ve spotted them on eBay and Amazon too. Dennis also advises that the toy pad often sells for less than a dedicated NFC reader.

A Tron mini figure on the reader with the Tron movie soundtrack seen playing on the screen behind it
What’s the best movie soundtrack and why is it Tron?

Watch Dennis’s seven-year-old son Benny show you how it all works, from Elvis through to Prodigy via Daft Punk and Queen.

You can tell which songs Benny likes best because the volume goes to 11

There are some really simple step-by-step instructions for a quick install here, as well as a larger gallery of Musicfig rigs. And Dennis hosts a more detailed walkthrough of the project, plus code examples, here.

You can find all things Dennis-related, including previous Raspberry Pi projects, here.

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Coding on Raspberry Pi remotely with Visual Studio Code

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/coding-on-raspberry-pi-remotely-with-visual-studio-code/

Jim Bennett from Microsoft, who showed you all how to get Visual Studio Code up and running on Raspberry Pi last week, is back to explain how to use VS Code for remote development on a headless Raspberry Pi.

Like a lot of Raspberry Pi users, I like to run my Raspberry Pi as a ‘headless’ device to control various electronics – such as a busy light to let my family know I’m in meetings, or my IoT powered ugly sweater.

The upside of headless is that my Raspberry Pi can be anywhere, not tied to a monitor, keyboard and mouse. The downside is programming and debugging it – do you plug your Raspberry Pi into a monitor and run the full Raspberry Pi OS desktop, or do you use Raspberry Pi OS Lite and try to program and debug over SSH using the command line? Or is there a better way?

Remote development with VS Code to the rescue

There is a better way – using Visual Studio Code remote development! Visual Studio Code, or VS Code, is a free, open source, developer’s text editor with a whole swathe of extensions to support you coding in multiple languages, and provide tools to support your development. I practically live day to day in VS Code: whether I’m writing blog posts, documentation or Python code, or programming microcontrollers, it’s my work ‘home’. You can run VS Code on Windows, macOS, and of course on a Raspberry Pi.

One of the extensions that helps here is the Remote SSH extension, part of a pack of remote development extensions. This extension allows you to connect to a remote device over SSH, and run VS Code as if you were running on that remote device. You see the remote file system, the VS Code terminal runs on the remote device, and you access the remote device’s hardware. When you are debugging, the debug session runs on the remote device, but VS Code runs on the host machine.

Photograph of Raspberry Pi 4
Raspberry Pi 4

For example – I can run VS Code on my MacBook Pro, and connect remotely to a Raspberry Pi 4 that is running headless. I can access the Raspberry Pi file system, run commands on a terminal connected to it, access whatever hardware my Raspberry Pi has, and debug on it.

Remote SSH needs a Raspberry Pi 3 or 4. It is not supported on older Raspberry Pis, or on Raspberry Pi Zero.

Set up remote development on Raspberry Pi

For remote development, your Raspberry Pi needs to be connected to your network either by ethernet or WiFi, and have SSH enabled. The Raspberry Pi documentation has a great article on setting up a headless Raspberry Pi if you don’t already know how to do this.

You also need to know either the IP address of the Raspberry Pi, or its hostname. If you don’t know how to do this, it is also covered in the Raspberry Pi documentation.

Connect to the Raspberry Pi from VS Code

Once the Raspberry Pi is set up, you can connect from VS Code on your Mac or PC.

First make sure you have VS Code installed. If not, you can install it from the VS Code downloads page.

From inside VS Code, you will need to install the Remote SSH extension. Select the Extensions tab from the sidebar menu, then search for Remote development. Select the Remote Development extension, and select the Install button.

Next you can connect to your Raspberry Pi. Launch the VS Code command palette using Ctrl+Shift+P on Linux or Windows, or Cmd+Shift+P on macOS. Search for and select Remote SSH: Connect current window to host (there’s also a connect to host option that will create a new window).

Enter the SSH connection details, using user@host. For the user, enter the Raspberry Pi username (the default is pi). For the host, enter the IP address of the Raspberry Pi, or the hostname. The hostname needs to end with .local, so if you are using the default hostname of raspberrypi, enter raspberrypi.local.

The .local syntax is supported on macOS and the latest versions of Windows or Linux. If it doesn’t work for you then you can install additional software locally to add support. On Linux, install Avahi using the command sudo apt-get install avahi-daemon. On Windows, install either Bonjour Print Services for Windows, or iTunes for Windows.

For example, to connect to my Raspberry Pi 400 with a hostname of pi-400 using the default pi user, I enter [email protected].

The first time you connect, it will validate the fingerprint to ensure you are connecting to the correct host. Select Continue from this dialog.

Enter your Raspberry Pi’s password when promoted. The default is raspberry, but you should have changed this (really, you should!).

VS Code will then install the relevant tools on the Raspberry Pi and configure the remote SSH connection.

Code!

You will now be all set up and ready to code on your Raspberry Pi. Start by opening a folder or cloning a git repository and away you go coding, debugging and deploying your applications.

In the remote session, not all extensions you have installed locally will be available remotely. Any extensions that change the behavior of VS Code as an application, such as themes or tools for managing cloud resources, will be available.

Things like language packs and other programming tools are not installed in the remote session, so you’ll need to re-install them. When you install these extensions, you’ll see the Install button has changed to Install in SSH:< hostname > to show it’s being installed remotely.

VS Code may seem daunting at first – it’s a powerful tool with a huge range of extensions. The good news is Microsoft has you covered with lots of hands-on, self-guided learning guides on how to use it with different languages and development tools, from using Git version control, to developing web applications. There’s even a guide to learning Python basics with Wonder Woman!

Jim with his arms folded wearing a dark t shirt
Jim Bennett

You remember Jim – his blog Expecting Someone Geekier is well good. You can find him on Twitter @jimbobbennett and on github.

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Raspberry Pi 1 Model B units brought back to life for charity

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-1-model-b-units-brought-back-to-life-for-charity/

When we heard that James Dawson had rescued a load of well-worn Raspberry Pi 1 Model B and Model A computers from eBay, refurbished them, and sold them on, we felt warm and fuzzy knowing that some of our oldest devices would be finding new homes.

 Pi's needing new SD card slots
Raspberry Pis in need of new SD card slots. These are now all repaired but yet to be sold 

But the feels really hit when we learned that James is donating the money from those resales to us for our Learn at Home campaign, where we get Raspberry Pis into the hands of UK young people who need them the most.

We decided to learn a little more about the guy behind this generous idea.

Where do your computer repair skills come from?

I’m a 25-year-old guy from Newcastle Upon Tyne. I’ve always been into computers and started weekend work experience in a computer repair shop, which turned into an apprenticeship and then a full-time job, giving me a basic knowledge of board-level repairs and hardware diagnostics.

Why Raspberry Pi?

Around the time the first Raspberry Pi (the Model B) came out in 2012, the company I worked for took on a large client in their business IT support division that ran Linux based servers. I immediately purchased a Raspberry Pi and set about learning my way around the Linux terminal and picked it up pretty quickly.

Raspberry 1 Model A plus
Looking good for your age there, Model A

What do you do now?

I ended up supporting the aforementioned Linux-based servers for several years before moving on. Seven years later I’m a Senior Linux System Administrator / Platform engineer for a multinational company, and I’m not sure I’d be in this position if it wasn’t for Raspberry Pi! 

How did the idea to refurbish old Raspberry Pi units come about?

This isn’t something I had planned to do, it just happened! I was looking for some Raspberry Pi accessories on eBay one night, when I came across a box of 200+ broken Raspberry Pis. I had to have them and save them from becoming e-waste, but I didn’t have a plan for them, or even know if they were in a fixable state. 

James' haul of Raspberry Pi kit, some boxed, in a big cardboard box
James’ eBay haul

How did you fix them?

Once I found out the condition and performed some diagnostics, I realised that well over half of them were repairable. Using a cheap 3.5″ TFT Raspberry Pi display and a hacky bash script, I created a diagnostic tool that tested the USB ports, Ethernet port, and display output.

applying a solder mask to a pcb
Solder masks are a core component in James’s beauty routine. This photo comes from Part 3 of his five-part project blog.

The technical side of the repairs are detailed in a five-part (so far) blog. Get started on Part 1.

What made you want to donate to the Raspberry Pi Foundation?

I initially decided to see if I could donate the refurbished units to schools or maker spaces, but it turns out donating seven-year-old hardware is harder than it sounds!

Raspberry Pi 1s in a cardboard box

Thankfully, there are still a lot of people out there who are interested in early Raspberry Pi models, so I decided to sell them and donate the money. The Raspberry Pi Foundation, specifically their Learn at Home campaign, stood out to me. 

How well did they sell?

The first batch I repaired sold out in two days. That raised £400, which has already been donated. I hope to raise around £800 in total, and the next batch will be listed for sale soon.

Lots of Pi 1 Model B + packed in tightly in a box
Refurbished Raspberry Pi Model B, ready to ship

Keep up with James’s tech projects on his blog, or follow him on Twitter.

His latest refurbished batch of Raspberry Pi Model A computers is for sale on eBay, as well as a ton of Raspberry Pi Model B units.

Donate to our Learn at Home campaign

Since last summer, we’ve been distributing free Raspberry Pi computers to young people in the UK who don’t have access to a computer at home to do their schoolwork. The £800 that James is raising will allow us to give four disadvantaged young people free Raspberry Pi computer kits and ongoing support so they can continue learning while at home during the pandemic.

Find out how you can donate to our Learn at Home campaign to help solve this urgent issue.

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Check beer stock with Keg Punk on Raspberry Pi

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/check-beer-stock-with-keg-punk-on-raspberry-pi/

Do you remember the Danger Shed? New Orleans-based Raspberry Pi-powered home brewing monitoring set up in a… shed? Well, Patrick Murphy and his brewing crew are back with a new toy.

How does it work?

What is it?

It’s called Keg Punk – inventory software written in Python, specifically for running on Raspberry Pi and the 7″ Raspberry Pi Touch Display. You mount the touchscreen station in a convenient place and run the program on an embedded Raspberry Pi 4.

keg punk interface
Nice clean interface

Keg Punk is written in Python and is about 2500 lines of code. Since the program is small with a simple interface, it runs on anything from Raspberry Pi Zero to Raspberry Pi 4.

Who needs it?

As a manager at a local craft brewery, Patrick hated not knowing (or not being able to remember) how many kegs of each beer were left in the cellar.

So he started developing a cellar inventory program with the intention of being able to run it within arm’s reach of the beer taps.

Raspberry Pi seven inch touch screen running Keg Punk software
Small enough to sit discreetly next to the beer taps behind the bar

The station needed to have a touchscreen and be tough enough to cope with harsh environments (beer gets EVERYWHERE). Raspberry Pi is the perfect platform for the job as it’s small and easy to connect a touchscreen to.

It can be mounted discreetly close to workstations, so bartenders can quickly see how much stock is left without needing to go down to the cellar.

Keg Punk Raspberry Pi inside the screen casing
Everything fits neatly behind the Raspberry Pi Touch Display

While requirements in a professional setting inspired the idea of Keg Punk, it was developed with the home brewer in mind. The touchscreen station can easily be mounted to a kegerator (a portmanteau of keg and refrigerator) and the tap display can be configured to your setup.

Three installation options

One of the things the Danger Shed team admire most about Raspberry Pi users is their willingness to do a little hands-on tinkering. With that in mind, they launched Keg Punk in three packages, so you can choose an option based on how much of that you’d like to do:

keg punk full kit ready to be shipped
The Taproom Package

The Taproom Package: This is a full plug-in-and-go setup for those who don’t have a Raspberry Pi or who simply do not have time to tinker while also running a bar.

a raspberry pi 4 next to an s d card being held

Keg Punk pre-loaded SD card: Perfect for beer slingers who already have a Raspberry Pi but don’t want to install on their current SD card or deal with the hassle of installation.

Keg Punk software only: If you already have a Raspberry Pi and don’t mind a fair bit of tinkering, you can download the Keg Punk software and manually install.

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Visual Studio Code comes to Raspberry Pi

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/visual-studio-code-comes-to-raspberry-pi/

Microsoft’s Visual Studio Code is an excellent C development environment, and now it’s an easy install on Raspberry Pi. Here’s Jim Bennett from Microsoft to show you all how to get VS Code up and running on our tiny computer. Take it away, Jim…

There are a few products in the tech sphere that get me really excited. One of them is Raspberry Pi (obviously), and the other is Visual Studio Code or VS Code. I always hoped that the two would come together one day — and now, to my great pleasure, they have!

VS Code is a free, open source developer text editor originally released for Windows, macOS and x64 Linux. Out of the box it supports generic text editing and git source code control, as well as full web development with JavaScript, TypeScript and Node.js, with debugging, intellisense and all the goodness you’d expect from a full-featured IDE. What makes it super powerful is extensions — bringing a huge range of programming languages, developer tools and other capabilities.

For example my VS Code setup includes a Python extension so I can code and debug in Python, a set of Microsoft Azure extensions so I can manage my cloud services, PlatformIO to allow me to program micro-controllers like Arduino boards coupled with a C++ extension to support coding in C and C++, and even some Docker support. Not a bad setup for a completely free developer tool.

Jim’s Raspberry Pi 400 running VS Code

I’ve been hoping for years VS Code would come to Raspberry Pi, and finally it’s here. As well as supporting Debian Linux on x64, there are now builds for ARM and ARM64 – both of which can run on Raspberry Pi OS (the ARM build on Raspberry Pi OS, the ARM64 on the beta of the 64-bit Raspberry Pi OS). And yes — I am writing this right now on a Raspberry Pi 400 running VS Code!

Why am I so excited about this?

Well, there are a couple of reasons.

Firstly, it brings an exceptional developer tool to Raspberry Pi. There are already some great editors, but nothing of the calibre of VS Code. I can take my $35 computer, plug it into a keyboard and mouse, connect a monitor and a TV and code in a wide range of languages from the same place.

I see kids learning Python at school using one tool, then learning web development in an after-school coding club with a different tool. They can now do both in the same application, reducing the cognitive load – they only have to learn one tool, one debugger, one setup. Combine this with the new Raspberry Pi 400 and you have an all-in-one solution to learning to code, reminiscent of my ZX Spectrum of decades ago, but so much more powerful.

The second reason is to me the most important — it allows kids to share the same development environment as their grown-ups. Imagine the joy of a 10-year-old coding Python using VS Code on their Raspberry Pi plugged into the family TV, then seeing their Mum working from home coding Python in exactly the same tool on her work laptop as part of her job as an AI engineer or data scientist. It also makes it easier when Mum has to inevitably help with unblocking the issues that always come up with learners.

As a young child it was mind-blowing when my Dad brought home a work PC so he could write reports and I could use it to write up my school work – I was using what Dad used at work, making me feel important. I see this with my seven-year-old daughter, seeing her excitement that I use Microsoft Teams for work, the same as she uses for her virtual schooling (she’s even offered to teach me how to use it if I get stuck). To be able to bring that unadulterated joy of using ‘grown-up tools’ to our young learners is priceless.

Installing VS Code

The great news is VS Code is now available as part of the Raspberry Pi OS apt packages. Launch the Raspberry Pi Terminal and run the following commands:

sudo apt update 
sudo apt install code -y

This will download and install VS Code. If you’ve got your hands on a Pico, then you may not even need to do this – VS Code is installed as part of the Pico setup from the Getting Started guide.

After installing VS Code, you can run it from the Programming folder in the Raspberry Pi menu.

Getting started with VS Code

VS Code may seem daunting at first – it’s a powerful tool with a huge range of extensions. The good news is Microsoft has you covered with lots of hands-on, self-guided learning guides on how to use it with different languages and development tools, from using Git version control, to developing web applications — there’s even a guide to learning Python basics with Wonder Woman.

Go grab it and happy coding!

Jim with his arms folded wearing a dark t shirt
There he is – that’s the real life Jim!

Brilliant Jim Bennett shares loads of Raspberry Pi builds and tutorials over on Expecting Someone Geekier and tweets @jimbobbennett. He also works in Developer Relations at Microsoft. You can learn pretty much everything there is to know about him on github.

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Raspberry Pi Pico balloon tracker

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-pico-balloon-tracker/

Dave Akerman of High Altitude Ballooning came up with a stratospherically cool application for Raspberry Pi Pico. In this guest blog, he shows you how to build and code a weather balloon tracker.

Balloon tracking

My main hobby is flying weather balloons, using GPS/radio trackers to relay their position to the ground, so they can be tracked and hopefully recovered. Trackers minimally consist of a GPS receiver feeding the current position to a small computer, which in turn controls a radio transmitter to send that position to the ground. That position is then fed to a live map to aid chasing and recovering the flight.

system-1024x813-500x396
How it all works

This essential role of the tracker computer is thus a simple one, and those making their own trackers can choose from a variety of microcontrollers chips and boards, for example Arduino boards, PIC microcontrollers or the BBC Microbit. Anything with a modest amount of code memory, data memory, processor power and I/O (serial, SPI etc depending on choice of GPS and radio) will do. A popular choice is Raspberry Pi, which, whilst a sledgehammer to crack a nut for tracking, does make it easy to add a camera.

Raspberry Pi Pico

When I see a new type of processor board, I feel duty bound to make it into a balloon tracker, so when I was asked to help test the new Raspberry Pi Pico, doing so was my first thought. It has plenty of I/O – SPI ports, I2C and serial all available – plus a unique ability (not that I need it for now) to add extra peripherals using the programmable PIO modules, so there was no doubt that it would be very usable. Also, having much more memory than typical microcontrollers, it offers the ability to add functions that would normally need a full Raspberry Pi board – for example on-board landing prediction. More on that later.

Tracker components

So a basic tracker has a GPS receiver and radio transmitter. To connect these to the Raspberry Pi Pico, I used a prototyping board where I mounted a UBlox GPS receiver, LoRa radio transmitter, and sockets for the Pico itself.

I don’t use breadboards as they are prone to intermittent connections that then waste programming time chasing a “bug” that’s actually a hardware problem. Besides, trackers need to be robust so I would need to solder one together eventually anyway.

Pico top, GPS bottom-left; LoRa bottom-right

The particular UBlox GPS module I had handy only has a serial port brought out, so I couldn’t use I2C. No matter because, unlike most Arduino boards, the Raspberry Pi Pico isn’t limited to a single serial port.

The LoRa module connects via SPI and a single GPIO pin which the module uses to send its status (e.g. packet sent – ready to send next packet) to the Raspberry Pi Pico.

Finally, with the tracker working, I added an I2C environmental sensor to the board via a pin header, so the sensor can be placed in free air outside the tracker.

Finally, with the tracker working, I added an I2C environmental sensor to the board via a pin header, so the sensor can be placed in free air outside the tracker.

Development setup

I decided to use C for my tracker rather than Python, for a variety of reasons. The main one is that I have plenty of existing C tracker code to work from, for Arduino and Raspberry Pi, but not so much Python. Secondly, I figured that most of the testers would be using Python so there might be more of a need to test the C toolchain.

The easiest route to getting the C/C++ toolchain working is to install on a Raspberry Pi 4. I couldn’t quite get the VSCode integration working (finger trouble I think) but anyway I’m quite happy to code with an editor and separate build window. So what I ended up with was Notepadd++ on my Windows PC to edit the code, with the source on a Raspberry Pi 4. I then had an ssh window open to run the compile/link steps, and a separate one running the debugger. The debugger downloads the binary to the Raspberry Pi Pico via the latter’s debug port.

For regular debug output from the program I connected a Raspberry Pi Pico serial port to an FTDI USB Serial TTL adapter connected back to my PC – see the image below.

At some point I’ll revisit this setup. First, it’s now possible to printf to a virtual USB serial port, so that frees up that Raspberry Pi Pico serial port. Secondly, I need to get that VSCode integration working.

Tracker code

My Raspberry Pi and Arduino tracker programs work slightly differently. On the Raspberry Pi, to separate the code for the different functions (GPS, radio, sensors etc) I use a separate thread for each. That allows for example a new packet to be sent to the radio transmitter without delay, even if a slow operation is running concurrently elsewhere.

On the Arduino, with no threads available, the code is still split into separate modules but each one is coded to run quickly without waiting in a loop for a peripheral to respond. For example some temperature sensors can take a second or so to take a measurement, and it’s vital not to sit in a loop waiting for the result.

The C toolchain for Raspberry Pi Pico doesn’t, by default, support threaded code unfortunately. Rather than rebuild it with support added, I opted for the approach I use with Arduino. So the main code starts with initialising each module individually, and then sits in a tight loop calling each module once per loop. It’s then up to each module to return control swiftly so that the loop keeps running quickly and no module is kept waiting for long.

Code modules

The GPS code uses a serial port to receive NMEA data from the GPS. NMEA is the standard ASCII protocol used by pretty much every GPS module that exists, and includes the current date, time, latitude, longitude, altitude and other data. All we need to do is confirm that the data is valid, then read and store these key values. The other important function is to ensure that the GPS module is in the correct “flight mode” so that it works at high altitude – without this then it will stop providing new positions about 18km altitude.

View NMEA Data Log

The LoRa radio code checks to see when the module is not transmitting, then builds a new telemetry message containing the above GPS data plus the name of the balloon, any other sensor data, and the landing prediction (see later).

This message is passed to the LoRa chip via SPI, then the chip switches on its radio and modulates the radio signal with the telemetry data. Once the message has been sent then the chip switches on its DIO0 output which is connected to the Raspberry Pi Pico so it knows when it can send another message.

All messages are received on the ground (in this case by a Pi LoRa receiver) and then uploaded to an internet database that in turn drives a live Google map (see image below).

Sensors

Usefully for balloon trackers, the Raspberry Pi Pico can be powered directly from battery via an on-board buck-boost converter.

The input voltage connects through a potential divider to an analog sense input (ADC3) to allow for easy measurement of the battery voltage. Note that the ADC reference voltage is the 3.3V rail, which is noisy especially when used to power external devices such as the GPS and LoRa both of which have rather spiky power consumption requirements, so the code averages out many measurements.

An alternative would be to add a precise reference voltage to the ADC but I went for the zero cost software option.

The board temperature can also be measured, this time using ADC4. That’s less useful though for a tracker than an external temperature measurement, so I added a BME280 device for that. The Raspberry Pi Pico samples include code for the BME connected via SPI, but I chose I2C so I needed to replace the SPI calls with I2C calls. Pretty easy. The BME280 returns pressure – probably the most interesting environmental measurement for a balloon tracker – and humidity too.

Landing prediction

So far, everything I’ve done could also be done on a basic AVR chip e.g. the Arduino Mini Pro, with some spare room. However, one very useful extra is to add a prediction of the landing point.

We use online flight prediction prior to launch, to determine roughly where the balloon will land (within a few miles) so we know it’s safe to launch without landing near a city for example. This uses a global wind prediction database plus some flight parameters (e.g. ascent rate and burst altitude) to predict the path of the balloon from launch to landing. It can be very accurate if those parameters are followed through on the flight itself.

Of course the actual flight never quite follows the plan – for example the launch might be later than planned, and in changing wind conditions that itself can move the landing point by miles. So it’s useful to have a live prediction during that flight, and indeed we have that, using the same wind database.

However, since it’s online, and 3G/4G can be patchy when chasing a balloon, it’s useful to have an independent landing prediction. This can be done in the tracker itself, by storing the wind speed and direction (deduced from GPS positions) on the way up, measuring the descent rate after burst, applying that to an atmospheric density model to plot the future descent rate to the ground, and then calculating the effect of the wind during descent and finally producing a landing position.

Typical Arduino boards don’t have enough memory to store the measured wind data, but the Raspberry Pi Pico has more than enough. I ported my existing code which:

  1. During ascent, it splits the vertical range into 100 metres sections, into which it stores the latitude and longitude deltas as degrees per second.
  2. Every few seconds, it runs a prediction of the landing position based on the current position, the data in that array, and an estimated descent profile that uses a simple atmospheric model plus default values for payload weight and parachute effectiveness.
  3. During descent, the parachute effectiveness is measured, and the actual figure is used in the above calculation in (2).
  4. Calculates the time it will spend within each 100m section of air, then multiplies that by the stored wind speed to calculate the horizontal distance and direction it is expected to travel in that section.
  5. Adds all those sectional movements together, adds those to the current position, and produces the landing prediction.
  6. Sends that position down to the ground with the rest of the telemetry.

Phew. Now we know pretty much everything about how balloon trackers work. Thanks Dave! Also, if you want to go on your own near-space flight, check out High Altitude Ballooning.

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Raspberry fish & RP2040 chip

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-fish-rp2040-chip/

Look at our lovely friends over at This is not Rocket Science (TiNRS) – they’ve wasted no time at all in jumping in with our new chips. In this guest post, Stijn of TiNRS shares their fishily musical application of our new toy.

The new RP2040 chip by Raspberry Pi is amazing. When we got our hands on this beautiful little thing, we did what we always do with new chips and slapped on a Goldfish, our favourite acid bassline synthesiser (we make fish and chips, hahahaha).

TiNRS took to Instagram to explain more about the 18 year old fish synthesiser project

While benchmarking the performance by copy/pasting instances of our entire Goldfish in search of the chip’s limits, we suddenly found ourselves with a polyphonic synth. We have since rewritten these multiple instances into a 16-voice Poly-Goldfish with 4 oscillators per voice. To celebrate we designed a PCB and brightly coloured frontpanel to give this new Goldfish some dedicated controls.

Bring-up was trivial due to the amazing documentation and the extremely flexible PIO-blocks. RP2040 is a dream to work with. Childlike giddiness ensued while lying on the carpet and programming in VSCode on a Raspberry Pi 400 talking directly to the RP2040. This is the way to release a chip into the world: with fantastic documentation, an open toolchain and plenty of examples of how to use everything.

PCB and brightly coloured front panel

Once these chips hit general availability we will probably share some designs on our Github. This chip is now part of our go-to set of tools to make cool stuff and will very bloody likely be inside our next three modules.

It fits perfectly in our Open Source attitude. Because of the easy, high quality, multi-platform, free and even beginner-friendly toolchain they have built around this chip, we can expand the accessibility to the insides of our designs. With these chips it is way easier for us to have you do things like adding your own algorithms, building extra modes or creating personal effects. We can lean on the quality of the Raspberry Pi platform and this amazing chip.

TiNRS approves.

Keep an eye on the TiNR blog for more adventures in technology. You can also find them on Twitter @rocket_not and on Instagram.

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Raspberry Pi Pico – what did you think?

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-pico-what-did-you-think/

The best part of launching a new product is seeing the reaction of the Raspberry Pi community. When we released Raspberry Pi Pico into the world last Thursday, it didn’t take long for our curious, creative crew of hackers and tinkerers to share some brilliant videos, blogs and photos.

If you’ve spotted other cool stuff people have done with Raspberry Pi Pico, do comment with a link at the end of this post so we can check it out.

Graham Sanderson’s BBC Micro emulation

YouTube went wild for this Raspberry Pi Pico-powered BBC Micro and BBC Master emulation. Graham Sanderson‘s little bit of fun with our latest creation emulates the fine detail of the hardware required to get the best games and graphics demos to run.

He’s put together an entire playlist showing off the power of Raspberry Pi Pico, and it’s a retro gamer’s dream.

Alex Glow

Alex Glow went live for almost an hour unboxing our teeny tiny microcontroller, deep-diving into our getting started materials as well.

She has a good look around our launch blog post on camera too, unpacking some of the technical aspects of how Raspberry Pi Pico is powered, and also explaining why it’s so exciting that we’ve built this ourselves.

Jeff Geerling

Jeff Geerling has used his Pico for good, creating a baby-safe temperature monitor for his little one’s bedroom. In his video, he shows you around some of Raspberry Pi Pico’s “party tricks”, and includes the all-important build montage sequence.

If you prefer words to videos, Jeff has also put together a big ole blog post about our new microcontroller board.

Brian Corteil

Brian Corteil took to Twitter to share his eleven-year-old’s pro soldering skills, proving that Raspberry Pi is for everyone, no matter how young, old, or inexperienced, or expert.

Extreme close-up!

Look at the finish on those pins!

16MB Pico modification

Daniel Green did what you were all thinking – desoldered the onboard 2MB QSPI flash chip and replaced it with a 16MB version. Say hello to the first Pico in the world with this special modification. 

Eben himself!

On top of all the brilliant comments, projects, and guidance our community has already shared, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton will be joining the Digital Making at Home crew on Wednesday to show young coders around Raspberry Pi Pico.

Set a reminder for yourself (or your kids) to watch live on YouTube, or join in on Facebook, Twitter or Twitch at 7pm UK time.

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Raspberry Pi LEGO sorter

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-lego-sorter/

Raspberry Pi is at the heart of this AI–powered, automated sorting machine that is capable of recognising and sorting any LEGO brick.

And its maker Daniel West believes it to be the first of its kind in the world!

Best ever

This mega-machine was two years in the making and is a LEGO creation itself, built from over 10,000 LEGO bricks.

A beast of 10,000 bricks

It can sort any LEGO brick you place in its input bucket into one of 18 output buckets, at the rate of one brick every two seconds.

While Daniel was inspired by previous LEGO sorters, his creation is a huge step up from them: it can recognise absolutely every LEGO brick ever created, even bricks it has never seen before. Hence the ‘universal’ in the name ‘universal LEGO sorting machine’.

Hardware

There we are, tucked away, just doing our job

Software

The artificial intelligence algorithm behind the LEGO sorting is a convolutional neural network, the go-to for image classification.

What makes Daniel’s project a ‘world first’ is that he trained his classifier using 3D model images of LEGO bricks, which is how the machine can classify absolutely any LEGO brick it’s faced with, even if it has never seen it in real life before.

We LOVE a thorough project video, and we love TWO of them even more

Daniel has made a whole extra video (above) explaining how the AI in this project works. He shouts out all the open source software he used to run the Raspberry Pi Camera Module and access 3D training images etc. at this point in the video.

LEGO brick separation

The vibration plate in action, feeding single parts into the scanner

Daniel needed the input bucket to carefully pick out a single LEGO brick from the mass he chucks in at once.

This is achieved with a primary and secondary belt slowly pushing parts onto a vibration plate. The vibration plate uses a super fast LEGO motor to shake the bricks around so they aren’t sitting on top of each other when they reach the scanner.

Scanning and sorting

A side view of the LEFO sorting machine showing a large white chute built from LEGO bricks
The underside of the beast

A Raspberry Pi Camera Module captures video of each brick, which Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ then processes and wirelessly sends to a more powerful computer able to run the neural network that classifies the parts.

The classification decision is then sent back to the sorting machine so it can spit the brick, using a series of servo-controlled gates, into the right output bucket.

Extra-credit homework

A front view of the LEGO sorter with the sorting boxes visible underneath
In all its bricky beauty, with the 18 output buckets visible at the bottom

Daniel is such a boss maker that he wrote not one, but two further reading articles for those of you who want to deep-dive into this mega LEGO creation:

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Deter burglars with a Raspberry Pi chatbot

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/deter-burglars-with-a-raspberry-pi-chatbot/

How to improve upon the standard burglar deterring method of leaving lights switched on? Dennis Mellican turned to Raspberry Pi for a much more effective solution. It actually proved too effective when a neighbour stopped by, but more on that in a bit.

Here you can see Dennis’s system in action scaring off a trespasser:

Good job, Raspberry Pi chatbots!

The burglar deterrent started out as Dennis’s regular home automation system. Not content with the current software offerings, and having worked in DevOps, Dennis decided to create his own solution. Enter Raspberry Pi (well, several of them).

Chatterboxes

Dennis has multiple Raspberry Pi–powered devices dotted around his home, doing things such as turning on lights, powering up a garden sprinkler, and playing fake dog barks on wireless speakers. All these burglar deterrents work together and are run by a chat bot.

A simulation of the chatbots responding to Dennis’ commands

Each Raspberry Pi controls a single automated item in Dennis’s home. All the Raspberry Pis communicate with each other via Slack. Dennis issues commands if he, for example, wants lights to turn on while he is away, but the Raspberry Pis can also talk to each other when a trigger event occurs, such as when a motion sensor is tripped.

Smart sound

speaker, chromecast device, cctv camera and the Raspberry Pi connected for the anti burglary chatbot
Speaker, Google Chromecast, CCTV camera and Raspberry Pi

Google Chromecast enables ‘dumb’ speakers to be smart. Dennis has such speakers set up inside, close to windows at the front and back of the house, and they play an .mp3 file of a fake dog bark when commanded.

The security cameras Dennis uses in his home setup are a wireless CCTV variety, and the lights are a mix of TP-Link and Lifx smart bulbs.

Here’s all the Python code running Dennis’ entire security system.

Too effective?

Dennis’s smart system has backfired on him a few times. Once a neighbour visited while he was out and thought Dennis was rudely not answering the door, because she saw the lights go on inside, making it appear like he was home. Awkward.

The fake dog barking has also startled the postman and a few joggers — Dennis says it adds to the realism.

You’re cute, but you wreck stuff, so get out

The troupe of Raspberry Pis has also scared away an Australian possum (video above). These critters are notorious for making nests in roof cavities, so Dennis dodged another problematic home invasion there.

Future upgrades

Dennis is a maker after our own hearts when explaining where he’d like to go next with his anti-burglary build:

“I feel like Kevin McCallister from Home Alone, with these home security ‘traps’. I’m still waiting to catch the Wet Bandits for the sequel to this story. So far only stray cats have been caught by the sprinkler. Perhaps the next adventure of the chat bot is to order pizza and have Gangster ‘Johnny’ complete the transaction when the pizza delivery triggers the sensors.”

Go for it, Dennis!

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RetroPie booze barrel

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/retropie-booze-barrel/

What do we want? Retro gaming, adult beverages, and our favourite Spotify playlist. When do we want them? All at the same time.

Luckily, u/breadtangle took to reddit to answer our rum-soaked prayers with this beautifully crafted beer barrel-cum-arcade machine-cum-drinks cabinet.

A beer barrel with drinks inside two opening doors cut into the front of the barrel and a retro arcade console serving as the lid of the barrel with joystick and buttons on a ledge in front
We approve of this drink selection

The addition of a sneaky hiding spot for your favourite tipple, plus a musical surprise, set this build apart from the popular barrel arcade projects we’ve seen before, like this one featured a few years back on the blog.

Retro gaming

A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B+ runs RetroPie, offering all sorts of classic games to entertain you while you sample from the grownup goodies hidden away in the drinks cabinet.

The maker’s top choice is Tetris Attack for the SNES.

A beer barrel with drinks inside two opening doors cut into the front of the barrel and a retro arcade console serving as the lid of the barrel with joystick and buttons on a ledge in front
Such a beautiful finish

Background music

What more could you want now you’ve got retro games and an elegantly hidden drinks cabinet at your fingertips? u/breadtangle‘s creation has another trick hidden inside its smooth wooden curves.

The Raspberry Pi computer used in this build also runs Raspotify, a Spotify Connect client for Raspberry Pi that allows you to stream your favourite tunes and playlists from your phone while you game.

You can set Raspotify to play via Bluetooth speakers, but if you’re using regular speakers and are after a quick install, whack this command in your Terminal:

curl -sL https://dtcooper.github.io/raspotify/install.sh | sh
Booze barrel joystick and buttons panel during the making process
Behind the scenes

u/breadtangle neatly tucked a pair of Logitech z506 speakers on the sides of the barrel, where they could be protected by the overhang of the glass screen cover.

Hardware

The build’s joysticks and buttons came from Amazon, and they’re set into an off-cut piece of kitchen countertop. The glass screen protector is another Amazon find and sits on a rubber car-door edge protector.

The screen itself is lovingly tilted towards the controls, to keep players’ necks comfortable, and u/breadtangle finished off the build’s look with a barstool to sit on while gaming.

We love it, but we have one very important question left…

Can we come round and play?

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Get VMWare on Raspberry Pi

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/get-vmware-on-raspberry-pi/

Hacking apart a sweet, innocent Raspberry Pi – who would do such a thing? Network Chuck, that’s who. But he has a very cool reason for it so, we’ll let him off the hook.

Subscribe to Network Chuck on YouTube

He’s figured out how to install VMware ESXi on Raspberry Pi, and he’s sharing the step-by-step process with you because he loves you. And us. We think. We hope.

Get cutting

In a nutshell, Chuck hacks apart a Raspberry Pi, turning it into three separate computers, each running different software at the same time. He’s a wizard.

Our poor sweet baby 😮

VMware is cool because it’s Virtual Machine software big companies use on huge servers, but you can deploy it on one of our tiny devices and learn how to use it in the comfort of your own home if you follow Chuck’s instructions.

Raspberry Pi cut into three pieces with labels showing how powerful each bit is and what it's capable of
Useful labels explaining which bit of Raspberry Pi is capable of what

What do you need?

Make sure you’re up to date

So easy, it only takes 40 seconds to explain

Firstly, you need to make sure you’re running the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS. Chuck uses Raspberry Pi Imager to do this, and the video above shows you how to do the same.

Format your SD card

Network Chuck removing SD card from Raspberry Pi 4
It’s teeny, but powerful

Then you’ll need to format your SD card ready for VMware ESXi. This can be done with Raspberry Pi Imager too. You’ll need to download these two things:

Chuck is the kind of good egg who walks you through how to do this on screen at this point in the project video.

VMware installation

Then you’ll need to create the VMWare Installer to install the actual software. It’s at this point your USB flash drive takes centre stage. Here’s everything you’ll need:

And this is the point in the video at which Chuck walks you through the process.

Once that’s all done, stick your USB flash drive into your Raspberry Pi and get going. You need to be quick off the mark for this bit – there’s some urgent Escape key pressing required, but don’t worry, Chuck walks you through everything.

Create a VM and expand your storage

Once you’ve followed all those steps, you will be up, running, and ready to go. The installation process only takes up the first 15 minutes of Chuck’s project video, and he spends the rest of his time walking you through creating your first VM and adding more storage.

Top job, Chuck.

Keep up with Chuck

Network Chuck holding a Raspberry Pi 4 next to his broadcasting microphone
Fun fact: Raspberry Pi 4 is the same length as Network Chuck’s beard

Network Chuck live-streams every Monday on his YouTube channel, and you can follow him on Twitter too.

There’s also the brilliant networkchuck.com.

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These Furby-‘controlled’ Raspberry Pi-powered eyes follow you

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/these-furby-controlled-raspberry-pi-powered-eyes-follow-you/

Sam Battle aka LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER couldn’t resist splashing out on a clear Macintosh case for a new project in his ‘Cosmo’ series of builds, which inject new life into retro hardware.

furby facial recognition robot in a clear case in front of a dark background
AAGGGGHHHHHHH!

This time around, a Raspberry Pi, running facial recognition software, and one of our Camera Modules enable Furby-style eyes to track movement, detect faces, and follow you around the room.

Give LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER a follow on YouTube

He loves a good Furby does Sam. Has a whole YouTube playlist dedicated to projects featuring them. Seriously.

Raspberry Pi  with camera module attached to small screen loading software needed to run face recognition
Sam got all the Raspberry Pi kit needed from Pimoroni

Our favourite bit of the video is when Sam meets Raspberry Pi for the first time, boots it up, and says:

“Wait, I didn’t know it was a computer. It’s an actual computer computer. What?!”

face recognition software running on small screen with raspberry pi camera behind it, looking at the maker
Face recognition software up and running on Raspberry Pi

The eyes are ping pong balls cut in half so you can fit a Raspberry Pi Camera Module inside them. (Don’t forget to make a hole in the ‘pupil’ so the lens can peek through).

Maker inserting raspberry pi camera module inside a sliced ping pong ball. You can see the ribbons of the camera module sticking out of the ping pong ball half
Raspberry Pi Camera Module tucked inside ping pong ball as it’s mounted to a 3D-printed part

The Raspberry Pi and display screen are neatly mounted on the side of the Macintosh so they’re easily accessible should you need to make any changes.

Raspberry Pi and display screen mounted on the side of a clear macintosh frame
Easy access

All the hacked, repurposed junky bits sit inside or are mounted on swish 3D-printed parts.

Add some joke shop chatterbox teeth, and you’ve got what looks like the innards of a Furby staring at you. See below for a harrowing snapshot of Zach’s ‘Furlexa’ project, featured on our blog last year. We still see it when we sleep.

It gets worse the more you look around

It wasn’t enough for Furby-mad Sam to have created a Furby look-a-like face-tracking robot, he needed to go further. Inside the clear Macintosh case, you can see a de-furred Furby skeleton atop a 3D-printed plinth, with redundant ribbon cables flowing from its eyes into the back of the face-tracking robot face, thus making it appear as though the Furby is the brains behind this creepy creation that is following your every move.

a side view of the entire build with a furby skeleton visible inside
Hey in there. We see you! You dark lord of robo-controlling

Eventually, Sam’s Raspberry Pi–powered creation will be on display at the Museum of Everything Else, so you can go visit it and play with all the “obsolete and experimental technology” housed there. The museum is funded by the Look Mum No Computer Patreon page.

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Raspberry Pi 400 for working and learning at home

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-400-for-working-and-learning-at-home/

Did you get Raspberry Pi 400 as a home learning or working device? We hope you’ve been getting on well with our affordable all-in-one computing solution.

If you’re a new user, here are some tips for you to get the most out of your brand-new Raspberry Pi 400.

Does *anyone’s* home office desk look this tidy?..

First things first!

Make sure your Raspberry Pi runs the newest version of the Raspberry Pi OS. Here is how (and here is a video preview of what the process looks like):

Screen grab of raspberry pi os being installed inline code

Open a terminal window by clicking on the Terminal icon in the top menu bar. Then type this command in the terminal window:

sudo apt update

Press Enter on the keyboard. Once the update is downloaded, type into the window:

sudo apt full-upgrade

Press Enter again. It is safe to just accept the default answer to any questions you are asked during the procedure by typing y and pressing Enter.

Now reboot your Raspberry Pi.

Videoconferencing, collaboration, files

‘Every Zoom Meeting’ by Second City via YouTube

With the newest version of Raspberry Pi OS installed, you can use the following applications in the Chromium browser:

Just log in with your username and password and start working or learning!

Raspberry Pi OS also has LibreOffice installed for working with text files, spreadsheets, and the like.

Printing on your Raspberry Pi

Go into the Preferences section in the main menu, and open Print Settings. This shows the system-config-printer dialog window, where you can do the usual things you’re familiar with from other operating systems: add new printers, remove old ones, set a printer as the default, and access the print queue for each printer.

Like most things in Linux-based operating systems such as Raspberry Pi OS, whether you can make your printer model work depends on user contributions; not every printer is supported yet. We’ve found that most networked printers work fine, while USB printers are a bit hit-and-miss. The best thing to do is to try it and see, and ask for help on our forums if your particular printer doesn’t seem to work.

More tips for using Raspberry Pi as a home computer

Our very own Alasdair Allen wrote a comprehensive guide that covers more topics of setting up a Raspberry Pi for home working, from getting your audio and video ready to setting up a Citrix workspace. Thanks Alasdair!

Free resources for learning at home

A girl and mother doing a homeschooling lesson at a laptop

We’ve got a host of completely free resources for young people, parents, and teachers to continue computing school lessons at home and learn about digital making. Discover them all here!

What do you need?

Let us know in the comments if there are any niggles you’re experiencing, or if you have a top tip to help others who are just getting to grips with using Raspberry Pi as a home learning or working device.

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Smart Fairy Tale

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/smart-fairy-tale/

This is creepy, and we love it. OK, it’s not REALLY creepy, it’s just that some people have an aversion to dolls that appear to move of their own accord, due to a disturbing childhood experience — but enough about me.

Smart Fairy Tale is a whimsical, unique community project created by Berlin-based installation artist Niklas Roy and interaction designer Felix Fisgus.

Using a smartphone app, viewers determine which way a ball travels through transparent pipes, and depending on which light barriers the ball interrupts on its journey, various toys are animated to tell different stories.

The server of the installation is a Raspberry Pi 4. Via its GPIO pins, it controls the track switches and releases the ball.

Raspberry Pi 4 mounted onto plastic with the installation's servo and all the microcontrollers
Raspberry Pi 4 tucked in the top right-hand corner, mounted together with the router. Photo courtesy of Niklas’ project page

The apparatus is full of toys donated by residents of Wolfsburg, Germany. The artists wanted local people to not only be able to operate the mechanical piece, but also to have a hand in creating it. Each animatronic toy is made as a separate module, controlled by its own Arduino Nano.

Smart Fairy Tale can be remotely controlled by viewers who want to check in on the toys they gifted to the installation, and by any other curious people elsewhere in the world.

A phone using the app to control the installation. The installation is out of focus in the background
The app in action. Photo from Felix’s project page.

Better yet, the stories the toys tell were devised by local school students. The artists showed the gifted toys to a few elementary school classes, and the students drew several stories featuring toys they liked. The makers then programmed the toys to match what the drawings said they could do. A servo here, a couple of LEDs there, and the students’ stories were brought to life.

Some drawings local children made suggesting storylines for each of the gifted toys
Some of the storylines drawn by local children. Photo courtesy of Felix’s project page.

So what kind of stories did Wolfsburg’s finest come up with? One of the creators explains:

“There were a lot of scenes to interpret, like the blow-up love story, the chemtrail conspiracy, and the fossil fuel disaster, which culminates in a major traffic jam. The latter one even involved a laboratory for breeding synthetic dinosaurs by the use of renewable energies.”

Felix Fisgus

We LOVE it. Don’t tell me this isn’t creepy though…

WHY DO YOU HAUNT MY DREAMS???

You’ll find tonnes of extra technical specs and images in the project posts on both Felix and Niklas‘ websites.

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Meet team behind the mini Raspberry Pi–powered ISS

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/meet-team-behind-the-mini-raspberry-pi-powered-iss/

Quite possibly the coolest thing we saw Raspberry Pi powering this year was ISS Mimic, a mini version of the International Space Station (ISS). We wanted to learn more about the brains that dreamt up ISS Mimic, which uses data from the ISS to mirror exactly what the real thing is doing in orbit.

The ISS Mimic team’s a diverse, fun-looking bunch of people and they all made their way to NASA via different paths. Maybe you could see yourself there in the future too?

Dallas Kidd

Dallas in a green t shirt stood next to Estefannie in a black t shirt on a blue background. Estefannie is wearing safety googles
Dallas (in the green t shirt) having a lark with teammate Estefannie. Safety first!

Dallas Kidd currently works at the startup Skylark Wireless, helping to advance the technology to provide affordable high speed internet to rural areas.

Previously, she worked on traffic controllers and sensors, in finance on a live trading platform, on RAID controllers for enterprise storage, and at a startup tackling the problem of alarm fatigue in hospitals.

Before getting her Master’s in computer science with a thesis on automatically classifying stars, she taught English as a second language, Algebra I, geometry, special education, reading, and more.

Her hobbies are scuba diving, learning about astronomy, creative writing, art, and gaming.

Tristan Moody

Tristan Moody holding his kid Team ISS NASA
That’s Tristan on the right. NASA does not currently hire small children.

Tristan Moody currently works as a spacecraft survivability engineer at Boeing, helping to keep the ISS and other satellites safe from the threat posed by meteoroids and orbital debris.

He has a PhD in mechanical engineering and currently spends much of his free time as playground equipment for his two young kids.

Estefannie

Estefannie dressed up as Rey from Star Wars for the 2021 princesses with powertools calendar
Estefannie as Rey from Star Wars for the 2021 Princesses with Powertools calendar

Estefannie is a software engineer, designer, punk rocker and likes to overly engineer things and document her findings on her YouTube and Instagram channels as Estefannie Explains It All.

Estefannie spends her time inventing things before thinking, soldering for fun, writing, filming and producing content for her YouTube channel, and public speaking at universities, conferences, and hackathons.

She lives in Houston, Texas and likes tacos.

Douglas Kimble

A member of team ISS Mimic giving a thumbs up while working on the ISS Mimic
Where are the dogs, Douglas?!

Douglas Kimble currently works as an electrical/mechanical design engineer at Boeing. He has designed countless wire harness and installation drawings for the ISS.

He assumes the mentor role and interacts well with diverse personalities. He is also the world’s biggest Lakers fan living in Texas.

His favorite pastimes includes hanging out with his two dogs, Boomer and Teddy. 

Craig Stanton

A member of team ISS Mimic raising an eyebrow while working on the ISS Mimic hardware
Craig’s knows what’s up. Or knows a secret. We can’t tell. Maybe both?

Craig’s father worked for the Space Shuttle program, designing the ascent flight trajectories profiles for the early missions. He remembers being on site at Johnson Space Center one evening, in a freezing cold computer terminal room, punching cards for a program his dad wrote in the early 1980s.

Craig grew up with LEGO and majored in Architecture and Space Design at the University of Houston’s Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture (SICSA).

His day job involves measuring ISS major assemblies on the ground to ensure they’ll fit together on-orbit. Traveling to many countries to measure hardware that will never see each other until on-orbit is the really coolest part of the job.

Sam Treagold

A member of team ISS Mimc sitting at a laptop
Sam: not to be trusted with hardware you don’t want shot in the desert

Sam Treadgold is an aerospace engineer who also works on the Meteoroid and Orbital Debris team, helping to protect the ISS and Space Launch System from hypervelocity impacts. Occasionally they take spaceflight hardware out to the desert and shoot it with a giant gun to see what happens.

In a non-pandemic world he enjoys rock climbing, music festivals, and making sound-reactive LED sunglasses.

Chen Deng

A member of team ISS Mimic showing off a solar panel
Chen showing off the very shiniest part of the ISS Mimic (solar panels)

Chen Deng is a Systems Engineer working at Boeing with the International Space Station (ISS) program. Her job is to ensure readiness of Payloads, or science experiments, to launch in various spacecraft and operations to conduct research aboard the ISS.

The ISS provides a very unique science laboratory environment, something we can’t get much of on earth: microgravity!  The term microgravity means a state of little or very weak gravity.  The virtual absence of gravity allows scientists to conduct experiments that are impossible to perform on earth, where gravity affects everything that we do.

In her free time, Chen enjoys hiking, board games, and creative projects alike.

Bryan Murphy

bryan murphy from team iss mimic at nasa
Bryan, adorned with an LED necklace, posing next to ISS Mimic’s rotating solar panel ‘wings’

Bryan Murphy is a dynamics and motion control engineer at Boeing, where he gets to create digital physics models of robotic space mechanisms to predict their performance.

His favorite projects include the ISS treadmill vibration isolation system and the shiny new docking system. He grew up on a small farm where his hands-on time with mechanical devices fueled his interest in engineering.

When not at work, he loves to brainstorm and create with his artist/engineer wife and their nerdy kids, or go on long family roadtrips—- especially to hike and kayak or eat ice cream. He’s also vice president of a local makerspace, where he leads STEM outreach and includes excess LEDs in all his builds.

Susan

A member of team ISS Mimic
Here’s Susan rocking some of those LED glasses and getting a good grip on ISS Mimic

Susan is a mechanical engineer and a 30+-year veteran of manned spaceflight operations.  She has worked the Space Shuttle Program for Payloads (middeck experiments and payloads deployed with the shuttle arm) starting with STS-30 and was on the team that deployed the Hubble Space Telescope.

She then transitioned into life sciences experiments, which led to the NASA Mir Program where she was on continuous rotation for three years to Russian Mission Control, supporting the NASA astronaut and science experiments onboard the space station as a predecessor to the ISS.

She currently works on the ISS Program (for over 20 years now), where she used to write procedures for on-orbit assembly of the Space Xtation and now writes installation procedures for on-orbit modifications like the docking adapter. She is also an artist and makes crosses out of found objects, and even used to play professional women’s football.

Keep in touch

Team ISS posing in NASA t shirts in front of the ISS mimic

You can keep up with Team ISS Mimic on FacebookInstagram, and Twitter. For more info or to join the team, check out their GitHub page and Discord.

Kids, run your code on the ISS!

Logo of the European Astro Pi Challenge

Did you know that there are Raspberry Pi computers aboard the real ISS that young people can run their own Python programs on? How cool is that?!

Find out how to participate at astro-pi.org.

The post Meet team behind the mini Raspberry Pi–powered ISS appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Pi ‘Swear Bear’ keeps your potty mouth in check

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-swear-bear-keeps-your-potty-mouth-in-check/

Why use a regular swear jar to retrain your potty-mouthed brain when you can build a Swear Bear to help you instead?

Swear Bear listens to you. All the time. And Swear Bear can tell when a swear word is used. Swear Bear tells you off and saves all the swear words you said to the cloud to shame you. Swear Bear subscribes to the school of tough love.

Artificial intelligence

The Google AIY kit allows you to build your own natural language recogniser. This page shows you how to assemble the Voice HAT from the kit, and it also includes the code you’ll need to make your project capable of speech-to-text AI.

Black AIY HAT stuck on top of a Raspberry Pi
Image of the Voice HAT mounted onto a Raspberry Pi 3 courtesy of aiyprojects.withgoogle.com

To teach Swear Bear the art of profanity detection, Swear Bear creators 8 Bits and a Byte turned to the profanity check Python library. You can find the info to install and use the library on this page, as well as info on how it works and why it’s so accurate.

You’ll hear at this point in the video that Swear Bear says “Oh dear” when a swear word is used within earshot.

Hardware

Birds eye view of each of the hardware components used in the project on a green table

This project uses the the first version of Google’s AIY Voice Kit, which comes with a larger black AIY Voice HAT and is compatible with Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. The kit also includes a little Voice HAT microphone board.

Version 2 of the kit comprises the smaller Raspberry Pi Zero WH and a slimmer ‘Voice Bonnet’.

The microphone allows Swear Bear to ‘hear’ your speech, and through its speakers it can then tell you off for swearing.

All of hardware is squeezed into the stuffing-free bear once the text-to-speech and profanity detection software is working.

Babbage Bear hack?

Babbage the Bear

8 Bits and a Byte fan Ben Scarboro took to the comments on YouTube to suggest they rework one of our Babbage Bears into a Swear Bear. Babbage is teeny tiny, so maybe you would need to fashion a giant version to accomplish this. Just don’t make us watch while you pull out its stuffing.

The post Raspberry Pi ‘Swear Bear’ keeps your potty mouth in check appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Merry Christmas to all Raspberry Pi recipients — help is here!

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/merry-christmas-to-all-raspberry-pi-recipients-help-is-here/

Note: We’re not *really* here, we just dropped in to point you in the right direction with your new Raspberry Pi toys, then we’re disappearing again to enjoy the rest of the festive season. See you on 4 January 2021!

a raspberry pi 400 box peeking out of christmas wrapping paper
Photographer Brian’s wrapping skills are A+

So… what did you get? We launched a ton of new products this year, so we’ll walk you through what to do with each of them, as well as how to get started if you received a classic Raspberry Pi.

Community

First things first: welcome! You’re one of us now, so why not take a moment to meet your fellow Raspberry Pi folk and join our social communities?

You can hang out with us on Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Instagram. And we’ve got two YouTube channels: a channel for the tech fans and makers, and a channel for young people, parents, and educators. Subscribe to the one you like best — or even BOTH of them!

Tag us on social media in a photo with your favourite Christmas present and let us know what you plan to do with your new Raspberry Pi!

Raspberry Pi 400

Top view of a woman's hands using the Raspberry Pi 400 keyboard and official Raspberry Pi mouse
The nail polish that shook the internet

If you were lucky enough to get a Raspberry Pi 400 Personal Computer Kit, all you have to do is find a monitor (a TV will also do), plug in, and go. It really is that simple. In fact, when we launched it, Eben Upton described it as a “Christmas morning product”. Always thinking ahead, that guy.

If you got a Raspberry Pi 400 unit on its own, you’ll need to find a mouse and power supply as well as a monitor. You also won’t have received the official Raspberry Pi Beginner’s Guide that comes with the kit, so you can pick one up from the Raspberry Pi Press online store, or download a PDF for free, courtesy of The MagPi magazine.

Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera

Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera, with additional lens attached

You are going to LOVE playing around with this if you got one in your stocking. The Raspberry Pi High Quality Camera is 12.3 megapixels of fun, and the latest addition to the Raspberry Pi camera family.

This video shows you how to set up your new toy. And you can pick up the Official Raspberry Pi Camera Guide for a more comprehensive walkthrough. You can purchase the book in print today from the Raspberry Pi Press store for £10, or download the PDF for free from The MagPi magazine website.

Share your photos using #ShotOnRaspberryPi. We retweet the really good ones!

Operating systems & online support

Adorable family snap

If you got one of our classic Raspberry Pi boards, make sure to get the latest version of Raspberry Pi OS, our official supported operating system.

The easiest way to flash the OS onto your SD card is using the Raspberry Pi Imager. Take 40 seconds to watch the video below to learn how to do that.

Help for newbies

If you’re a complete newbie, our help pages are the best place to start in case you’re a bit daunted by where to plug everything in on your very first Raspberry Pi. If you want step-by-step help, you can also take our free online course “Getting Started with Your Raspberry Pi”.

Once you’ve got the hang of things, our forum will become your home from home. Gazillions of Raspberry Pi superfans hang out there and can answer pretty much any question you throw at them – try searching first, because many questions have already been asked and answered, and perhaps yours has too.

Robots, games, digital art & more

screen grab of raspberry pi projects homepage

When you’re feeling comfortable with the basics, why not head over to our projects page and pick something cool to make?

You could program your own poetry generator, create an alien language, or build a line-following robot. Choose from over 200 step-by-step projects!

The Raspberry Pi blog is also a great place to find inspiration. We share the best projects from our global community, and things for all abilities pop up every week day. If you want us to do the heavy lifting for you, just sign up to Raspberry Pi Weekly, and we’ll send you the top blogs and Raspberry Pi-related news each week.

Babbage Bear

What a QT

And if you got your very own Babbage Bear: love them, cherish them, and keep them safe. They’re of a nervous disposition so talk quietly to them for the first few days, to let them get used to you.

LOVE YOU, BYE

The post Merry Christmas to all Raspberry Pi recipients — help is here! appeared first on Raspberry Pi.