Raspberry Pi Roundup

Potter Duel Allen Pan of Sufficiently Advanced decided that Google’s voice recognition service wasn’t being used for the right stuff. So, he hooked up a Raspberry Pi to the service for a far more magical mission. Wizard Analogue No-Magic Dueling Simulator (W.A.N.D.S.) is Harry Potter-meets-Laser-Tag – the Pi detects the speaking of ‘spells’ and then triggers an infra-red tipped wand. The infra-red signal is picked up by an opposing player’s receiver and then an Arduino hooked up to a T.E.N.S. machine delivers light electrical shocks to various parts of their body. This gives a palpable sense of being ‘hit’ without doing any damage. There...

Plant Watering Michael Lynch decided he wanted a house plant. Being a software engineer, however, and not a gardener, gave him a distinct problem: when should the plant be watered? How much moisture is too much? So, he collaborated with Jeet Shetty on an automatic plant watering system called GreenPiThumb. He used Python on the back-end for managing soil moisture and temperature sensors and for turning the water pump on and off, as can be seen below. He also recorded events and sensor readings to a database. The front end (see a static example here) was written in AngularJS and Ansible was used to deploy the...

New products! Just a quick FYI, we've launched some new products today - coloured GPIO headers and new Cameras: check out the shop homepage for more information. Growbox Speaking of cameras... Alex Ellis decided to grow some cress and he wanted a way of monitoring the growth. To do this, he used a Raspberry Pi Zero, a Pi camera and a cheap plastic box to grow the cress in. The Pi and camera are mounted to the outside of the box, with a hole for the camera and then Alex uses some Python code to automatically take pictures of the cress’ progress and...

Coral Reef Ranjib Dey loves his salt water aquarium which is home to a miniature, living, coral reef. It takes a lot of expertise and monitoring to keep this fragile ecosystem alive and to do it he has decided to bring in a little bit of Raspberry Pi know-how. The system, called reef-pi, which comprises the Pi, some relays and an analogue-to-digital converter to grab sensor readings, is growing all the time and currently has the following features: AC 110/220v equipment control (on demand and periodically based on timers) DC pump velocity and LED based light intensity control (using PCA9685 PWM...

Ride the Wave! Bomani, Eunice, and Matt have created a project called Waves which allows you to see the spoken word in printed form. A set of colour-coded questions is posed and you are then invited to answer them whilst pressing a colour-coded button. The appropriate question and your response are then printed out using a thermal printer – the question as text and your response as a sound wave (pictured above). You can read how they did it, and perhaps create your own, by viewing more about the project over at GitHub and see it in action below. Retro Sound Effects James McCullen...