Ask HN: Share Your Raspberry Pi Project | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Share Your Raspberry Pi Project

I'm looking for some inspiration for what I can do with my $35 computer. I think we can all learn a lot from any cool hardware project.

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Although not strictly a Raspberry Pi project, I have a couple C.H.I.P. boards[1] scattered throughout my apartment collecting temperature and humidity readings (using a HIH8120 sensor[2]) and feeding it to my Raspberry Pi which runs InfluxDB and Chronograf[3] to store and display a simple dashboard. The end result looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/cIrhSUq.png

[1]: https://getchip.com/

[2]: https://sensing.honeywell.com/HIH8120-021-001S-humidity-sens...

[3]: https://www.influxdata.com/time-series-platform/chronograf/

Interesting... But what do you do with this data?

Nothing in particular. I just wanted a way to view the temperature and humidity in my apartment when I'm out. Also I wanted to know what affects the humidity in my apartment and by how much (for example, you can see when I take my morning shower). In the future I may use the data to control a humidifier to turn it on whenever the humidity drops below a certain level.

Funny you mention humidity & showers. This is what I see when I take one:

https://twitter.com/Stolen_Souls/status/848444075296641025

I'm the same, I use some cheap ESP8266 devices which have a temperature/humidity sensor attached. They submit their measurements every minute to a central MQ installation:

https://steve.fi/Hardware/d1-temperature-humidity/

While I don't have any particular reason for collecting the data it can be fun to look at. For example you can easily spot when somebody has a shower because the humidity spikes in the bathroom:

https://twitter.com/Stolen_Souls/status/848444075296641025

Naively I expected to track the weather, because I figure on a hot day the temperature of my living-room/etc would spike. Turns out this house is pretty well insulated so the internal temperature has essentially no relationship to the external one. I guess that makes sense in a country where you might have -25'C in the winters.

This is really cool! I've been thinking about a similar idea lately and this seems like a great way of doing it. Do you by chance have any material on how you got the honeywell sensor working with the C.H.I.P. board? (This would be my first electronics project)

This was my first electronics project as well and I chose the Honeywell sensor because it has decent humidity accuracy (which is what I was mostly interested in) and a bonus temperature sensor built in. It uses the I2C protocol for communication which I found pleasant to work with although it would probably be simpler to just use am analog voltage sensor.

Here's the program I wrote to read the sensor over I2C: https://gist.github.com/tsyd/f48e933a21fb40b9f9eea28118f54e0...

I'll most certainly be checking this out in the near future. Thanks!

I'm currently prototyping an alternate approach - using an nrf52 to send readings beacons, and then gathering those beacons with a raspberry pi

This has the added benefits of being able to be powered with a solar panel.

What language did you end up using to access the sensors?

I've been ~hoping~ to use Go to access the GPIO pins, but haven't had much success - any suggestions?

Check out https://periph.io/, which makes GPIO access easy :)

Thanks for the suggestion! Any affiliation :) ?

I've used https://github.com/stianeikeland/go-rpio to control my garage doors and this library https://github.com/kidoman/embd has some more advanced features which I've used for a thermostat solution.

Thanks! I'll take a look! I have an AstroHat on my Pi and I think it should be straight forward-ish using one of these.

+1 for embd. I've used it with great success.

I'm planning on doing pretty much the same thing. A couple of questions:

1. Why not just run InfluxDB and Chronograf on one of the CHIPs?

2. How are you sending data to the Pi?

> Why not just run InfluxDB and Chronograf on one of the CHIPs?

I started off with a single C.H.I.P. and ran everything on it but then when I added a second C.H.I.P. I wanted to have all the data in a central location. I also found Chronograf lag a lot when trying to browse more than a couple day's worth of data. The Raspberry Pi has much faster storage and CPU.

> How are you sending data to the Pi?

The C.H.I.P. has a Python script that runs on a cron that calls a C program to read the sensor and then sends it to the Pi using InfluxDB's HTTP API.

I am doing something similar at my apartment:

http://pi.tafkas.net/temperatures/

Blog post: http://blog.tafkas.net/2012/10/03/gathering-and-charting-tem...

I love the C.H.I.P board, seems like they'd have better market penetration if their name wasn't "CHIP" though. I feel like the Particle IOT line has suffered a similarly hindrence?

I used one to build a photobooth for my wedding. The raspberry pi controls a DSLR camera to take 4 photos, stitches them into a 4x6, prints the photo and uploads everything to a Google Photos album which was displayed live on a projector.

Very cool. What were you using for your Google Photos uploader on Linux?

The photobooth application was written in Python and I was able to get picasawebsync (https://github.com/leocrawford/picasawebsync) working. Even though the documentation says it's probably no longer working, I can verify that it was working for me as of September 2016 which is after the Picasa deprecation. I had to edit the source a little so that I could call it from my app instead of the command line.

Another challenge was that I couldn't find a good application to display the Google photos album. Nothing I found would display any new photos added to the album after the slideshow had begun while also displaying everything in a continuous loop. I ended up writing a second small Python app also using picasawebsync to periodically sync the photos to a second Raspberry Pi which was hooked up to a projector and display them looped in a random order.

I'm also in the process of building a photobooth. Using the standard Pi Camera module + a Pimoroni Unicorn Hat HD to give people a prompt when the photo is about to be taken. It'll then publish the photos on it's own internal webserver that'll be visible on another Pi for easy emailing / browsing and tweeting! Going to pack it all in an transparent enclosure that looks like the approximate shape of an oversized DSLR.

Nice, that sounds quite a bit more compact than mine. Having really good quality photos for us to keep was the biggest priority so we settled on a DSLR and dedicated flash. Along with the printer, I ended up installing it all into an old speaker cabinet which ended up fitting everything perfectly. I do wish I wasn't living in an apartment at the time and had access to some better tools to build a proper enclosure though.

I've been looking to do this myself, did you follow any guides online to help you with this? How did you connect your camera to the Pi?

I looked at some guides for ideas and was hoping to find a ready to go solution but nothing seemed perfect for our use case. Good quality photos for keepsakes was a primary goal so I used this as an excuse to buy a DSLR (which still ended up being cheaper than renting a photobooth for a few hours would have been). I chose to code it up in Python since it seemed like the best candidate with plenty of libraries that could handle what I wanted. I chose a camera based on what devices were supported in gphoto2. Specifically, I chose a camera that supported live preview which allowed our guests to frame their photo better. I answered the question about connecting the camera in another comment but the tl;dr is that it was connected via USB and all communications were through the python app I wrote using the gphoto2 library.

I would be insanely interested in a thorough write-up of this. My mother is getting married in a few months and it would be incredible to build for her and her fiance!

I'll try and get the process written down but in the meantime, feel free to shoot me an email with any questions. You can find my email in my profile.

How do you get the pictures transferred to the pi?

The camera is hooked up to the raspberry pi via USB. I'm using the gphoto2 library in python to communicate with the camera, show a live preview on the attached LCD screen, snap photos and copy the photos onto the raspberry pi after they're taken.

Here's a list of cameras that gphoto2 supports: http://gphoto.org/proj/libgphoto2/support.php

I made sure to buy a DSLR that supported live-preview so that our guests could frame themselves before the photos were taken.

I built a microtonal keyboard: http://jsnow.bootlegether.net/jik/keyboard.html

The keys have pressure sensitive film underneath that causes a voltage drop when you press on them. There's a wire from under each key that goes to an input on an MCP3008 ADC. There are 20 of those, each with 8 inputs, all connected on a SPI bus running at 2mhz. Effectively, this acts as a 160 channel digital voltmeter. The Pi can scan all the ADCs about 90 times per second, and it converts key pressure into midi commands that can be sent to an external synth or I can run a software synth locally on the Pi.

That's a beautiful piece of work. Nice job!

Thanks.

I brew beer with mine[1]. I use a CHIP to control an old fridge as a fermentation chamber.

For both systems I'm using CraftBeerPi[2], a python project with a pretty active community around it.

I wrote about it on opensource.com[3] and it was pretty popular, which surprised me a little bit. But I guess a lot of people in our community like beer :). I'm always trying to figure out how to make brewing my career without the related massive cut in income (please share any great ideas on that!)

[1]: http://localconspiracy.com/2016/12/electric-brewery.html [2]: https://github.com/Manuel83/craftbeerpi [3]: https://opensource.com/article/17/7/brewing-beer-python-and-...

Fellow beer brewer here!

I wrote my own small weather service, http://www.brilcast.com/, and re purposed the waterproof sensor to help track and record the process from lautering/sparging all the way to transfer to primary fermentation.

The setup is simple. Sensor code is written in Python, then it's sent to a SQLite database running on a Flask webserver. The frontend uses D3.js to visualize the data. The entire service is hosted on Pythonanywhere. It's quite spartan, but it works well. https://github.com/williamBartos/brilCast

I built a spaceship for my kids: http://www.duncanjauncey.com/blog/archives/377 (please excuse the tabloid headline of the article)

You Win Father of Year in my book.

Recreating the Sony Aibo robot dog using a pile of cheap servos, 3 axis gyro, the camera, wireless, neopixel lights, LiIon power, etc. Shoulder joints, body shell and chassis 3d printed. Total cost is around $150.

Locomotion is largely based upon the designs documented by Cynthia Brezeal Ferrell (MIT mobile robots lab, under Prof. Rod Brooks) in her PhD thesis for the hexapod robot, Atilla/Hannibal.

The first attempt was using Python which presented two insurmountable problems : 1) raspian OS boot time of 1.5 minutes which is unacceptable for an embedded device and 2) python threading is not sufficient for realtime. I was attempting to make series elastic actuators but the imprecision of the threading (jitter) was leading to wild oscillations... I finally had to accept it was a dead end.

I have started over in Elixir + Nerves which is designed at its core for embedded work. I will admit it is very slow going. Not because of any deficiencies in the language or environment. Quite the contrary -- I get a 10-second cold boot time and superb stability! But rather my mind is the limiting factor here. After three decades of imperative programming, the shift to functional programming is a challenge!

Any pictures, write up, Github? This sounds awesome!

I also remember reading awhile back about the huge market for upkeeping these things once Sony abandoned it. Perhaps you're onto a business!

No, this is the first I've spoken of it, really. I've a few notebooks filled with sketches, thoughts, designs, etc. and a pile of prototype joins and brackets littering my workbench. It's actually a very challenging project from an electrical engineering and mechanical engineering standpoint. The Sony team were superstars. I still like the "mutant" prototype the best as it had the most character: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfHape9Y31Q

In the mid 2000s, I had written some code for the Aibo to let it read books aloud.

Flash forward toa couple years ago. My kids saw some video of me with the Aibo Reader project and wanted an Aibo of their own. Unfortunately, the Aibo as a product is dead. The batteries are now dying and irreplaceable (thanks to Sony and their idiotic insistence upon DRM - it's not enough to merely provide electrons, the battery must also know the secret handshake in order for the Aibo to accept it. Maddening!!!) And those few used Aibos that do have working batteries are dying from other issues related to mechanical failure (mostly clutches in the head/neck assy.) yet command a premium price.

So now, my kids still want an Aibo. I got to thinking about how far technology had come in the past 20 years, and started wondering to myself if I could build a facsimile with the RPi. Thus the birth of this little side-project.

Could you share more about your experience with elastic actuators? What did your hardware look like? I'm working on something similar, and would love your input.

Sure. It's an evolution of the idea I saw here: http://hackaday.com/2015/12/15/feeling-force-through-a-servo...

Using a flexible servo horn, this allows some degree of deformation when torque is applied. Embed a 1/32" neodymium magnet in the horn, and a magnetic rotary position sensor in the driven part. As resistance to movement ("torque") increases, the flexible servo horn twists/deflects, angle of difference between the two parts changes and this can be detected by the magnetic sensor.

Picture a torque strain gauge, the way the needle deflects from the centerline of the gauge. This is similar but we're doing so in an radial (edit:removed axial) and not linear sense.

I went on to 3d print a flexible servo horn somewhat similar to this: http://mechanismsrobotics.asmedigitalcollection.asme.org/dat... but with the magnet embedded in the outer rim of the wheel and the sensor in the inner section.

Different amounts of sensitivity are obtained by printing different spoke stiffness on the horn.

Result is a compact, modular torque sensor for about $2 in parts. Feed the results to a PID look and you have a nice controller that can tell me when a robot leg is bearing a load, or is jammed, etc. This is essential to proper gait. Otherwise your robot is simply an electronic marionette.

One of the big challenges was getting 16 additional 16bit voltage reads back to my Rpi over i2c bus. (one value for each servo) https://www.adafruit.com/product/1085

Soln: used one of these multiplexer boards: https://www.adafruit.com/product/2717

and I used AdaFruit's excellent servo controller board: https://www.adafruit.com/product/815

and some neopixel rings for eyes: https://www.adafruit.com/product/3047

(wonderful for expressing mood)

This is great, thank you!

Use Home Assistant to integrate anything in your house. Make voice assistants respond to your commands. Write advanced automations to help make your life easier.

Use our Hass.io OS build to setup Google Assistant easily on your Pi. Need a USB microphone and speakers connected to the Pi and you'll get the full Google Assistant experience.

https://home-assistant.io

(disclaimer: I'm the founder)

Just discovered Home Assistant yesterday and I'm really looking forward to diving into it.

I've been really digging home-assistant. Just got it set up a few weeks ago. Ended up buying $300 of zwave switches soon after

I'm the co-founder of https://snips.ai, we are building a 100% on-device Voice AI platform to respect people privacy!

We would love to see what you can do with what we are building and to feature you on our website !

Very cool. I'd love to use it, but...

Any plans to release source code? I can't trust any privacy claims without seeing it.

We want to open-source the platform later this year, you don't need an internet connection to use the platform so you can trust us!

Will this have the ability to replace an Alexa in terms of smart home integration/automation?

This is what we want to build !

Perfect, keep up the great work.I'm glad to hear of your project.The Alexa and accompanying hardware/software is one of the few non FOSS things I rely on within my home. I can't wait for a viable alternative!

I've done a little reading into making something along these lines using a Pi, Snowboy hotword detection, and one of the cloud APIs.

Two things I'm curious about...

1) What are you using for hardware with the Pi? It seems a high quality microphone is important to this application and the only array microphone I've been able to find is the MATRIX creator which seems steep in price if I could just buy an Amazon Dot.

2) Your numbers indicate significantly better performance than Google. How are you able to achieve that? Where does your training data come from if nothing is supposedly leaving my device?

I really strongly desire a system that wouldn't require relying on the cloud but I just don't know how you can get enough training data to be anywhere near as accurate as a cloud provider. That led me to thinking the next best thing would be a setup with Snowboy hotword detection where I know nothing is leaving my device until my own programmed hotword is spoken.

Hi Bronco, a blog post on microphone will come soon on our blog, subscribe!

I have been searching for something like this and this looks amazing! Looking forward to trying this out.

As others said, I'd feel more comfortable with an open codebase.

Thanks, this is coming soon!

Me and My brother made a strobe light based on a Nature paper to attempt to treat my Uncle for Alzheimers.

See http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v540/n7632/full/nature2...

Do you have any more information about your project?

Yes, I think I prodded my brother to write a blog post but I will write it myself and try to get to it this weekend.

But basically the steps you would have

1. Get a Raspberry pi (obviously) and load linux with python support.

2. Use this shield https://www.amazon.com/Pimoroni-Unicorn-Hat-Shield-Raspberry...

3. Create a python script that blinks with the HZ that was in the Nature paper.

I think I saw someone else try a similar thing with an oculus rift or vive. How do you think it went with your relative.?

I have no idea. We never did any controlled experiments. Also, I didn't notice a difference anecdotally.

Did you notice any improvements?

We've built a whole business on top of the Raspberry Pi. The company/project is called Screenly[1], which is a digital signage solution for the Raspberry Pi and we have over 10,000 devices running it. We really gained a lot of momentum early on with our open source version[2].

[1] https://www.screenly.io

[2] https://github.com/Screenly/screenly-ose

Interesting product. Are there any screenshots / videos of it in action?

I built a tool that monitors a solar panel installation:

The Website: http://solarpi.tafkas.net

Github Repository: https://github.com/Tafkas/solarpi

Blog Post: http://blog.tafkas.net/2014/07/03/a-raspberry-pi-photovoltai...

Feedback is very welcome.

I've always liked chiming clocks, so I made a pseudo grandfather clock with an RPi Zero W, a $1 I2C servo controller, and a $3 mini digital servo that strikes a long chime tube scavenged from an old doorbell[1] - ntpd means it's a lot more accurate than a pendulum clock, and cron keeps it from ringing in the middle of the night.

1: https://youtu.be/mfOEBCp74UU

I built a tube internet radio with speech output of station names and switching stations with the AM dial. A small USB mouse picks up the rotation, a python script speaks the station name and passes the stream URL to gmediarenderer. Sound via USB soundcard and Phono/Aux input. Inspired by http://blog.scphillips.com/posts/2014/05/playing-music-on-a-....

Some pictures at http://imgur.com/a/r834D

Any info re: interfacing with the dial? I bought a radio for a similar purpose that's just been gathering dust in the garage.

Sure. I'm reading this device https://www.google.de/#q=PX8559+mouse with code similar to that one: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4855823/get-mouse-deltas...

Measure, how many delta ticks a revolution gives you and adjust the delta to trigger the next station to feel natural when turning the dial. I bent a simple bracket from some scrap sheet metal to hold the mouse in place just above the dial. The black and white threads of the cord wrapped around the dial helps the optical sensor, so try to position the optics above that.

Similar project: https://2dom.github.io/the-radio/ I did not bother to remove parts of the mechanics to make the dial endless, however. Dialling through so many stations that you need that is tedious anyways, so I felt I don't need it.

Oh and by the way, I made the Raspi's filesystem read-only so I could shwitch it of safely with the radio. See i.e. https://hallard.me/raspberry-pi-read-only/

1. use it as a weather station - temp/hum/pressure sensors are quite cheap 2. if you already have weather station, hook it up to an API and share the data (wunderground.com, or similar) 3. you can use it as local lan media player/web server if you don't want to mess with hardware 4. build a bad ass robot/drone/submarine with it 5. build security system - possibilities are limitless. You can even use pressure sensor as intrussion detection device, let alone sound, light, shock, camera, IR, etc sensors.... 6. use it as an alarm clock 7. use it as decoration - if you need it to last forever, pour a resin in a mould over it 8. wrap it as a gift if everything else fails

Cool! If you want to add 100% on-device Voice AI to your weather station you can use our platform at https://snips.ai which is free and will be open-sourced later!

Nothing unique really but I have a handful of older ones laying around that used to be purposed as RaspBMC machines. I recently moved everything to Plex with different client devices so I repurposed one Pi to be a print server for my parent's older printer. Another one has been repurposed as an AirPlay client for my outdoor speaker setup using a cheap amp I bought on Prime day.

I also have a newer Pi 3 running Stratux for receiving ADS-B traffic and weather on my iPad while flying.

Aside from Stratux there are definitely cheaper/easier solutions for what I've set up but nothing beats the 'free' hardware collecting dust in the bin.

I've built my home automation setup around Raspberry Pis.

I have an old Nexus7 tablet mounted on the wall (3D printed wall mount which incorporates a wireless charging coil) which hits the web UI of NodeRED running on a Pi to provide a 'home control panel'.

There's a pi with a heap of relays which controls things like my garden lights, sprinklers, motorised curtains (3D printed adapters to convert standard curtain tracks into motorised ones), etc, and then I have a number of Orvibo S20 WiFi power sockets to switch things like lamps on and off.

I have a pi mounted behind the front entrance panel acting as a doorbell, also connected to a camera module which triggers push notifications etc when motion is detected. This also ties back into the main 'automation hub' via NodeRED.

I also built an aquarium monitoring/control system on another Pi, with ambient and water temperature probes, a bunch of relays turning filters, lights, heaters, pumps, etc on and off, and an IR-emitter to send the relevant commands to my lighting fixtures to control the colour temperature and intensity (providing a 'sunrise'/'sunset' effect). Again, this all ties back to the main system using NodeRED.

Unrelated to the home automation, I also use a Pi to manage and run my 3D printer using OctoPrint, and run my media centre using LibreElec/Kodi/Emby (with my media stored on my main workworkstation and served via Emby).

Can you give some more information on the 3d printed blind automations? I've got a house with a lot of windows and I'm looking for an unobtrusive and cheaper way to automate all of the blinds

Here's an open hardware robot arm you can build:

http://kickstarter.com/projects/mime/mearm-pi-build-your-own...

I know it's Kickstarter but it will be shipping very soon and you can already download the files to cut your own if you're into that.

(Disclaimer: it's my project!)

Maybe not useful (to anyone else at least), but I've built a couple of small wheeled robots with cameras to do some experiments with Computer Vision.

Unless you're doing computationally intensive tasks, I find a Raspberry Pi 3 is overkill. If you go with the cheaper models like one of the low end Orange Pi's, you don't mind dedicating them to projects, even if the project is pretty useless.

I recently used a Pi to replace the game controller on an arcade style basketball game we have in our office (like this: http://imgur.com/a/B7YBq). It's running Android Things and has a couple of fun new game modes, better sound effects, and a whole bunch of LEDs for added awesomeness.

I use my raspberry pi to run home assistant to control my IoT devices. I also have another pi mounted on my 3d printer running octoprint so I can remotely interact with the printer.

If you are using Home Assistant, you can now do your own on-device Voice AI for free using https://snips.ai, we have added an integration!

I have one running a few home automation type tasks (an IP->serial gateway for my whole-house audio, SDR radio to monitor 4 utility meters [only 2 meters are currently reporting data as my 2 water meters are not reporting usage via radio to me or to the utility], and controlling relays for the sprinkler system). Next steps are I plan to create an Alexa skill that will control the whole-house audio and let me "pause" the sprinklers as needed and integrate with weather forecasting to predict near-future rainfall so I can save water/increase plant health if rain is expected.

I'll be honest: it's a lot of fun, but if I lived 100 lifetimes, it would never save me time on balance. ;)

I also use one to run stratux as another poster mentions. That one saved ~$650 vs buying the COTS solution.

Curious about your SDR meter monitoring. Any links or description of how that works? Would love to monitor my electric and water without using the energy company's devices.

I didn't do any actual hard work. I just used rtl-amr, which was super-easy to grab, compile, and use.

http://bemasher.net/rtlamr/

http://bemasher.net/rtlamr/signal.html has information on how it works, but you don't need to do/know anything about the protocol to get it to work.

I use it as a remote on/off/reset switch hooked directly to the mobo of my windows pc for when it decides to crash/bsod/random stuck and i can't RDP into the box, or just the power went out and need to turn the pc back on if it didn't automatically.

DeckLights !

With an LED strip, some carpentry, an Arduino, and rpi, I've brightend up my deck a little bit. The rpi is there to program the arduino while embedded and to have a web interface to control the lights. Still to do was to get Homebridge (which is working on the rpi) to turn the lights on and off using Siri.

http://imgur.com/a/E4lbU

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ww1q248jc7Q

https://github.com/kejaed/deckLights/blob/master/projectNote...

Just yesterday I used an old raspberry pi to make a bluetooth audio receiver that could be integrated with my vintage stereo equipment. You can buy something off the shelf for around $25 but they use cheap digital-to-analog converters and I wanted to use the high quality USB DAC I already had. Total hardware needed was the Pi, powered USB hub, USB DAC, and USB bluetooth adapter.

Potato quality photo of the very advanced system I came up with for keeping all the components together: https://tootcatapril2017.s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/media_at...

Did you have to use the USB bluetooth adapter with a Pi 3? I know the 3 has bluetooth but I don't know enough about it to know if I can just connect my phone to it to play music. I want to do something very similar to what you've done so I'm excited to see that somebody else succeeded.

I did the same thing using a HifiBerry-Hat (used the Pi as a Mopidy server before, but I like the Bluetooth setup better for UI reasons).

If you're using BlueZ and Pulseaudio, it comes down to a couple of simple config entries (google for Linux Bluetooth A2DP Sink).

I used a RPi 2 with a USB Dongle for the Bluetooth though, so I can't vouch for the internal Bluetooth of the RPi 3.

I used the very first version of the Raspberry Pi model B. I bought one when they became available years ago and then never did anything with it. If the Pi 3 comes with a bluetooth chip built-in then you will just need to do some software configuration. There are three servers to configure: bluez, udev, and pulseaudio. I used the following gist as a guide, but didn't follow every step exactly:

https://gist.github.com/oleq/24e09112b07464acbda1

Hope this helps!

I'm working on simplifying live streaming from the Raspberry Pi to Periscope [1] using the Camera Module [2]. Future streaming targets include the usual suspects: Twitch, YouTube, Facebook Live, et al. Deployment is flexible; you can install it as a Debian package, a Docker image, or a standalone binary.

Personally, I plan to use it as a traffic camera mounted on the window of our office.

[1] https://github.com/schmich/piriscope

[2] https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/camera-module-v2/

Some friends and I built a jukebox with lights that react meaningfully to the chords and beats in the music (using Chordify). We brought it to Burning Man as an art project. It's nothing compared to the other crazy ambitious stuff people do there - but it was our first real electronics project, and we had to learn a lot as we went.

Here's a grainy video: https://youtu.be/sXVZhv_Xi0I

Here's the code: https://github.com/nick264/music-processor-master

I had one on my sailboat making all the boat's sensor data available over wifi. It also let me control the Raymarine AutoHelm from my iPhone.

https://github.com/johnboiles/Helm-firmware https://github.com/johnboiles/Helm-hardware https://github.com/johnboiles/nmeaproxy

Just sold the sailboat though ️

Damn, now I have a legitimate reason to buy a sailboat ;)

Built a working prototype of a LAN based discovery and routing device for Evercam.io. Not very sophisticated but it worked and it was deployed to several locations successfully in a pilot program, allowing them to route to Cameras that were otherwise inaccessible.

Actual code didn't rely on rPi (Elixir/OTP on Linux). But we shipped them on Pis. Other options considered had been Galileo and also an SoC called (I think) Quark (also from Intel).

https://gitlab.com/evercam/evercam-gateway

I used it to built a working prototype of Spot [1], a Raspberry-Pi powered chatbot that helps people find a parking spot. As a test, the RPI3 was mounted on the lightpost, the Camera Module [2] was used to capture images, so we can count number of empty spots.

[1]: https://github.com/tzano/spotFinder

[2]: https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/camera-module-v2/

I'm running a digital signage service based on the Raspberry Pi: https://info-beamer.com/

It started as a for-fun project and I'm now working full time on it. So I guess it qualifies :-)

If you want to display any kind of information on your Pi, you might take a look. The code that "runs" the display is written in Lua and the system is pretty programmer friendly. You can even 'git push' and deploy directly on any number of screens. Questions welcome!

I'm using a Pi to capture the speeds and pictures of cars as they travel down my road. We then report the speeders to local law enforcement. I recently decided to expand to a 9 camera system (8 security cameras and 1 piCamera) and start capturing video, stills, speeds and car data. I then am able to show that the same car speeds everyday (or however often) and have a lot of useful data to hand over. My next step is to mount a large display on my property that shows the cars in big numbers just how fast they are going.

I bet a screen showing their behaviour is more effective than reporting them to the police.

actually the reporting to local law enforcement has been very effective. They do extra patrols based upon the data and have issues a number of tickets.

One they issued a ticket for 80 in a 35 to a driver at 5:00am and then again the next day the driver did the same thing! Didn't expect them to be there two days in a row.

You might have saved his life - or someone else's. 80 in a 35? Completely insane.

Yeah and sadly these high speeds are common in our rural area. Drivers see a long 2 lane road in the middle of nowhere and just press the gas.

I built a remote controlled cat feeder with a simple servo controller loosely based on this blog: http://drstrangelove.net/2013/12/raspberry-pi-power-cat-feed... Then I added a server instance and an iOS app so I could schedule / manually control feedings remotely. Great for short trips.

I used a Rapsberry Pi (and a lot of Dynamixel servos, LiPo, gyro, etc) to build a small hexapod robot. I was mostly interested in learning about legged locomotion, and got a bit carried away. Using a normal-ish Linux platform with GPIO and USB devices made it really easy (and fun) to hack everything together.

https://github.com/adammck/hexapod

I think you were featured on HN front page few times already :-)

We use one in the office to monitor the Jenkins build status of our dev branch. https://github.com/SeanCline/build-indicator/

Hardware-wise, it's just a Pi and UnicornHat. I wanted to use off-the-shelf components since it's in an office environment with rather strict rules about what can be plugged into the wall.

A friend and I put together a free dynamic DNS service [1] offering cool custom domains aimed at the Raspberry Pi community (and similar hardware hackers.)

It's not strictly a hardware project, but it's a crucial building block for any network-enabled Raspberry Pi project, and we'd love your feedback.

[1]: https://www.legitdns.com

Awesome!

i used raspberry pi 2 in order to build 2d mapping robot(i installed ROS on top of ubuntu on pi2). i also tried to make it autonomus but lack of some hardware such as motor encoder made it quite hard to accomplish so i did not go for it. See snippets of video diary at https://robot.birkankolcu.com

That looks really cool. Have you got any documentation for implementing it?

I built a voice-activated light switch using Pi. Demo and schematics here: http://arunpn.com/projects/voice-activated-light-switch/ After that project, I have slowly added more functionality to it like controlling music, alarms, etc.

I've a few simple projects around the house

1. I've a python script that sends bluetooth LE commands to my ceiling fan & lights. Ceiling fan has got a bluetooth LE remote you get from Lowes. Then used ha-bridge to simulate Philips hue, so now I can control the lights & fan using Alexa.

Built it to turn lights no/off with my new born daughter in hand.

And since about 5 months of age, every time anyone says the word Alexa she looks around to see the change in environment.

2. Run this useful open source project called LittleSleeper[1] to detect my baby daughter crying at night.

3. Configured IP camera to upload pictures on activity and use BerryNet[2] to detect whats in the images

[1]: https://github.com/NeilYager/LittleSleeper [2]: https://github.com/DT42/BerryNet

Cool ! If you want more privacy around your kid than streaming what she is saying to Amazon with Alexa, you can use the platform we are building at https://snips.ai, it is free and will be open-source too!

Thanks, I'll try this out!

Created a temperature sensor system that can generate alerts whenever temperature or humidity goes above or below a limit configured by the admin portal. Along with Elasticsearch and Kibana graphs can be generated and also data can be seen on top of the floor plan to understand hot and cold spots in a building.

The repository below contains code and instructions on how to setup the Raspberry Pi device to report temperature/humidity data along with manual alerts to the server: https://github.com/ankurp/thermostat-sensor

The server code where data is received and saved, notifications are sent, and the entire system configured via the admin portal is here: https://github.com/ankurp/thermostat

I've got more plans than finished projects. One is an attempt to build a GPIO-connected synthesizer using an old OPL-3 chip and the DAC chips that are designed to be paired with it. The plan would be to add direct hardware output to Adplug and Dosbox.

Another is a quadrupedal robot (more like a puppet to start with; autonomy would come after I've got the gait control code working). Control would be through a bluetooth game controller. I've got a laser-cut acrylic body for the thing and a servo control hat to deal with timing jitter.

Third, I've got a Pi-Zero and a broken PSP. 4.3" Backup camera screens are the right size, shape, and resolution to fit in the PSP case, they can be modified to take 5V instead of 12, and the Pi-Zero has 2 contact pins for the analog video out. I'd need to experiment with audio out; I've got a couple ideas.

These little computers are floppy and like to slide off the desk under the weight of their own USB cables. This has led me into many adventures with wall mounted enclosures.

[0] https://github.com/cjdaly/CompuCanvas

I built a smart scale that keeps track of my cat's food intake, compute trends, and text me when has been too long since eating:

https://github.com/rodrigosetti/smart-pet-food-tracker

ChronoPill is a DIY Time Capsule alternative for Raspberry Pi. I used Resin to make it ultra reproducible. MacOSX can backup to this networked drive just fine.

https://github.com/amingilani/chronopill

Also made a replay camera for the office foosball table. We have an iPad scorekeeping application that queries the Pi for a video replay after every goal.

https://github.com/johnboiles/replaycam

Is anyone using this to sense water levels (or just the presence of water)? I'd like to implement a doohickey that monitors water levels in a water storage tank which is not easily accessible. So it must be very reliable, and install-and-forget, as access is a pain in the ass.

I am going to try that this next week. I live in a third world country, and here most days there's no water coming from the pipes.

So I am going to try and monitor the water levels in my house.

What I bought to do that: A ESP8266 board (it's like an WiFi arduino), and an ultrasound distance sensor.

My plan is to point the sensor vertically towards the water. It emits sound and then measures the time it takes for that sound to bounce back. I think I can use to measure the level of water.

Then the results will be sent (using MQTT) to my Raspberry Pi that is running Home Assistant.

Are you concerned about condensation on the ultrasound detector throwing off your readings?

Also also, I have a Pi with a usb RTL-SDR radio receiver functioning as a mobile HAM APRS iGate: https://github.com/johnboiles/pi-rtlsdr-igate-docker

An R-Pi3 configured as a special router / credit-meter which has kids earn their internet access by completing online activities. https://netdispenser.github.io/

I have three Pis currently "deployed":

1) Internet radio w/ an amplifier in a cigar box. It was a gift for my gf and only plays the station she listened to in college. https://github.com/rocktronica/curpi

2) Timed camera and GIF maker for my cat feeder. https://github.com/rocktronica/feedergif

3) OctoPrint server for my 3D printer http://octoprint.org/

[edit: formatting]

I have one running PiAware: http://flightaware.com/adsb/piaware/

I built a "Kitchen Dashboard" last year: https://gavinr.com/2016/01/10/raspberry-pi-kitchen-dashboard...

And of course you have to build a RetroPie: https://retropie.org.uk/

+1 for PiAware. It's just about the easiest project and a good intro to the Pi.

Other things on Pi in my house: OpenVPN server (http://www.pivpn.io/) and Node-RED (https://nodered.org/) for collecting temperature data and pushing to Power BI.

I've used it to run a family dashboard: https://github.com/danesparza/Dashboard

I use Octopi to control my 3d printer: https://octopi.octoprint.org/

And I've started experimenting with different sensors using Golang and embd: https://github.com/kidoman/embd

I have my Pi hooked up to an LED strip in my room. It is running a flask server so I can control the light with a website or with my Alexa. I use it everyday and it was super easy to set up.

Made a smart foosball table last summer! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QSY4FEy9ZuY

I use it to turn my television on and off: https://github.com/simonbyrne/fauxmo

I'm working on an open source Canary clone with a RasPi Zero W and Camera module, a couple of sensors (Smoke and CO) and MotionEye software all stuffed into a Pringles can. :)

At our office we're big tea drinkers with a massive Teapot from Ikea so with a set of USB scales, we turned one into an internet connected Teapot complete with leaderboard, it's gamified tea making for the office.

https://github.com/gbrady92/Teabot

Leaderboard - http://www.teabot.co.uk/index.html

Waaay back in 2011, when I was getting started with electronics, I combined a Raspberry Pi 2 with a battery pack and a head mounted display for an iPod Video to make a HUD. It was horribly hacky, but I did manage to get it to show the time and my Google Calendar events with a Python GUI program and Internet over Bluetooth to my phone.

Some pictures: https://github.com/Hylian/PiHUD

Not myself, but a friend:

Making an snes emulator in an HDMI dongle form factor with wireless controllers.

SNES on your main TV system, switch TV inputs, play Super Mario Kart. No hookups, no wires.

a post on hackaday.com led me to a lightning sensor breakout board that connects at 3.3V which is perfect for a rpi. since I live in florida I jumped at it. just got it hooked up the other day, unfortunately NOAA's lightning strike database is a few days behind so in a day or two I'll be able to check the accuracy of it. it's my first electronics project with the rpi and I have definitely learned a lot already

Nice! I've been trying to do this but I haven't been able to find a lightning sensor breakout board that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. Can you link me to the one you purchased?

http://www.embeddedadventures.com/as3935_lightning_sensor_mo... that's the breakout, this is the python library you can use with it: https://github.com/pcfens/RaspberryPi-AS3935/

I hacked a remote controlled car and connected it to the Twitch chat so it can be controlled through chat commands.

It can also stream the video back to my computer so people on the stream can see where the car is going.

https://fullstack.network/i-built-a-car-that-is-being-contro...

Currently I am building a mobile GPS beacon which a drone can follow. The goal is to create a small follow-me box without the need for a smartphone.

We've built a doorlock system with Raspi, note here: https://code.oursky.com/iot-side-project-chima-open-door/ and code here: https://github.com/oursky/doorlock

Kilgore. A robot trout! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7busGsuIOU4

Fish code is python: https://github.com/djmips/trout

I've built a drone that can be controlled by rpi. Phase 1 is completed : http://akhilspassion.blogspot.co.id/2017/07/building-autonom...

I put retropie on one, then added a Picade hat to easily connect some real arcade buttons and joystick to play mame games on. I put it inside of an old restored Defender cabinet.

I'm also in the process of building a "magic mirror" which will have some home automation and Google assistant built in.

I made an ugly multi-coloured light controlled by a companion app - https://tomjwatson.com/blog/raspberry-pi-powered-home-lighti...

Raspberry Pi Nintendo cartridge http://www.dontwatchme.com/build-raspberry-pi-retropie-ninte...

http://joustmania.com Open source 16 player version of JS Joust, all running on a pi, very easy setup, and tons of features and game modes

It acts as a great DHCP and DNS server. It translates short addresses/hostnames into IP address, which is great for commands like “ssh pi@hub”. Also it’s much faster than my router.

I will be using the EnviroPhat from Pimoroni to collect data about the solar eclipse on August 21. I was more motivated by the data than putting together my own hardware for this one.

Just finished setting up openVPN on a RPi3b so my salesperson and I can access the CRM from outside my network.

HomeKit Hub & coupled with an ESP8266(Or even without it) you can make Siri do practically anything.

I use it as a GopiGo, Timelapse camera which i mount on my car dashboard to record my road trips.

Emulation (RetroPie), VPN (PiVPN), DNS (PiHole) and IP Camera (MotionEye OS)

I made a surveillance camera for my new home, it actually works quite well.

block all ads on your network: https://pi-hole.net/

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