It’s the fourteenth day of the third month! And if you’re a Brit, that means absolutely nothing. But take that date, flip reverse it like you’re American, and BOOM! It’s 3.14 or, as the cool kids call it, Pi Day.

In honour of this wonderful day, here are some awesome Pi/pie/π doohickies that we hope you’ll all enjoy!

Pi versus pie

Dramatised re-enactment of actual events

Have you found yourself embroiled in a textual or verbal conversation similar to the one above? Are you tired of having to explain that you’re not playing Minecraft on a piece of pastry, or that your lights aren’t being controlled by confectionery? Worry no more, for we have provided the following graphic as a visual aid to help you to introduce the uninitiated to the Raspberry Pi.*

Print off the PDF version for your classroom, Code Club, office, bedroom, locker door, Grandma, neighbour, local bus stop, newsletter, Christmas cards, and more!

Do it for the Pi (but please don’t eat it!)

This gem of a music video found its way to us via Twitter, and, in the moment we watched the preview snippet, the earworm lodged itself firmly into our brains and hearts.

Creative Mind Frame / 1-UP

So this whole Pi(e) Day business I’ve been posting about… With 3.14 coming up Ohm-I and I decided it was appropriate to do our Patreon song about the Raspberry Pi computer. I mean it’s only right… right? But why stop there?

This is just one of many awesome videos from Creative Mind Frame and we highly recommend checking out more of his brilliant work.

But what about pie?

How could we publish a Pi Day blog post without mentioning pie? Here in the UK, I like to think we’re more of a savoury pie nation than our American friends. As far as deserts go, whether you head into a cafe, pull up a chair at your grandmother’s table, or simply browse the aisles of your local supermarket, you’re likely to find a wider array of tarts than pies on offer. Because of this, let me direct you towards our second Queen, Her Sublime Majesty Mary Berry, and this recipe for Mary’s Bakewell Tart. Raspberry jam and almonds? Yes, please!

Nommmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmmm…
Photo from BBC Food.

If the Bakewell doesn’t do it for you, you heathens, check out Rosanna Pansino‘s Mini Raspberry Pi Pies.

MINI RASPBERRY PI PIES – NERDY NUMMIES

Today I made Mini Raspberry Pi Pies in celebration of Pi Day (March 14th)! I really enjoy making nerdy themed goodies and decorating them. I’m not a pro, but I love baking as a hobby. Please let me know what kind of treat you would like me to make next.

Last, but by no means least…

What exactly IS pi?

An excellent question. Here’s one of YouTube’s finest, maths-enthusiast The Odd 1s Out, to argue the case for his favourite number. Also, I stole his Pi/Pie Day artwork for today’s thumbnail so…thanks!

Why Pi is Awesome (Vi Hart Rebuttal)

Happy Pi day everyone! Go checkout Vi Hart’s channel➤ https://www.youtube.com/user/Vihart She’s made a 2016 version!! :O ➤https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vydPOjRVcSg&nohtml5=False 2014 version➤https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iUh_CSjaSw ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Website ➤ http://tinyurl.com/za5gw22 Tumblr ➤ http://theodd1sout.tumblr.com Facebook ➤ https://www.facebook.com/theodd1sout Twitter ➤ https://twitter.com/Theodd1sout Tapastic ➤ https://tapastic.com/theodd1sout

Whatever you do this Pi Day, make sure you have a great one. And if you build something great, learn something wonderful, or simply make a pie, be sure to share it using #PiDay and tag us so we can see it!

*Big up to Sam for the awesome graphic and the “YES!” he exclaimed when I asked him to draw a Pi versus a pie…Street Fighter-style.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Pie vs. π vs. Pi Day 2017

On 3 and 4 March 2017, more than 1,800 people got together in Cambridge to celebrate five years of Raspberry Pi and Code Club. We had cake, code, robots, explosions, and unicorn face paint. It was all kinds of awesome.

Celebrating five years of Raspberry Pi and Code Club

Uploaded by Raspberry Pi on 2017-03-10.

It’s hard to believe that it was only five years ago that we launched the first Raspberry Pi computer. Back then, our ambitions stretched to maybe a few tens of thousands of units, and our hope was simply that we could inspire more young people to study computer science.

Fast forward to 2017 and the Raspberry Pi is the third most successful computing platform of all time, with more than twelve and a half million units used by makers, educators, scientists, and entrepreneurs all over the world (you can read more about this in our Annual Review).

On 28 February, we announced the latest addition to our family of devices, the Raspberry Pi Zero W, which brings wireless connectivity and Bluetooth to the Pi Zero for an astonishing $10. You seemed to like it: in the four days between the product launch and the first day of the Birthday Party, we sold more than 100,000 units. We absolutely love seeing all the cool things you’re building with them!

The Pi Zero W in all its glory, showing the optional Camera Module

Celebrating our community

Low-cost, high-performance computers are a big part of the story, but they’re not the whole story. One of the most remarkable things about Raspberry Pi is the amazing community that has come together around the idea that more people should have the skills and confidence to get creative with technology.

For every person working for the Raspberry Pi Foundation, there are hundreds and thousands of community members outside the organisation who advance that mission every day. They run Raspberry Jams, volunteer at Code Clubs, write educational resources, moderate our forums, and so much more. The Birthday Party is one of the ways that we celebrate what they’ve achieved and say thank you to them for everything they’ve done.

Over the two days of the celebration, there were 57 workshops and talks from community members, including several that were designed and run by young people. I managed to listen to more of the talks this year, and I was really impressed by the breadth of subjects covered and the expertise on display.

All About Code on Twitter

Big thanks to @Raspberry_Pi for letting me run #PiParty @edu_blocks workshop and to @cjdell for his continuing help and support

Educators are an important part of our community and it was great to see so many of our Certified Educators leading sessions and contributing across the whole event.

Carrie Anne Philbin on Twitter

Thanks to my panel of @raspberry_pi certified educators – you are all amazing! #piparty https://t.co/0psnTEnfxq

Hands-on experiences

One of the goals for this year’s event was to give everyone the opportunity to get hands-on experience of digital making and, even if you weren’t able to get a place at one of the sold-out workshops, there were heaps of drop-in and ask-the-expert sessions, giving everyone the chance to get involved.

The marketplace was one of this year’s highlights: it featured more than 20 exhibitors including the awesome Pimoroni and Pi Hut, as well as some great maker creations, from the Tech Wishing Well to a game of robot football. It was great to see so many young people inspired by other people’s makes.

Code Club’s celebrations

As I mentioned before, this year’s party was very much a joint celebration, marking five years of both Raspberry Pi and Code Club.

Since its launch in 2012, Code Club has established itself as one of the largest networks of after-school clubs in the world. As well as celebrating the milestone of 5,000 active Code Clubs in the UK, it was a real treat to welcome Code Club’s partners from across the world, including Australia, Bangladesh, Brazil, Canada, Croatia, France, New Zealand, South Korea, and Ukraine.

Representatives of Code Club International, up for a birthday party!

Our amazing team

There are so many people to thank for making our fifth Birthday Party such a massive success. The Cambridge Junction was a fantastic venue with a wonderful team (you can support their work here). Our friends at RealVNC provided generous sponsorship and practical demonstrations. ModMyPi packed hundreds of swag bags with swag donated by all of our exhibitors. Fuzzy Duck Brewery did us proud with another batch of their Irrational Ale.

We’re hugely grateful to Sam Aaron and Fran Scott who provided the amazing finales on Saturday and Sunday. No party is quite the same without an algorave and a lot of explosions.

Most of all, I want to say a massive thank you to all of our volunteers and community members: you really did make the Birthday Party possible, and we couldn’t have done it without you.

One of the things we stand for at Raspberry Pi is making computing and digital making accessible to all. There’s a long way to go before we can claim that we’ve achieved that goal, but it was fantastic to see so much genuine diversity on display.

Probably the most important piece of feedback I heard about the weekend was how welcoming it felt for people who were new to the movement. That is entirely down to the generous, open culture that has been created by our community. Thank you all.

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I enjoy projects that can be made using items from around the home. Add a Raspberry Pi and a few lines of code, and great joy can be had from producing something smart, connected and/or just plain silly.

The concept of the IoT Smart Lobby Welcoming Music System fits into this category. Take a speaker, add a Raspberry Pi and a PIR sensor (both staples of any maker household, and worthwhile investments for the budding builder), and you can create a motion-sensor welcome system for your home or office.

[DIY] Make a smart lobby music system for your office or home

With this project, you will be able to automate a welcoming music for either your smart home or your smart office. As long as someone is around, the music will keep playing your favorite playlist at home or a welcome music to greet your customers or business partners while they wait in the lobby of your office.

The Naran Build

IoT makers Naran have published their Smart Lobby build on Instructables, where you’ll find all the code and information you need to get making. You’ll also find their original walkthrough of how to use their free Prota OS for Raspberry Pi, which allows you to turn your Pi into a Smart Home hub.

Their build allows you to use Telegram Bot to control the music played through their speaker. The music begins when movement is sensed, and you can control what happens next.

It’s a great build for playing information for visitors or alerting you to an intrusion.

Tim Peake Welcoming Committee

A few months back, I made something similar in the lobby at Pi Towers:  I hid a sensor under our cardboard cutout of ESA astronaut Tim Peake. Visitors walking into the lobby triggered the sensor, and were treated to the opening music from 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Sadly, with the meeting rooms across the lobby in constant use, the prank didn’t last long.

Alex J’rassic on Twitter

In honour of the #Principia anniversary, I pimped out cardboard @astro_timpeake at @Raspberry_Pi Towers. Listen. https://t.co/MBUOjrARtI

If you’re curious, the Christmas tree should be a clue as to why Tim is dressed like a nativity angel.

The Homebrew Edition

If you’re like me, you learn best by doing. Our free resources allow you to develop new skills as you build. You can then blend the skills you have learned to create your own interesting projects. I was very new to digital making when I put together the music sensor in the lobby. The skills I had developed by following step-by-step project tutorials provided the foundations for something new and original.

Why not make your own welcoming system? The process could teach you new skills, and develop your understanding of the Raspberry Pi. If you’d like to have a go, I’d suggest trying out the Parent Detector. This will show you how to use a PIR sensor with your Raspberry Pi. Once you understand that process, try the Burping Jelly Baby project. This will teach you how to tell your Raspberry Pi when to play an MP3 based on a trigger, such as the poke of a finger or the detection of movement.

From there, you should have all the tools you need to make a speaker system that plays an MP3 when someone or something approaches. Why not have a go this weekend? If you do, tell us about your final build in the comments below.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Make a PIR speaker system

What’s small, squishy and guaranteed to be more interested in a springy door stopper than in the £100 toy you just bought for them?

A baby.

This is me as a baby. I was going to use a standard Google Images baby, but instead I figured I’d use me. So here I am. Me in my infant form. Adorbs, right?

Sure, they’re cute. And that post-bath baby smell is intoxicating. We continue to spend our hard-earned money on toys for them, and they continue to be more interested in the box the toy came in. Perhaps it makes sense to give up on expensive toys, and get creative with various bits from around the house instead.

With this in mind, allow me to introduce the Pi-powered Busy Board: a pi-connected collection of things and stuff that make noises when you touch them. Aka Noisy Baby Paradise.

PI Powered Busy Board demo

I made a busy bored using a raspberry pi that can be found @ https://www.instructables.com/id/PI-Powered-Busy-Board/

Keeping baby busy

Kenny Lilly, father of a squishy baby from across the pond, used random noise makers from around his house and coupled them with a Raspberry Pi 3, an Adafruit Capacitive Touch HAT and some Bare Conductive paint.

Kenny used stencils to create attractive shapes with the paint. He then hammered copper-plated nails through from the front of the busy board to the back, to create connections between the paint and the HAT.

He used the Adafruit Python library to control the touch functions of the HAT. When the user interacts with the stenciled images, the HAT produces appropriate audio playback.

Kenny used a second piece of wood to make the back of the board, and built a frame using thinner pieces of wood to create a space inside. The  electronics are sandwiched inside the Busy Board, and the whole build is then powered by a USB battery, like the one you may keep in your bag to recharge your mobile phone. Finally, with a small speaker connected to the Pi, the build was complete.

The full how-to for building the Pi-powered Busy Board can be found on Kenny’s Instructables page. And if there are any health and safety concerns regarding a small, slobbery baby playing with conductive paint, Bare Conductive assure their customers that their paint is safe and child-friendly. So there you have it. Baby Paradise.

Have you used a Raspberry Pi to appease your infant overlord? Share your project in the comments below.

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Back when home television sets were thin on the ground and programmes were monochrome, TV maintained a magical aura, a ‘how do they fit the people in that little box’ wonder which has been lost now that sets are common and almost everyone has their own video camera or recording device. Many older shows were filmed specifically to be watched in black and white, and, in much the same way that plugging your SNES into an HD monitor doesn’t quite look right, old classics just don’t look the same when viewed on the modern screen.

50’s televisions were so pretty. So, so pretty.

Wellington Duraes, Senior Program Manager for Microsoft and proud owner of one of the best names I’ve ever seen, has used a Raspberry Pi and some readily available television content to build a TV Time Machine that draws us back to the days of classic, monochrome viewing the best way he can.

He may not be able to utilise the exact technology of the old screen, but he can trick our mind with the set’s retro aesthetics.

TV Time Machine

You can see more information about this project here: https://www.hackster.io/wellington-duraes/tv-time-machine-d11b5f

As explained in his hackster.io project page, Wellington joined his local Maker community, the Snohomish County Makers in Everett, WA, who helped him to build the wooden enclosure for the television. By purchasing turquoise speaker grille fabric online, he was able to give a gorgeous retro feeling to the outer shell.

Wellington: “I can’t really keep it on close to me because I’ll stop working to watch…”

For the innards, Wellington used a cannibalised thrift store Dell monitor, hooking it up to a Raspberry Pi 2 and some second-hand speakers. After the addition of Adafruit’s video looper code to loop free content downloaded from the Internet Archive, plus some 3D-printed channel and volume knobs, the TV Time Machine was complete.

The innards of the TV Time Machine

“Electronics are the easiest part,” explains Wellington. “This is basically a Raspberry Pi 2 playing videos in an infinite loop from a flash drive, a monitor, and a PC speaker.”

On a personal note, my first – and favourite – television was a black-and-white set, the remote long since lost. A hand-me-down from my parents’ bedroom, I remember watching the launch of Euro Disney on its tiny screen, imagining what the fireworks and parade would look like in colour. Of course, I could have just gone downstairs and watched it on the colour television in the living room, but there was something special about having my own screen whose content I could dictate.

For anyone too young to remember the resort’s original name.

On weekend mornings, I would wake and give up my rights to colour content in order to watch Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Defenders of the Earth, and The Wuzzles (my favourite) on that black-and-white screen, knowing that no one would ask for the channel to be changed – what eight-year-old child wanted to watch boring things like the news and weather?

The Wuzzles theme

intro

I think that’s why I love this project so much, and why, despite now owning a ridiculously large smart TV with all the bells and whistles of modern technology, I want to build this for the nostalgia kick.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – TV Time Machine

Dr Lucy Rogers is more than just a human LED. She’s also an incredibly imaginative digital maker, ready and willing to void warranties in her quest to take things apart and put them back together again, better than before. With her recipe for legal, digital indoor fireworks, she does exactly that, leaving an electronic cigarette in a battered state as it produces the smoke effects for this awesome build.

Firecracker Demo Video

Uploaded by IBM Internet of Things on 2017-02-28.

In her IBM blog post, Lucy offers a basic rundown of the build. While it may not be a complete how-to for building the firecrackers, the provided GitHub link and commentary should be enough for the seasoned maker to attempt their own version. If you feel less confident about producing the complete build yourself, there are more than enough resources available online to help you create something flashy and bangy without the added smoke show.

For the physical build itself, Lucy used a plastic soft drink bottle, a paper plate, and plastic tubing. Once painted, they provided the body for her firecrackers, and the support needed to keep the LED NeoPixels in place. She also drilled holes into the main plastic tube that ran up the centre of the firecracker, allowing smoke to billow out at random points. More of that to come.

Spray paint and a touch of gold transform the pieces of plastic piping into firecrackers

The cracking, banging sounds play via a USB audio adapter due to complications between the NeoPixels and the audio jack. Lucy explains:

The audio settings need to be set in the Raspberry Pi’s configuration settings (raspi-config). I also used the Linux program ‘alsamixer’ to set the volume. The firecrackers sound file was made by Phil Andrew. I found that using the Node-RED ‘exec node’ calling the ‘mpg123’ program worked best.

Lucy states that the hacking of the e-cigarette was the hardest part of the build. For the smoke show itself, she reversed its recommended usage as follows:

On an electronic cigarette, if you blow down the air-intake hole (not the outlet hole from which you would normally inhale), smoke comes out of the outlet hole. I attached an aquarium pump to the air-intake hole and the firecracker pipe to the outlet, to make smoke on demand.

For the power, she gingerly hacked at the body with a pipe cutter before replacing the inner LiPo battery with a 30W isolated DC-DC converter, allowing for a safer power flow throughout the build (for “safer flow”, read “less likely to blow up the Raspberry Pi”).

The pump and e-cigarette fit snugly inside the painted bottle, while the Raspberry Pi remains outside

The project was partly inspired by Lucy’s work with Robin Hill Country Park. A how-to of that build can be seen below:

Dr Lucy Rogers Electronic Fire Crackers

www.farnell.com Dr Lucy Rogers presents her exciting Fire Crackers project, taking you from the initial concept right through to installation. Whilst working in partnership with the Robin Hill country park on the Isle of Wight, Lucy wanted to develop a solution for creating safe electronic Fire Crackers, for their Chinese New year festival.

Although I won’t challenge you all to dismantle electric cigarettes, nor do I expect you to spend money on strobe lights, sensors, and other such peripherals, it would be great to see some other attempts at digital home fireworks. If you build, or have built, anything flashy and noisy, please share it in the comments below.

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The Tough Pi-ano needs to live up to its name as a rugged, resilient instrument for a very good reason: kids.

Brian ’24 Hour Engineer’ McEvoy made the Tough Pi-ano as a gift to his aunt and uncle, for use in their centre for children with learning and developmental disabilities such as autism and Down’s syndrome. This easily accessible device uses heavy-duty arcade buttons and has a smooth, solid wood body with no sharp corners.

24 Hour Engineer Presents the Tough Pi-ano

24 Hour Engineer is a channel to showcase the things I’ve built. Instructions for the Tough Pi-ano can be found at my website, 24HourEngineer.com and searcing for “Tough Pi-ano.” http://www.24hourengineer.com/search?q=%22Tough+PiAno%22&max-results=20&by-date=true

The Pi-ano has four octaves of buttons, each controlled by a Raspberry Pi Zero. Each Zero is connected to a homebrew resistor board; this board, in turn, is connected to the switches that control the arcade buttons.

The Tough Pi-ano is designed specifically for musical therapy, so it has a clean and uncomplicated design. It has none of the switches and sliders you’d usually expect to find on an electronic keyboard.

The simple body, with its resilient keys, allows the Tough Pi-ano to stand up to lots of vigorous playing and forceful treatment, providing an excellent resource for the centre.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Tough Pi-ano

Rob from The MagPi here! We’re still incredibly excited about the brand-new, wireless-enabled Raspberry Pi Zero W, and it’s in our latest issue, out now. Here’s a video of me talking about it.

Introducing Raspberry Pi Zero W

The Raspberry Pi Zero W, the new wireless-enabled Raspberry Pi, is out now! Rob from The MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine, reveals the specifications, price, and more. Get a free Pi Zero W with a twelve-month print sub to The MagPi – http://magpi.cc/SubsNew The subscription offer includes a free Raspberry Pi Zero W, an official case with three covers, and a cable bundle.

We have not just one, but two, big articles about the Raspberry Pi Zero W in issue 55 of The MagPi. Our Big Build feature teaches you how to make a modified PiGRRL handheld retro console, and you’ll also find a full ten-page breakdown of everything that’s cool and new with the Raspberry Pi Zero W.

As usual we have loads of other excellent articles in the magazine, from tutorials on how to create an Amazon Alexa-powered robot to reviews of the brand new version of Kodi.

Pi Zero W, back-ups, advanced GPIO, 3D modelling, and more. We think issue 55 is fabulous!

Get your copy
You can grab a copy of The MagPi 55 in stores now at WHSmith, Tesco, Sainsbury’s, and Asda. Alternatively you can order your copy online, or get it digitally via our app on Android and iOS. There’s even a free PDF of it as well.

We also have a new subscription offer to celebrate the new Raspberry Pi Zero W: grab a twelve-month subscription and you’ll get a Raspberry Pi Zero W absolutely free, along with a free official case and a bundle of adapter cables. Get yours online right now!

Free Creative Commons download
As always, you can download your copy of The MagPi completely free. Grab it straight from the issue page for The MagPi 55.

Don’t forget, though, that as with sales of the Raspberry Pi itself, all proceeds from the print and digital editions of the magazine go to help the Raspberry Pi Foundation achieve its charitable goals. Help us democratise computing!

Lastly, here’s a full zip of the code from this issue, to help you get off to a flying start with your projects. We hope you enjoy it!

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Today is Raspberry Pi’s fifth birthday: it’s five years since we launched the original Raspberry Pi, selling a hundred thousand units in the first day, and setting us on the road to a lifetime total (so far) of over twelve million units. To celebrate, we’re announcing a new product: meet Raspberry Pi Zero W, a new variant of Raspberry Pi Zero with wireless LAN and Bluetooth, priced at only $10.

Multum in parvo

So what’s the story?

In November 2015, we launched Raspberry Pi Zero, the diminutive $5 entry-level Raspberry Pi. This represented a fivefold reduction in cost over the original Model A: it was cheap enough that we could even stick it on the front cover of The MagPi, risking civil insurrection in newsagents throughout the land.

MagPi issue 40: causing trouble for WHSmith (credit: Adam Nicholls)

Over the ensuing fifteen months, Zero grew a camera connector and found its way into everything from miniature arcade cabinets to electric skateboards. Many of these use cases need wireless connectivity. The homebrew “People in Space” indicator in the lobby at Pi Towers is a typical example, with an official wireless dongle hanging off the single USB port: users often end up adding a USB hub to allow them to connect a keyboard, a mouse and a network adapter, and this hub can easily cost more than the Zero itself.

People in SPAAAAAACE

Zero W fixes this problem by integrating more functionality into the core product. It uses the same Cypress CYW43438 wireless chip as Raspberry Pi 3 Model B to provide 802.11n wireless LAN and Bluetooth 4.0 connectivity.

Pi Zero Announcement Video

Music: Orqestruh by SAFAKASH – https://soundcloud.com/safakash

To recap, here’s the full feature list for Zero W:

• 1GHz, single-core CPU
• 512MB RAM
• Mini-HDMI port
• Micro-USB On-The-Go port
• Micro-USB power
• HAT-compatible 40-pin header
• Composite video and reset headers
• CSI camera connector
• 802.11n wireless LAN
• Bluetooth 4.0

We imagine you’ll find all sorts of uses for Zero W. It makes a better general-purpose computer because you’re less likely to need a hub: if you’re using Bluetooth peripherals you might well end up with nothing at all plugged into the USB port. And of course it’s a great platform for experimenting with IoT applications.

Official case

To accompany Raspberry Pi Zero W, we’ve been working with our friends at Kinneir Dufort and T-Zero to create an official injection-moulded case. This shares the same design language as the official case for the Raspberry Pi 3, and features three interchangeable lids:

• A blank one
• One with an aperture to let you access the GPIOs
• One with an aperture and mounting point for a camera

Three cases for the price of one

The case set also includes a short camera adapter flexi, and a set of rubber feet to make sure your cased Zero or Zero W doesn’t slide off the desk.

New distributors

You may have noticed that we’ve added several new Zero distributors recently: ModMyPi in the UK, pi3g in Germany, Samm Teknoloji in Turkey, Kubii in France, Spain, Italy and Portugal, and Kiwi Electronics in the Netherlands, Belgium and Luxembourg.

Raspberry Pi Zero W is available from all Zero distributors today, with the exception of Micro Center, who should have stock in stores by the end of this week. Check the icons below to find the stockist that’s best for you!

UK, Ireland

United States

Canada

Germany, Austria, Switzerland

France, Spain, Italy, Portugal

Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg

Turkey

Global

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Matthew “Raspberry Pi Guy” Timmons-Brown puts together a video of what the Raspberry Pi community has achieved every year. He’s just published 2017’s update, and it’s a doozy: have a look, and see how many of these projects and people you recognise!

What is Raspberry Pi? – Five years of Pi!

Half a decade. 12 million Raspberry Pis. On the 28th February 2017, Raspberry Pi will be five years old. As with previous years, I thought that I would make a video to commemorate this historic landmark and to show everyone just what Raspberry Pi is about.

We’re going to be celebrating the community that comes up with this amazing stuff all this weekend at our fifth Big Birthday Weekend, here in Cambridge. Tickets (£5 for over-16s, free for people under 16) are sold out for Saturday, but there are still some left for Sunday: grab them while they’re hot! You’ll see some of the projects featured in this video, discover some completely new ones, have the chance to attend drop-in sessions on digital making, robotics and more, meet with hundreds of like-minded Pi fans, and hang out with the team that makes your Raspberry Pi.

There will also be cake. See you there!

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The Raspberry Pi often makes the world a better place. This time, it’s helping to test 3D-printed stents using a smart stent-testing robot.

Stents are small tubes used to prop open a patient’s airway. They keep people alive, so it’s incredibly important they don’t fail.

In fact, the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) requires testing of each design by compressing it over 300,000 times. That’s a sturdy challenge for any human, which is why machines are normally used to mash up the stents.

The usual stent-destroying machines are dumb clamps, with no idea whether the stent is breaking or not.

A smarter stent-testing robot

Enter the Stent-Testing Robot, an intelligent arm that mashes stents while a Raspberry Pi Camera Module keeps a sharp eye on how it performs.

It’s designed by Henry J. Feldman, Chief Information Architect at Harvard Medical Faculty Physicians.

“We start with a CT scan of the lungs, and via a 3D reconstruction get the size and shape of the bronchus that we wish to stent open,” explains Henry. “The trick is to make it the exact shape of the airway.”

The challenge with testing is if stents start to fail before the end of the test. The dumb devices currently used continue to pulverise the stent when this happens.

Machine vision to control stent-testing

The Raspberry Pi, meanwhile, uses machine vision to stop the mashing at the moment of failure.

The instant-stop approach enables Henry’s team to check which part failed, and view a time-lapse leading up to the failure. The video helps them design more reliable stents in the future.

Henry explains:

Naturally, we turned to the Raspberry Pi, since, along with a servo control HAT, it gave us easy OpenCV integration along with the ability to control a Hitec HS-5665MH servo. We also added an Adafruit 16-channel Servo/PWM HAT. The servo controls a ServoCity Parallel Gripper A.

Python was used to write the servo controller application. The program fires off a separate OpenCV thread to process each image.

Henry and his medical team trained the machine learning system to spot failing stents, and outlined the likely points of failure with a black marker.

Each time the gripper released, the robot took a picture with the Pi Camera Module and performed recognition of the coloured circles via OpenCV. If the black marker had a split or was no longer visible, the robot halted its test.

The test was successful:

While the OpenCV could occasionally get fooled, it was remarkably accurate, and given this was done on an academic budget, the Raspberry Pi gave us high-performance multi-core capabilities for very little money.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Stent-testing smart robot makes the medical grade

Here’s one for the classic car enthusiasts and audiophiles in the room. Matthew Leigh (Managing Director of Infomagnet by day, skilled maker by night) took the aged cassette deck from an old Ferarri, and brought it into 2017 with the help of a Raspberry Pi.

He used a HiFiBerry DAC alongside a Raspberry Pi 3 to allow the playback of digital music through the sound system of the car. The best part? It all fits neatly into the existing tape deck.

Matthew was also able to integrate the tech with the existing function buttons, allowing him to use the original fast-forward, rewind, pause and play controls.

The USB ports are accessible via the cassette door, allowing users to insert flash drives loaded with music. As always, the Raspberry Pi 3 is also accessible via WiFi, providing further connectivity and functionality. A network-connected tablet acts as a media centre screen.

The build could be taken further. The Amazon Alexa Voice Service, connected to a 4G dongle or phone, could update the driver with traffic issues, breaking news, or weather reports. In fact, we’ve seen so many ‘carputer’ builds, we’re convinced that there’s no end to the vehicular uses for a hidden Raspberry Pi.

Have you built a carputer? Or maybe hidden a Raspberry Pi in an old piece of tech, or an unexpected location? Let us know in the comments below.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Cassette deck in an old Ferrari, Pi-fied

Raspberry Pi is based in Cambridge. (Just to be clear, that’s the one in East Anglia, UK, not the one in Massachusetts, USA.)

When we say “based in Cambridge”, that suggests (correctly) that our offices are here. But the connection between Raspberry Pi and Cambridge runs a lot deeper than mere geography.

Raspberry Pi was founded with the aim of increasing the number of applicants to study computer science at the University of Cambridge. The processor core which powers the Raspberry Pi was developed in the city by ARM, the hugely successful microprocessor company which itself grew out of Acorn, one of the original pioneers of the 1980s home computer revolution, and another Cambridge success story. The original VideoCore graphics processor was designed by staff at Cambridge Consultants, one of the first technical consultancy firms in the UK. They spun out a company called Alphamosaic to sell VideoCore; that company was subsequently acquired by Broadcom, and it was the engineers at Broadcom’s Cambridge office who updated and improved it to make the version which provides the multimedia for Raspberry Pi.

It was those same engineers who put together the out-of-hours ‘skunkworks’ project which became the Raspberry Pi alpha board. When Raspberry Pi was founded as a charity and a company in its own right, we decided that Cambridge was where we would be based. Most of our staff live in or around Cambridge, and many of them are graduates of the University. Cambridge runs deep in the DNA of Raspberry Pi: our chairman David Cleevely is fond of saying that Raspberry Pi couldn’t have happened anywhere else, and while that may not be entirely true, it’s certainly the case that Cambridge provided the conditions for it to flourish as it has. We’re very proud of our connection to Cambridge, and we’ve decided to celebrate it.

A few months ago, Eben and I were looking at the beautiful city flyover videos that Apple offer as screensavers on the Apple TV, and we thought that it would be great if we could do something similar for Raspbian, with Cambridge as the subject. So we enlisted the help of Cambridge Filmworks, who are experts at filming from drones, and asked them to put together a video showing the best of Cambridge’s architecture. They did, and it’s gorgeous.

We also thought that it would be good to get some matching desktop wallpapers that showed off the best views of the city and the University. The best photographs I’ve seen of Cambridge were from Sir Cam, who takes photos for the University; they have very kindly allowed us access to their archives, from which we’ve chosen some scenes that we feel capture what is so special about this place.

Today we are launching the Cambridge theme pack for PIXEL: a video screensaver of Cambridge architecture and a set of desktop wallpapers. (We should point out this is entirely optional: it’s just some extra eye-candy for your PIXEL desktop if you fancy it.)

To install the wallpapers

sudo apt-get install cantab-wallpaper

To install the screensaver

sudo apt-get install cantab-screensaver

Or to install both

sudo apt-get install cantab-theme

Note that the wallpapers will be installed in the same /usr/share/pixel-wallpaper directory as the standard PIXEL wallpaper images. You can use the Appearance Settings dialog to choose the wallpaper you want.

Note also that the screensaver is quite a big download – it’s 200MB or so of high-resolution video – so you may not want to use it if your SD card is full or your network connection is slow.

Once you have installed the packages, you’ll need to configure the screensaver. Go into Preferences > Screensaver from the main menu, and select the screensaver called ‘Cantab’.

If you want just the Cambridge screensaver, set Mode to the ‘Only One Screen Saver’ option. If you do not do this, you will get a random selection of others as well. You can also configure how many minutes before the screensaver activates in the ‘Blank After’ window.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Cambridge theme for PIXEL