When John Sichi discovered a Mansfield Holiday Zoom movie camera on Yerdle, he was instantly transported back to a childhood of making home movies with his family.

The camera was fully operational, but sadly the lens was damaged. 

With the cost of parts, film, and development an unreasonable expense, John decided to digitise the camera using a Raspberry Pi Zero and Pi camera module.

To fit the Pi in place, John was forced to pull out the inner workings; unfortunately this meant he had to lose the nostalgic whirring noise of the inner springs which would originally have spun as the movie was recorded.

Using a scrap piece of metal, he was able to create a stop/start button from the existing trigger: hold it down to record, and release to stop.

A USB battery pack provides power to the Pi while bits of LEGO and Sugru hold it in place. 

John decided to mount the camera module externally, as he did not want to risk damaging the body of the Mansfield. A further upgrade would aim to use a camera with functional lens, thereby fully incorporating the new tech with the old functionality. 

Code for the camera is available via GitHub while sample footage from the camera can be found below. As you can see, the build works beautifully, and that retro image quality is incredibly evocative. Great work, John! 

Holiday Pi retrocamera

Uploaded by jsichi on 2016-09-14.

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While perusing a local car boot sale, David Pride came across a Silverlit Air Drum Kit for the grand total of one whole shiny pound. And just like any digital maker, he bought it, realising the potential of this wondrous discovery.

The original Silverlit Air Drum Kit

David had been recently fiddling with the Python CWiid library, a resource that allows you to use Wii controllers (Wiimotes) with a Raspberry Pi via Bluetooth. However, it was the setup of two controllers to a single Pi that was causing issues:

I’d only ever managed to get one controller working with a single Pi before, so the first challenge was to get a pair of controllers working as the ‘sticks’. That took a lot of mucking about, until I found the excellent post by WiiGate that detailed how to set up two controllers properly, using the MAC addresses. You can find it here.

Once this hurdle had been overcome, David collected a variety of open-source drum sample .wav files from the abundance of sound clips available on the web.

Did you honestly believe we’d get through this entire blog without a single cowbell reference?

David used Tkinter, writing a small app that would allow him to understand the positioning of the controllers, and as a result the data produced. Due to the nature of the controllers, movement wasn’t the only factor to consider. Speed and the way in which the controller was moved were also important. Move the controller quickly, and a different set of data is produced from that generated by a slower motion.

However, David isn’t one to give up and after a (relatively long) while, he had managed to plot positions for four distinct drum sounds:

I initially wanted to get three sounds on each controller, but the movement scale was a bit too tight to do it successfully every time, and two sounds often overlapped. So, I’m using the trigger button on each controller, combined with the movement for one of the sounds. This gives six different drum sounds, three per controller, that can be played without the sounds overlapping.

The final result of David’s tinkering is this wonderful air drum kit that provides a clean, impressive response with every movement. And because he’s such a lovely chap, all the code you need can be found at his GitHub page.

Raspberry Pi Air Drum Kit

Easy Python project using 2 Wii controllers and a Raspberry Pi to create an ‘air drum’ kit

So David, all we need now is the air guitar, air bass and air keyboard, and we’ve got the start of this year’s Christmas Number One.

Band name suggestions welcome…

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talkiepi is a single-button, push-to-talk walkie-talkie build that allows users to talk with their friends easily over WiFi, without the confusion of frequency dials, random buttons, and all the other clicky, turny, pushy options that caused me to break my own walkie-talkies as a child.

It’s the brainchild of Daniel Chote, native New Zealander, self-proclaimed Code Monkey and all-round Wonder Dad, currently residing in the USA.

Whereas many parents would simply hop on the internet and purchase their kids a set of walkie-talkies, Daniel decided to make his own.

SPOILERS, SWEETIE. Though not without good reason… for many reported that his son was stuck within a parallel universe… of sorts, literally trapped within their mutual space… kinda… ish. It’s like a tightrope walker but upside down? I think that’s what they said. And… hmmm… oh yeah, he’s only able to communicate via fairy lights and walkie-talkie technology and… eeeerr… I think I need to watch that show again. SPOILERS, SWEETIE.

The talkiepi can be built with or without an enclosure. Though Daniel uses a 3D printer to complete the build, you could use the components as they are, though they wouldn’t look half as good and would be a pain to make portable. But forgoing the case at the start will help you get a better idea of how everything works… so get a little naked to begin with.

Once you’re ready to put everything together, Daniel has provided the files needed for the print. Or, for added awesome, you could utilise any tin or Eggo box you have lying around. 

I’ll have Eleven Eggos, please…

Daniel cannibalised a USB speakerphone for sound and voice, installed a Raspberry Pi 3 in the casing and used a handful of components he already had, including a GPIO header connector, nuts and bolts, and LEDs. A push button with built-in LED acts as the means of activating the talk function of the talkiepi. 

The software for the device runs primarily on Mumble. Mumble allowed Daniel to create groups for the talkiepi, meaning that only those within the group could communicate. And with the added benefit of the Mumble app, those without the talkiepi can still join in with the fun via a smartphone or computer. All you need can be found at Daniel’s GitHub page.

We really like the fun factor of this build. It’s clean, simple and easy to use. On a larger scale, the system could work within more ‘grown up’, professional locations to allow for an easy method of communication. But for now, we’re working out how quickly we can build a set and start make-pretending Stranger Things in the Pi Towers office.

… did anyone else just see the wallpaper ripple?

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I came across Clodagh O’Mahony on Instagram, right at the start of my Raspberry Pi employment. As I was starting my new adventure with Pi, so was she… albeit via a somewhat different approach.

@yodaomahony *sigh* There goes all my (parents’) money. #goodcause tho. #adafruit #thesiscountdown #day82

@raspberrypifoundation What are you planning to make @yodaomahony?

@yodaomahony @raspberrypifoundation I’m building a dress that quantifies real-world social interactions and posts them online. My thesis is a commentary on how much social media affects our actions.

It’s fair to say that our initial interaction had me hooked on the idea of wearable tech that quantified social interactions. So from that moment, I followed her account, checking in on her posts, and then counted down the days until her thesis was due, mainly so I could finally share the build with all of you.

Eventually the Instagram countdown ran its course and last week, as Clodagh announced the end of her project, this long-awaited blog post could finally come to life. And for Clodagh, it meant she had one for us in return…

“Since it’s now all over and done with, I’m going to skip the Phase/Part structure and just do a summary write-up of the thesis build. To be honest, I would probably just let it slide and go back to the pre-thesis days of whinging about my hair and Project Runway, but I feel like I owe the Raspberry Pi Foundation something for following me almost all the way through the Instagram countdown.”

(See? Regardless of what people say, my adorable social bullying helps productivity!)

For her thesis, Clodagh built two components of the study: the dress and its accompanying website.

The dress itself houses a Raspberry Pi, fibre optics, an Adafruit 12-Key Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout and Pimironi Blinkt within a beautiful 3D-printed casing.

With the dress split into sectors, lights glow as a body part is touched, thanks to conductive thread… lots of conductive thread. A hand to the waist sets the dress glowing purple, to the hip, green, and so on. 

As the touch sets the lights in action, the dress also registers the interaction via a point system, relaying the data back to the website.

It’s fair to note now that the dress and website are all part of a thesis study into the way in which we have handed ourselves over to social media, and the idea of celebrities ‘selling themselves’ online, opening their lives to public scrutiny for the good of their career progression. 

Alongside touch, the dress also sets out to award points based on voice. Positive words boast positive colouring across the Blinkt, while negative words do the opposite. Though the device doesn’t record specific speech, it acknowledges words based on a catalogue and awards points accordingly. Points are also granted for profile page views and location, along with multipliers based on how public you make your profile. 

It genuinely is wonderful to see the dress come to life. Changes along the way were well-documented – at one point, an entirely new dress was created to better fit the purpose – and with the piece now complete, Clodagh can go back to bingeflixing Project Runway and blogging, while I hunt down my next Instagram victim prey target maker.

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We are confident that nobody out there has built a working MAME cabinet that’s any smaller than this. Adafruit’s Phillip Burgess posted this project on Twitter last week, and you guys went absolutely nuts for it. So he’s produced a video, and a quick and dirty explainer so you can make your own.

Your eyes aren’t deceiving you: that backplate is a Pi Zero. You’re going to need tiny elf fingers for this one.

Really: it’s teeny. That OLED screen is only 0.96″.

Phillip’s at pains to point out that their walkthrough is not a complete, step-by-step tutorial of the sort that Adafruit usually provide:

It’s lessons learned during an impromptu weekend hacking session which, to be honest, was a lot of trouble to build and only marginally fun to play, aside from the incredible “gee whiz that’s tiny!” factor. But it may provide insights for others looking to build small gadgets…

You may not enjoy playing it, Phillip, but I’m sure any mice haunting the Adafruit factory will be having a field day.

World’s Smallest MAME Arcade Cabinet @adafruit #adafruit @raspberry_pi

Tempest in a Teacup https://learn.adafruit.com/worlds-smallest-mame-arcade-cabinet —————————————– Visit the Adafruit shop online – http://www.adafruit.com Subscribe to Adafruit on YouTube: http://adafru.it/subscribe Join our weekly Show & Tell on G+ Hangouts On Air: http://adafru.it/showtell Watch our latest project videos: http://adafru.it/latest New tutorials on the Adafruit Learning System: http://learn.adafruit.com/ Music by bartlebeats: http://soundcloud.com/bartlebeats —————————————–

You can find a writeup for what has to be the coolest MAME cabinet build I’ve seen this year at Adafruit. Thanks gang!

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Today’s downpour notwithstanding, the UK has just experienced its hottest September day since 1911. Here at Pi Towers, we were acutely aware of this. The office roared with the noise from sixty-odd CPU fans at full tilt. The air conditioning conked out. And things got especially bad when we realised that it was buy-one-get-one-free day at the local noodle place, which meant we were also trying to justify the eating of hot food in an office that was feeling a lot like one of those spa steam rooms, but stinkier.

Artist’s rendering of the general situation at Pi Towers for much of this week

Sensible people would have engineered their way out of this mess, like DevinL9 (please let us know your real name in the comments if you’d like us to use it here). DevinL9 is the possessor of an internet statistic: he reckons that a full-sized human can produce between two and four litres of sweat in an hour.

This is disgusting, so DevinL9 has come up with a nice little OpenCV hack to evaporate as much of it as possible. This is a “use what you have” hack: it’s not beautiful, but it’s effective, and if your desk is anything like mine you’ve probably got almost everything you need for the build in a drawer. Meet the fan that recognises your face, and swivels to track it.

Meet FanBot. Devin L9 says:

Welcome FanBot, the personal desktop fan that follows your face and keeps you cool when things are getting a little too spicy!

This is more of a proof of concept than a finished beautified product. It is for a intermediate developer. However, I wouldn’t write yourself off if you’re a beginner, it’ll just be a little more difficult. That being said, this project will get you a working version of openCV 3.0.0 on the Raspberry Pi 2 (RPi). [Liz notes: or any other model of Raspberry Pi! ] It will teach you a little about pulse width modulation (PWM) and how to control a servo with the general purpose input/output (GPIO) pins on the RPi. Let me know if you have problems. I’ll do my best to fix anything. It should be noted that this is not going to be a completely optimized solution in code or execution. The purpose of this project is to get a simple working version of openCV, play around with it by means of face detection, and move a servo so that a small fan can cool you off!

It works, too. There’s a complete build diary and full parts list and instructions, including all the code you’ll need, over at Instructables.

No soldering’s required: just breadboard and superglue for mounting. What are you waiting for?

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I have been staring at a blank screen for whole minutes. There are no words for just how much I love this project. I’ve already been on eBay to find a General Instrument AY-3-8910 series sound chip so I can play with one myself. Before we get into details, feast your ears.

vmw ay-3-8910 ym player

Raspeberry Pi Driving an AY-3-8910 sound chip It’s playing “intro2.ym” by Surgeon (Aleksy Lutsenko) More details on the setup can be found here: http://www.deater.net/weave/vmwprod/hardware/ay-3-8910/

What’s going on here? The Raspberry Pi is playing chiptunes by serving the files directly on to a AY-3-8910 (brought direct to you from the 1980s), while doing some rather jolly LED visualisation too.

The AY-3-8910 is no longer made: it was a piece of kit you’d find in most arcade machines, games consoles and home computers in the 1980s (if you had a ZX Spectrum, an Amstrad CPC or an Apple II, you’ll be familiar with its gorgeously grungy bleeps and bloops). Nowadays there’s dwindling stock that goes to service old machines, or to make entirely new things that’ll play chiptunes – like this beast.

Vince Weaver, the maker, says:

The AY-3-8910 is fairly straightforward. Three channels of square waves plus various noise and envelope effects. Provide a clock (1MHz in our case) and there are 16 (well, 14) on-chip registers you write to. Just put the address then the 8 bit value on the bus, toggle the 3 bus control pins, and you are set. You’ll want to do this fairly fast. A typical YM music file wants you to write all 14 registers every 50Hz.

I use the Pi’s GPIOs to shift an 8 bit value into a shift register. Then I use a few more to drive the control bus.

Visualization is done with some i2c LED displays.

The amplifier is an LM386 design from the AY-3-8910 datasheet.

Vince has plans to make some improvements (adding stereo, printing a PCB, swapping out for a better amplifier, using SPI to drive the shift register instead of GPIO and refining the software), but even in this prototype version, this is a piece of kit I’d love to have on my desk. Fortunately, we can replicate the project: everything you need is on Vince’s website and on GitHub. Thanks Vince!

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A few weeks back, we were fortunate enough to be sent the Puppet Kit for Raspberry Pi, from our friend Simon Monk of Monk Makes. The kit shows you how to use your Raspberry Pi to take control of a traditional marionette, including controlling the puppet from your keyboard, recording stop-frame puppet movements, and setting the puppet up so that it waves when it detects movement. 

Given my limited experience of physical computing with a Raspberry Pi, I decided to take on the challenge of completing the kit, and documented my journey through Snapchat.

To boldly go…

Right out of the box, the kit feels as if it has been put together with care and thought. All wooden pieces have been laser cut, all components (apart from the Raspberry Pi itself) are provided, and the kit includes a step-by-step guide so foolproof that I felt confident I could complete the project. 

The only issue?

My intense fear of clowns, which was instantly triggered when I opened the box and saw the puppet itself:

All the nope.

Despite my coulrophobia, I carried on with the build, because that’s how much you all mean to me, dear readers. I do these things for you.

The guide walked me through the project, with clear instructions supported by photographs and diagrams. It was only when I reached Step 16, “Run the Test Code”, that I realised I couldn’t find a mouse. Fortunately I was able to enlist the aid of Ben Nuttall, who has become my Raspberry Pi hero in cases such as this.

Ben Nuttall is my hero

Ben helped me to set the Pi up on the Pi Towers local network, allowing me to feed Simon’s code to the Pi via my MacBook. If you don’t have access to Ben and his heroic abilities, you could use the recently mentioned PiBakery from the legendary David Ferguson to preset the network details into Raspbian before setting up your Raspberry Pi.

After this, setting up the walking functionality of the puppet, plus the additional sensor, was a breeze. With very little previous experience of using GPIO pins, servos, and nightmare-inducing clown puppets, I was somewhat taken aback by how easy I found the process. In fact, by the end, I had the clown dancing a merry jig and waving to anyone who passed. Cute, right?

Making a Waving Puppet – Snapchat Story

We recently got our hands on the Monk Makes Puppet Kit and decided to have Alex build it.. despite her complete lack of coding knowledge. Seriously… she knows nothing. She’s the Jon Snow of Digital Making.

All in all, the kit was a wonderful experience and an interesting learning curve. Not only did it teach me the value of a well-executed and detailed maker kit, it also taught me the value of a Ben Nuttall, and helped me not to fear all clowns after having watched IT at a teenage slumber party like a fool!

*cries in a corner*

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When we started Raspberry Pi, we had a simple goal: to increase the number of people applying to study Computer Science at Cambridge. By putting cheap, programmable computers in the hands of the right young people, we hoped that we might revive some of the sense of excitement about computing that we had back in the 1980s with our Sinclair Spectrums, BBC Micros and Commodore 64s.

At the time, we thought our lifetime volumes might amount to ten thousand units – if we were lucky. There was was no expectation that adults would use Raspberry Pi, no expectation of commercial success, and certainly no expectation that four years later we would be manufacturing tens of thousands of units a day in the UK, and exporting Raspberry Pi all over the world.

The first two thousand Raspberry Pis. Each Pi in this pallet now has 5000 siblings.

With this in mind, you can imagine how strange it feels to be able to announce that over the last four and a half years we’ve sold a grand total of ten million Raspberry Pis. Thanks to you, we’ve beaten our wildest dreams by three orders of magnitude, and we’re only just getting started. Every time you buy a Raspberry Pi, you help fund both our ongoing engineering work, and our educational outreach programs, including Code Club and Picademy.

Very early on, we decided that we would offer the bare-bones Raspberry Pi board without accessories: that way, cost-conscious customers get the lowest possible price, provided they can beg or borrow USB peripherals, a power supply and an SD card. Over the years, Raspberry Pi distributors have built on this, producing some fantastic bundles for people who would rather get everything they need from a single source.

To celebrate the ten millionth Raspberry Pi, for the first time we’ve put together our own idea of what the perfect bundle would look like, creating the official Raspberry Pi Starter Kit.

The starter kit, unboxed and ready to go

Inside the minimalist white box (like the official case, another beautiful Kinneir Dufort design), you’ll find:

• A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
• An 8GB NOOBS SD card
• An official case
• An official 2.5A multi-region power supply
• An official 1m HDMI cable
• An optical mouse and a keyboard with high-quality scissor-switch action
• A copy of Adventures in Raspberry Pi Foundation Edition

This is an unashamedly premium product: the latest Raspberry Pi, official accessories, the best USB peripherals we could find, and a copy of the highest-rated Raspberry Pi book. The kit is available to order online in the UK from our partners element14 and RS Components, priced at £99+VAT, and will be coming to the rest of the world, and to your favourite reseller, over the next few weeks.

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It gives me great pleasure to announce that The MagPi, the official Raspberry Pi magazine, is now available – fully translated and localised – in Germany, thanks to a collaboration with our friends at CHIP.

Germany was one of the first places outside the UK to take an interest in Raspberry Pi, so it’s quite fitting that it’s our first license. Eben Upton tells us more:

Germany is our third largest market so it seems natural that, after only 18 months, Germany should be the first country to get a localised version of The MagPi.

On a personal note, it’s particularly satisfying for me to see the MagPi launch in Germany, because as a child I used to import German Commodore Amiga magazines, which had so much more technical detail than their UK equivalents. The style of the MagPi is very reminiscent of these magazines: I hope that we’re in some sense “returning the favour,” and that German children of all ages (from 8-80) will be inspired to create exciting projects with Raspberry Pi and share them with the world.

The first issue is out right now everywhere you’d expect a cutting-edge technology magazine to be, not to mention available direct from CHIP’s online store.

Like the UK magazine, das offizielle Raspberry Pi Magazin features 100 pages of glossy Raspberry Pi goodness, but unlike its UK language counterpart it’s currently scheduled to run bi-monthly, so the next issue will be arriving on 2 November.

The magazine is available now for €9.95 in print or €6.50 on digital devices, and you can pick up a subscription for €54.80. Subscribers will also receive the same amazing free gift – a Raspberry Pi Zero and full cable bundle (including the camera ribbon cable). The free PDF edition will follow in 90 days.

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Everybody loves cake, right? Cakes have layers. Mmm…. cake! We’re sure you’re also love PiBakery, a brand new way to bake Raspberry Pi images, which makes creating a custom image a…piece of cake.

PiBakery was created by David Ferguson. He’s a talented 17-year-old whom we first met at the Big Birthday event we held to celebrate four years of Pi back in February. He showed Liz and Eben a work-in-progress version of PiBakery, and they’ve been raving about it ever since.

This crafty program enables users to mix together a customised version of Raspbian with additional ingredients – and you need absolutely no experience with computers to set up your custom image.

In PiBakery, you drag-and-drop blocks (just like Scratch) to add extra components. PiBakery then mixes the latest version of Raspbian with its additional sprinkles, and flashes the result directly to an SD Card.

“The idea for PiBakery came about when I went to a Raspberry Pi event,” says David. “I needed to connect my Pi to the network there, but didn’t have a monitor, keyboard and mouse. I needed a way of adding a network to my Raspberry Pi that didn’t require booting it up and manually connecting.”

“PiBakery solves this issue,” he explains. “You can simply drag across the blocks that you want to use with your Raspberry Pi, and the SD Card will be created for you.”

“If you’ve already made an SD card using PiBakery, you can insert that SD card back into your computer, and keep editing the blocks to add additional software, configure new wireless networks, and alter different settings,” says David. “All without having to find a monitor, keyboard and mouse.”

PiBakery is available for Mac and Windows, with a Linux version on the way. It can be downloaded directly from its website. As well as the scripts and block interface, it contains the whole Raspbian installation, So the initial download takes quite a while. But does make the process of building, and flashing SD Cards, remarkably simple.

David has written a guide to creating customised SD cards with PiBakery. It’s a very easy program to use, and we followed his guide to quickly build a custom version of Raspbian that connected straight to our local wireless network. Guess what: it worked first time.

Behind the scenes, PiBakery creates a set of scripts that run when the Raspberry Pi is powered on (either just the first time, or every time it is powered). These scripts can be used to set up and connect to a WiFi network, and activate SSH.

Other options include installing Apache, changing the user password, and running Python or command line scripts.

The user controls which scripts are used with the block-based interface. You drag-and-drop the tasks you want the Raspberry Pi to perform when it is powered up. Piece of cake.

We love PiBakery, and cake. Did we mention cake?

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Working here at Pi Towers, I’m always a little frustrated by not being able to share the huge number of commercial businesses’ embedded projects that use Raspberry Pis. (About a third of the Pis we sell go to businesses.) We don’t get to feature many of them on the blog; many organisations don’t want their work replicated by competitors, or aren’t prepared for customers and competitors to see how inexpensively they’re able to automate tasks. Every now and then, though, a company is happy to share what they’re using Pis for.

Makoto Koike, centre, with his parents on the family cucumber farm

Here’s a great example: a cucumber farm in Japan, which is using a Raspberry Pi to sort thorny cucumbers, saving the farmer eight to nine hours’ manual work a day.

Makoto Koike is the son of farmers, who works as an embedded systems designer for the Japanese car industry. He started helping out at his parents’ cucumber farm (which he will be taking over when they retire), and spotted a process that was ripe for automation.

Cucumbers from the Makotos’ farm

At the Makotos’ farm, cucumbers are graded into nine categories: the straightest, thickest, freshest, most vivid cucumbers (which must have plenty of characteristic spurs) are the best, and can be sold at the highest price. Makoto-san’s mother was in charge of sorting the cucumbers every day, which took eight hours at the peak of the harvest. Makoto-san had an epiphany after reading about Google’s AlphaGo beating the world number one professional Go player. He realised that machine learning and deep learning meant the sorting process could be automated, so he built a process using Google’s open-source machine learning library, TensorFlow, and some machinery to process the cucumbers into graded batches.

Sorting in action

Camera interface

Google have put together a diagram showing how the system works:

There are difficulties in building this sort of system, not least the 7000 cucumbers, pre-graded by his mother, that Makoto-san had to photograph and label over a period of three months to give the model material to train with. He says:

“When I did a validation with the test images, the recognition accuracy exceeded 95%. But if you apply the system with real use cases, the accuracy drops down to about 70%. I suspect the neural network model has the issue of “overfitting” (the phenomenon in neural networks where the model is trained to fit only the small training dataset) because of the insufficient number of training images.”

Still, it’s an impressive feat, and a real-world >95% accuracy rate is not unfeasible with a big enough data set. We’d be interested to see how the setup progresses, especially as more automation is added; right now, cucumbers are added to the processing hopper by hand, and a human has to interact with the touchscreen grading panel. Here’s the system at work:

TensorFlow powered cucumber sorter by Makoto Koike

Uploaded by Kazunori Sato on 2016-08-05.

We’re hoping to see some updates from the Makoto family as the system evolves. And in the meantime, if you have an embedded project you’d like to share with us, let us know in the comments!

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New Zealander James Zingel recognised his mother’s concern over his grandmother’s well-being, and decided to do something about it.

For the Bay of Plenty Science Fair, the 14-year-old Bethlehem College student designed and built ‘Gran Check’, a Raspberry Pi-powered monitor that uses a PIR sensor to recognise his gran’s movement as she feeds her dogs, taking a photograph every morning to email back to his mother.

14-year-old James was concerned by the news of the elderly passing away unnoticed

James had researched similar builds on the market, noting their price was unrealistic for those with a lower budget. With the increase in average lifespans, plus upsetting reports of the elderly passing away unnoticed, he was determined to create something affordable and readily available to all, with little to no maintenance requirements.

A knob on the lid allows for the PIR sensitivity to be adjusted

The Gran Check lives within a wooden box, installed beside his grandmother’s dogs’ food. He knew it was the best location, since the dogs would never allow her to go a day without feeding them. For added peace of mind, James built the device to be self-sufficient, ensuring she’d never have to operate it herself.

James noted his grandmother’s independent nature, understanding that constant ‘check in’ calls from the family would be unrealistic. The Gran Check removes all concern for her welfare, without constantly bugging her for updates.

James credits the internet for much of his digital maker education

James was given a Raspberry Pi by his father, though he soon overtook the level of expertise on offer, and turned to YouTube and websites for help. 

James built the Gran Check over four weekends, and has ambitions to improve the build for others:

“I want to make it easy [to build], but also useful in loads of situations; it could also send a text message and attach a photo to it, for example. This would make sure that, for people in different situations, it’s not just one size fits all.”

It’s no surprise that James’s hard work was acknowledged. Not only did he win the award for best junior technology and best exhibit, but the 14-year-old also took home the NIWA Best in Fair Overall Winner.

To see James talking about Gran Check, and his plans for the build, visit the Bay of Plenty Times.

We look forward to seeing what’s next for James and Gran Check.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Gran Check