Please help me/us find ideas to use the awesome hardware that is the Raspberry pi.
The only things I can think of are robot controller and portable, retro-gaming box. That and a computer to run hard drives for off loading pictures while camping.
House automation, time lapse photography, balloon photography, web controlled motion detecting automated Nerf gun defense system.
What about a digital picture frame that streams live from Randomland or another online picture repository?
What about wireless wilderness media storage? So you can connect your cameras or phones and download and share photos and videos in the woods.
Like wilderness wifi?
I like the picture frame idea. It would be cool to have a communal repository of pictures that people can all have their frames pointing to.
More ideas.
Retro gaming machine: Put a pi inside the shell of a broken NES, SNES, etc... Put all the old game emulators it along with the Roms for all the games ever. Then take some old SNES controllers and hack them to be USB connected. Then use HDMI output to connect to TV. Awesomest retro gaming machine ever. 16 bit in HiDef woo-hoo!
RC submarine: Pis have no cooling Or ventilation requirements so they can be placed inside a waterproof container. This would allow you to build an RC submarine which would be really cool. You could use a USB camera to see where you are going. Not sure about Bluetooth penetration distances in water... Might be something that needs looked into. Rising and floating would be interesting problems too. If you were too lame for a sub you could always create a boat with an underwater camera at least.
If I remember high frequency is crappy under water. Most just bounces off the surface. And according to this rather awesome site, water just absorbs the signal, because that's what water does to microwaves.
http://www.societyofrobots.com/robotforum/index.php?topic=8408.0
I do like the guys serial-over-sonar idea.
Idea:
WIfi/bluetooth cave exploring robot. Complete with USB cameras and lights
The problem here is rock is even less permeable to signals then water is. Might have to have a cat5 tether.
Idea:
Arial sensor and photography platform
Take pictures and read weather conditions from an RC plane/glider or dirigible.
With a sub a cat 5 tether wouldn't be a terrible idea. Give you something to haul it back in with when it inevitably fails underwater. Less scuba required that way.
I've always like the idea of underwater and aerial photography. With aerial it is much more cost effect to use balloons rather than rc copters or planes. Also there is a lot less chance of them crashing into your face.
Plenty of air and plenty of water around. Caves are a little harder to find. And how do you get it back if it fails or gets stuck?
Big tires and pull the tether back?
As long as it doesn't get stuck between two rocks or fall down a deep hole or something. Not saying it couldn't be done or anything it just seems to imply greater risk than air or water. Also the terrain would be the most difficult. If you want to try it though I am totally up for helping :)
Nick and I talked about a vehicle/not which would be a boat/raft that could lower a tethered submersible with lights and a camera. This could communicate via cat5 or some other cable. That removes the problem of the water eating all the microwaves.
Of course for simplicity you could create just the sub and still have it tethered. Then just drop it off the edge of a boat or dock.
Maybe attempt it in stages? First stage tethered sub. Second stage RC raft which lower a tethered sub.
Or just scrub the whole thing and go ballooning.
Blah, you don't need a raft or boat or anything to drop your submarine! All you need is a floating antenna! Super simple and then you can use WiFi or bluetooth with no problems. Then as the sub drives around it just drags its floating antenna along with it. So much easier...
Sorry for the idea vomit...
What about using Wifi to control the ROV? You can connect the antenna to a USB wifi dongle in the ROV and have it host it's own ad hoc network. Then you could use a smartphone to connect to the network and browse to the ROV's IP on your phone's browser. Then you could control the ROV via the webpage... It would also let you have multiple people connect to the ROV and watch it's video feed (or control it, which would be weird with multiple people fighting over control).
Wifi should be plenty fast to stream video and do all the controlling and monitoring you need. If you need more distance (either between the antenna and the ROV or between the operator and the floating antenna) you could make the floating "antenna" actually be a wireless router connected to the ROV via cat 5. This would cause a bunch of issues namely now you have to drag around a much heavier float and you have to power the router necessitating big batteries on the float and other crapola.
That could work too. And I also think Wifi is better then bluetooth for anything like this (much more flexable).
I also think it would be better to have a floating, waterproof enclosure for all the fancy bits and have the camera lowered from there. But that is all based of my guessing. I have no idea how stable a small craft like this would be. You would probably need very calm water to get useable video feed.
I not have a desire to get some USB headers, mount them to a plastic box and try to waterproof them. I wonder where you can get that black resin they pour into transformers to make them waterproof.
Should we make a project-specific thread for the aquatic camera platform? What are the design goals for this project?
We could totally make another thread if you want as yhis one got sort of taken over.
If you lower the camera then you are stuck with a maximum depth of like 10' due to having to use USB to connect to the camera. All of the resources I've seen for photography and video recommend no longer than 10' and for faster speeds (USB 3.0) more like 6.5'. Also if you want to use pi camera (if they ever stop being back ordered) you can't even use that much.
I think we could create a backup water proof container to keep the pi in if necessary. Just in case the main PVC case leaks.
Our goal I think, should be to create an underwater ROV capable of a depth of 20' with a live camera feed. Little grabber hands and other fancy stuff not necessarily included.
Basic but interesting web-based control of GPIO pins:
http://roverpi.blogspot.com/2013/06/taking-leds-to-next-level-web.html
Brad - If you end up putting WIFI on the ship you could have a more advanced interface for controlling sounds from people laptops/phones.
I want to switch lights on and off. Simple enough, right? A little research shows I should be able to directly connect a solid state relay (http://www.amazon.com/dp/B004HZN628/ref=cm_sw_em_r_am_wp_am_us?ie=UTF8) to a Pi's GPIO pins. I s'pose it might be prudent to stay in DC land as a first project, but flipping electrical sockets on and off via software just sounds so cool :)
My followup project would be to set up a Bluetooth service on a Pi that scans for known phones, then does an action when they're found in range. Combining the two, you'd have an excessively complicated proximity light sensor!
I think I am going to use gphoto and the PI to turn my S1 IS camera (Or any new-ish powershot and some Nikon DSLR) into a remote controlled video/picture taker. Mount it atop vehicles! Make a water proof box and photograph squirrels! Spy on chickens! Leave a battery with it and do a time-lapse from the top of a mountain while you sleep! (Although the CHDK firmware allows that last one already.)
Nice. Camera automation would be fun.
Where did you all buy your Pis? (or is Brad the only one who has bought one so far?) I see them on Amazon (http://www.amazon.com/Raspberry-Pi-Model-Revision-512MB/dp/B009SQQF9C/ref=pd_bxgy_pc_text_y) for slightly more than they should cost...
I got mine at Newark around Christmas (when they had free shipping and were not in stock) and received it several weeks later. Now it seems you can get one within a week :)
http://www.newark.com/raspberry-pi/raspbrry-modb-512m/model-b-assembled-board-only/dp/43W5302
I got my Pi (thank you mailman). It's even smaller than I expected. Let the fun begin...
piedit!
Cool. I take it that by "PiEdit" you have it up and running? :)
Any plans for it yet?
Nothing in particular. More of a catalyst to get me playing with some electricity. Driving motors would be awesome, but I won't tackle anything like that any time soon. I picked up a cheap 5v relay that should be able to switch AC power. So that's what I'll start with, once I get past my "Hello world" phase.
I'm also impatiently waiting on a couple of hardware pieces in the mail. Mainly any way to connect to the RPi's header pins...without resorting to gingerly wrapping wires around the pins (which I mostly didn't try, by the way). That, and a batch of LEDs that are probably shipping from the other side of the world.
Thread highjack! ...So, it's no submersible vehicle, but I did manage to build out a breadboard with a few LEDs and a RESTful API to control them 1 (http://flask.pocoo.org/), 2 (http://randomland.net/forum/index.php/topic,279.0.html). It's nothing special, but it's a platform independent starting point for makin' me some internet-controlled hardware. The video below shows it in action via my no-effort web GUI.
How were you guys* thinking of building out remote-control capabilities for your* Pi's?
colloquially y'all, y'alls'
I was thinking web based for nice low bandwidth control. that and vnc or ssh for when its needed. Probably just ssh for system stuff.
SSH and samba are good for dev (so you can edit source on a real computer). I'm going to play with websockets tonight. That's pretty much the ultimate low-bandwidth solution, as of now.
Yeah, something listening for signals on a specific port would be nice. No need for a webserver serving up pages, the server can be local to the controlling machine and send signals to the pi. Or just run a light-weight server on the pi.
I made my desk lamp blink (http://randomland.net/forum/index.php/topic,281.0.html) via Raspberry Pi. Yay. And I got to learn some basic AC wiring along the way. Doubleyay.
That is pretty cool. You could remote control a whole room that way. Never have to get up to turn the light off again :)
Have you guys heard that there's a new revision of the Rasberry Pi? The B+ (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LPESRUK/ref=ox_sc_act_title_1?ie=UTF8&psc=1&smid=A1COA7PWTAABOP).
I found this out just yesterday. I'll probably get myself one a bit after I move. I mean, one can never have too many under-utilized miniature computers, right?
I managed to update my RPi that runs the pirate ships/tiki hut to mount everything as read-only. Now its a proper embedded system and I don't have to worry about file system corruption due to improper shutdown, power failure, or people yanking out USB or SD cards while it is running.
Also, I got a B+ to play with, but I haven't had a chance to do anything with it yet.