Oxford Raspberry Jam - Feb 2014

As the Raspberry Pi marks its 2^nd Anniversary, we thought we’d round up a few familiar faces, as well as some new ones, and get together for another Raspberry Jam Show and Tell Session!

Projects shown

Pixi-Pi - An FPGA based I/O Board that can control stuff

Big Data - Don't get caught in a traffic jam ever again!

Pimp My Ride - A broken RC Car modified with a Pi

HDMIPI- Alex Eames Portable HD Pi Screen

Ro-Pi - A Self Aware Vehicle

Pi in the Sky - Dave Akerman, The Bababge Bear Balloon Guy!

Pi Ameteur Radio - APRS on Raspberry Pi with XASTIR

Love Hz - Open Source Flood Monitor

PiXi Pi

First off we had Mark who has designed the PiXi 200. An FPGA based Pi I/O and sensor board to add multiple I/O, 3.3v +5v power, 2x RS232, 3pin servo connectors (also Arduino Shield compatible). This awesome little board opens up a whole host of exciting applications, some of which he bought along to show off. As well as things like 8 bit computer emulation, serial interfaces and PWN control, the PiXi 200 can also be used to control vehicles or Robots over the internet, act as a home automation controller or be used as a Fireworks trigger/sequencer.

Mark is looking to create a Kickstarter to create the first batch of PiXi 200 boards. The inspiration behind his design came from his passion for astronomy. He had the idea to use a Raspberry Pi to replace an old Hitachi processor board that he’d built 20 years ago to power an Astronomical Camera. However, he soon discovered that his design had many other uses for applications like Robotics, and brought along some vehicles as well as a Dalek! These are all tethered by Ethernet cable at present, but he's working on a WiFi controlled solution.

You can find out more about Mark’s PiXi 200 on his website, http://www.astro-designs.com/index.html

Big Data

Ian’s "big data" project was inspired by a You-Tube video he had seen about some guys that lost a bag on a bus in the US. By using publicly available live routing data of buses, they set out to track and then retrieve their bag. They wrote a python script to predict when the bus would return to their nearest bus stop, and then turned up to meet it, walked on and collected their bag!

Ian commutes from Wantage to Maidenhead and uses the very busy M4 and M40 motorways. He was looking for a way to monitor how busy the motorways were, so he knew when to take a different route and avoid any jams. With the bus routing application in mind, Ian wondered what “big data” was available in the UK. Luckily, data.gov.uk went live last year with several data sets, including ones from the Highways Agency are now available.

On motorways like the M40 and M4, the motorway signs show the average travel time between junctions, and Ian's idea was to use that data to determine how busy the traffic was along his route. Using the XMLeTree library to interpret the XML dataset from data.gov.uk, he wrote a Python script to pull down the xml data set every 5-10 minutes. He presented the results in the form of an LED traffic light boad connected via his Raspberry Pi. His simple board has coloured LED’s to denote the state of the traffic. Red over 5 mins delay (indicating heavy traffic) less than 2 mins green and amber inbetween.

You can find the code Ian’s project on GitHub

Pimp my Ride

David M found one of his childhood toys in his parent’s basement. Rather than chuck it out, in the spirit of Hardware Hacking, David decided to strip out the broken electronics and replace it with a Raspberry Pi. It’s still work in progress but has already linked the steering servos using a L293D Half-H driver. The next steps are to get the Pi Camera working and then use an Android Phone’s inbuilt accelerometer, to tilt/turn, drive/steer the car over WiFi and watching where he’s going via the video feed.

Looking forward to seeing it finished at the next Jam David! ;0)

Alex’s - HDMIPi 1280x800 9” Hi-Def Screen for Raspberry Pi,

RasPi.TV Alex Eames, showed us his new HDMI-PI portable displays. These were his prototypes, but will soon be in production and available to buy.

In the photo below on the left is a Pi HD camera displaying live video on the screen. Alex also showed off the Pi’s GPU capabilities by showing us how the Pi can handle picture in picture video. The photo to the right is a Pi running the HD video Big Buck Bunny. Alex is also looking at including a second HDMI input for another source as well as some function buttons and VESA mounting.

See http://hdmipi.com/ if you would like further details about the technical spec, or information about ordering one.

Alex was also tweeting pics throughout the jam via his PiCorder ! see https://twitter.com/raspio1 What's really cool about this is that he can overlay graphics such as the DesignSpark Logo.

Ro-Pi: A Self-Aware Rover

When I was a kid we had Bigtrak, a vehicle you programmed with a keypad to move it around your bedroom. Ray C showed us his modern version, a semi-autonomous robot buggy with a RoPi Controller that avoided collisions as it made its way around the room. Ray bought the basic rover, but has made some cool modifications. To control it, Ray chooses from a pre-set of commends that he sends over Bluetooth via a keyboard. There is no screen, so the commands given are relayed back via a speaker in the form of a computerised voice. Ray's Rover also has a “self mode” so if you set it off without instructions, it will detec walls and other obstacles via the on-board sensors.

In his second demonstration, Ray used an old piezoelectric buzzer from a PC and connected it up to the GPIO. Using dyalog.apl and a combination of on/off and delays, his APL program can create ‘sound’ and successfully played us a music scale.

Pi in the Sky

Dave Akerman is one of around 50 High Altitude Ballooning enthusiasts in the UK. He is quite a celebrity in the world of Pi Projects. and you may have seen his post on the Raspberry Pi or BBC Websites. The Raspberry Pi is an ideal solution to have on board. It’s cheap, lightweight, low power and very versatile. It also turns out to be relatively rugged, having withstood temperatures as low as -60 deg centigrade and of course being dropped back to earth from over 22 miles high!

Dave told us about his Raspberry Pi Babbage Bear jump that was inspired by Felix Baumgartner record breaking free fall from approximately 39 kilometres (24 miles) high.

Dave uses the Pi as the heart of the electronics on his flights. He uses the Pi cameras to take video and stills. There are also sensors and tracking devices to record the mission. Data is not only stored on board, but some is also sent back to the ground live throughout the mission on a low power radio link. Dave can also send back live images. The data rate, 4800 baud is pretty low, that’s about 480 characters a second, taking about 5 minutes per picture.

All of this is packed into a box (usually under 500 grams in weight) and attached to a weather balloon.

Depending on what part of the world you live in, High Altitude Ballooning requires permission from authorities like Air Traffic Control. Dave also uses Weather Prediction Software so he has an idea of where he is likely to land. Flights usually last a few hours, depending on weather conditions. Flights can be watched live online, displaying live mission data including position. Dave is connected to a community of Amateur Radio helpers that are always available to help him track, locate and retrieve the payload with some amazing accuracy!

You can find out more about Dave’s missions on his website, www.daveakerman.com

Pi Ameteur Radio

Paul K is an Amateur Radio enthusiast and is using the Pi as a Terminal Node Controller (TNC) for AX.25 Packet Radio applications. (APRS). XASTIR, provides a graphical user interface (GUI) on the Pi for displaying the APRS data. Paul sends and receives data packets over the air and displays the results on a map. He can also pick up locations of other APRS stations, and use them to relay data.

APRS can be used to track stuff like position data of vehicles, or to collect and relay weather data.

Love Hz - Open Source Flood Monitor

Ben Ward is the founder of Love Hz, an Oxford-based startup specialising in the Internet of Things and wireless sensor networks. They are one of a handful of networks in the UK’s TV Whitespace pilot, organised by Ofcom to explore the technology, and are using it to deploy open source sensor networks in remote locations. Tv Whitespace is a technology which uses gaps between TV channels for wireless communication and is particularly suited to machine-to-machine (M2M) communication and the Internet of Things. Ben's project is for an open source flood monitor, and he's looking for more volunteers who can offer their expertise and would like to take part in the further development of the projects open source hardware and software.

Below is the hardware he is currently experimenting with.The gateways consist of a Raspberry Pi with a Ciseco “Slice of Radio” on the GPIO header (a USB variant can also be used) and aggregate the sensor devices before uplinking to the Internet via whitespace or broadband. These gateways contain the logic to aggregate the sensors into datastreams for the database.

You can read more about Ben's project in his DesignSpark Blog

Thanks again to all that presented and attended! See you next time.

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