Some time ago I had a course dealing with image analysis i.e. image segmentation, moments, colour detection, object recognition etc. As part of the course everyone had to make a project that showcased the theory we had been learning throughout the course. We were allowed to use OpenCV as the backbone for accessing the camera etc, but not allowed to use any of the built-in filters. Instead the goal was to implement the different algorithms ourself.
One day one of my friends was playing the Smartphone game ZomBuster. A screenshot of the gameplay can be seen below:
ZomBuster gameplay
The goal of the game is to tap the lane with the zombie in it, in order to kill it. As the zombies are green and humans are blue I thought it would be a fun challenge to build a robot that could play the game autonomously for the course.
This also allowed me to use the 3D printer I had just bought at the time. For that reason I created a 3D model with all the needed components:
In this blog post I will describe a IoT (Internet of Things) Vending Machine that I built quite some time ago with a friend of mine Sigurd Jervelund Hansen.
At Sigurd’s dorm room they got hold of an old vending machine free of charge, as it did not work. We quickly decided that we wanted to get it working and give it a overhaul as well. In the end we enabled it to take both RFID/NFC cards and coins and make funny twitter updates about it.
The video below gives a short overview on how it works.
As mentioned we reused some shift registers, relays and voltage regulators on the original mainboard. One Arduino Pro Mini is connected to the mainboard and takes care of reading and lighting up the buttons (lights up if the relevant slot is not empty), controls the 7-segment LED display, reading the output from the coin validator and returning money if the user requests it by pressing a dedicated button.
I have finally finished my last exams, so now I have more time to focus on some of my own projects. It has been a while since our Kickstarter campaign was successfully funded, but we are still working on making the experience better for the final users.
After the campaign ended we sent out a survey to all our backers with several questions about there address, profession and so on, but we also asked them if they had any suggestions for improvements or extra features they would like to see added to the Balanduino. A lot of people asked if we could enable wireless streaming for it.
I was personally very excited about that since I have been playing with the thought for quite a while, so when the official camera module for the Raspberry Pi became available I bought it straight away.
We have been working with the new Raspberry Pi board for a while but didn’t show it to you guys before now.
Many of you might already have seen and read plenty of videos and articles about it so I thought it would be more appropriate to make a tutorial on how to use the GPIO’s, and especially on how to speed up the GPIO’s.
In this video I walk you thru all the steps from installing the Raspbian image which is based upon Debian. This is by far the most complete and well working image I’ve discovered.
Together with a complete X-window system it also comes with many different developer tools preinstalled such as Python and GCC.
So go watch the video while to set up your own Raspberry Pi for GPIO control.
Soon a BeagleBoard competitor will be released – the Raspberry Pi.
Raspberry Pi - Embedded ARM11 Computer
The Raspberry Pi is a small credit card sized ARM11 embedded computer, capable of running embedded Linux or WinCE.
When released it is supposed to be available in two models, where the biggest difference is the ethernet connector.
The first model, which comes with 128MB RAM, 1x USB but no ethernet will be priced at $25.
That’s an insane price for an embedded computer capable of doing HD video by using the onboard HDMI connector.
The second model, which comes with 256MB RAM, 2x USB and also ethernet, will be priced at $35.
And most of the times embedded applications requires some kind of internet connection as almost everything in this world becomes online. So why not spend those $10 extra to get the ethernet capability too.
The Raspberry Pi is expected to be sold in the end of February, though the initial stock is limited to around 10.000pcs so you have to be fast. Hopefully we will be able to do a review of the board soon.
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