RPiBlog

Introduction

Robotics have many benefits for both personal and professional organisations, many of which are only now becoming apparent as we have moved from robotics as emerging technology to something which is a viable alternative to using humans for the same processes. The main catalyst of this change, of course, was the inclusion of linear actuators into the systems of robots as a matter of course. Linear actuator with feedback systems have enabled us to make robots which have precision and delicacy in their systems; rather than being solely able to apply certain levels of force to the task at hand, the linear actuators allow it be programmed for more delicate tasks, while the feedback systems allow the robots the means to determine for themselves what types of stimulation and delicacy is required.

Many changes made within a company, whether IT-based or procedural, fail to provide immediate cost savings and are more focused on a slow, steady return on Investment (ROI), however with RPA, benefits can nearly be recognized from the get-go.

Companies can often find themselves at the mercy of the market when making any significant changes to the way in which they run themselves – when they change things, there is almost inevitably a period of time where they lose money and custom because of the difficulties inherent in both keeping everything going and adjusting to the new status quo at the same time. Robotics can change that, since they follow their programming, rather than needing to be trained and watched until the training sinks in fully.

Infallibility

Robots are not subject to human fallibility, except when it comes to their programming, but even that is scrutinized by many different people before it is used in a robot. Particularly when it comes to assembly lines and other rote works, humans can become bored, or start to miss things they otherwise wouldn’t due to the monotony of the job. Robots do not become bored, and they do not miss things, which makes it logical to switch assembly line jobs and some security jobs over to them.

Accuracy

Robots can be far more accurate than humans, because of their ability to keep going for longer time periods with becoming tired or needing to have parts replaced (if good quality materials are used in the first place). The inclusion of robots in the workplace can therefore guarantee a stronger level of accuracy over a longer period of time, which can itself lead to a company gaining a reputation for accuracy and consistency within the wider community.

Reduced Risk

Having robots involved in business, particularly in industries such as heavy construction works and the likes, can cut down on the risk of injury and loss of life. Not only are robots far stronger than humans, they are less prone to injury and have less need of repair, since they are less easily damaged. The overall work process becomes more manageable for everyone involved, as robots can vastly simplify work which is done in many industries by simply being robots, and not becoming sick or injured.

The robust construction of robots means that they are less likely to cost the company for when they are not working, as they will not need much in the way of repairs, and of course never get sick or need time off for other reasons.

Unlimited Possibilities And The Future of 3D Printing Technology

Additive manufacturing is the name given to what we call 3D printing in every day conversation. What happens is that the printers take a digital model of a 3D shape, and turn it into a solid object through slowly building it from the bottom up. While we have had the technology for years, it is only recently that 3D printing has really enjoyed its current status as a technology which can explicitly be used to manufacture goods, or parts of goods.
3D printing is something which can be done in a variety of different materials, depending on what the needs of the printer are. Metal, ceramics, thermoplastics, and even food are all substances which can be used in printing, something which expands the boundaries of printing. While the use of such printing machines is not yet fully enabled, in the future it stands to change manufacturing drastically.

Linear actuators are a large part of why 3D printing is becoming so huge. These pieces of equipment allow the motion from a motor to be converted into linear motion, something which has completely changed the way in which a lot of printing occurred. Linear actuators have allowed for greater precision in the way 3D printers handle their work, which has opened them up to being used for many more functions than would otherwise be possible.

Medical Advances

3D printing is increasingly at the forefront of medical technology, due to its abilities to print both tools and appliances – think of the recent stories about 3D printing for prosthetics. What is the future of that, if we can simply print whatever extra limbs we need for people who do not have the full complement?
More and more people in medical research are looking at the possibility of creating replacement organs to use for people who are needing transplants. Not only would this cut down on the risks associated with transplanting organs directly from other people (i.e. risk of infection, risk of organ rejection, risk of there not being a transplant available…), it would also enable people to more directly control the entire process from start to finish.

Transport

3D printing is increasingly being used to create the necessary parts for cars, planes, and other modes of transportation. The use of printing for this is having a knock-on effect in the industry because it is making production cheaper and easier for everyone involved. Being able to print parts for a mode of transport means that spares can be created more easily, and that we can perhaps salvage more cars and other modes of transport than we could before, simply because having parts does not include needing to be able to make them, but simply to be able to create them from a pattern.
Having 3D printers be able to do this also means that the manufacture of various vehicles may become more widespread over time, as the manufacturing of it might take less expertise than it currently does.

Food

3D printing research is increasingly focused on the ability of a printer to create food from scratch. This is an interesting concept, as it is, similar to the possible medical uses for 3D printing, talking about creating a ‘live’ product which can then be treated as such (i.e. eaten). Theoretically, simply having a food pattern and the appropriate materials should be enough, which poses interesting questions for the future of food production.

Can’t make it to the new museum opening, and worried you’ll never see the main attraction in person? Don’t worry - 3D printing plus Raspberry Pi can bring it to you. Museum in a Box is a smart use of 3D printing concepts and Raspberry Pi programming that shares knowledge with people anywhere in the world.

Museum in a Box: Bringing Collections to You

Museum in a Box began in 2015 and has created over eight million miniature 3D prints. The concept is unusual but effective. 3D printed miniatures of museum exhibits, combined with an audio box powered by Raspberry Pi. The box detects when a 3D object rests on top and begins playing the associated audio file. An interactive museum experience that’s also portable allows wide sharing of limited exhibits. Rather than original displays sitting on a shelf, these boxes bring history into the digital age. Expert knowledge combined with a physical object you can feel brings the museum experience into the real world.

Touching More Than Screens

Museum in a Box caters to a younger audience with its inclusion of technology in the accurate presentation of each miniature. Its origins are not a surprise since its founder is George Oates, an original designer at Flickr. Younger generations are visual and live their lives inundated with tech, and this project serves to meet them in a familiar place.
Digitizing curated items isn’t a huge leap since photographs and 3D representations aren’t new. But using 3D print technology to shrink artifacts from the Smithsonian or UK National History Museum? Then the question became how to illustrate each item without a docent packed into each box. Raspberry Pi answered that challenge.

Real World Applications

Raspberry Pi is a tiny computer well-suited to the task of explaining tiny museum artifacts. The Raspberry Pi Foundation explains its desire to bring digital making to people across the world. Its humanitarian goals echo Museum in a Box’s educational and cultural premise. The computers are inexpensive and learning to program them requires little training.

A blog post from a mom attended one of Museum in a Box’s workshops captured the essence of the project. Her young son enjoyed the experience so much that he requested to attend a second workshop. This unusual tech trick is doing its best to bring history alive, one box at a time.

Whoever said 'small is beautiful' knew what they were talking about. The Raspbery Pi could provide the perfect solution as a cost-effective way of hosting your own website. It is more than capable of running the necessary software to create a basic site or blog. You could also use it as a test machine for running a WordPress development system.

Many of us dream of creating and running our own blog, but are put off by the hassle of finding the right hosting solution. Let’s take a look at the practicalities of a DIY workaround with your Raspberry Pi. You might be surprised at just how straightforward it can be.

Why Pi?

Many people are surprised to hear something so small, inexpensive and simple can be used as a web server. But there are several factors that make it a perfect choice. Your desktop machine might not have sufficient system resources to perform the role reliably, and there is the fact that if you are seeking an always-on web server, the low energy footprint of the Raspberry Pi can really come into its own.

Getting started

Before you begin, make sure the hardware is all in order. Check you have been through the basic setup procedure, and that you have all the essential hardware. Naturally, you also need to have a suitable operating system installed. For the following purposes, we will assume you have the latest version of Raspbian installed.

The next step is to setup SSH if you have not already done so. Then it is just a case of configuring your Raspberry Pi by installing an appropriate web server application such as Apache and you are ready to start uploading HTML pages.
You will find that life is much easier if you also set up FTP on your device. This greatly simplifies the process of replacing the basic placeholder with your own PHP or HTML content.

Your own personal website

Let’s get one thing straight, you are never going to be hosting games and video content using your Raspberry Pi, but for a simple website or blog, the potential is considerable. Armed with only a battery pack and an internet dongle, you have the power to host a website from anywhere in the world. And best of all, you have complete control and no reliance on anyone else.

Want to create a sound system that will do your music collection justice, but don’t want to spend the big bucks on a professional installation? Pi MusicBox, the self-described “swiss-army knife of streaming,” offers a whole new way to listen to music in your home that’s both simple to set up and easy to configure so that you can play your favorite artists in any room of the house. Using little more than a Raspberry Pi and basic sound equipment, you can wirelessly stream music from Spotify, Google Music, SoundCloud, web radio, and other cloud-based services, or you can play songs from your own collection.

MusicBox lets you control your music from just about anywhere using a phone, tablet, laptop, or other mobile devices without the hassle of using a monitor. You can even set up multiple raspberry pi devices so that you can stream music to wireless headphones or to different speakers. Using Pi MusicBox, you can create your own custom surround-sound system in just an afternoon.

The Top Features of Pi MusicBox

Pi MusicBox offers a versatile solution that allows you to design and create a music streaming player using little more than a Raspberry Pi and basic sound equipment. There are a number of reasons to choose Pi MusicBox when setting up a home sound system:

● You won’t deplete your phone’s battery or interrupt other apps.

● There’s no need for a monitor with headless audio capabilities based on Mopidy.

● Stream music from the cloud, your network, an SD card or from a USB.

● Take advantage of WPA wifi support.

● Control your playlist remotely using a web interface or an MPD-client.

● Easily stream between devices with AirTunes, Airplay, DLNA and OpenHome compatibility.

● Use USB audio support to connect headphones, USB soundcards, speakers, and other devices to your Raspberry Pi.

Setting Up a Sound System

You can set up your own music streamer anywhere in your house using Pi MusicBox. With just a few inexpensive pieces of equipment, you’ll be listening to your favorite bands from the comfort of your couch in no time. In addition to the Pi MusicBox operating system, you’ll need:

● Raspberry Pi 1, 2 or 3

● An SD or microSD card

● A wifi adapter for the Raspberry Pi

● A speaker or sound system

● A device with access to a web browser

Once you’ve downloaded Pi MusicBox, you’ll need to format your SD card to connect to your wireless network. Now you can insert your SD card into your Pi, power on the device, and open MusicBox in a browser. Before playing music through any streaming services, you’ll have to enter your login details for any streaming services you want to use. Once you’ve rebooted your device, you should be able to play music from just about any of your playlists using the Pi MusicBox web portal.

Bare Conductive’s Pi Cap is an Raspberry Pi add-on board that lets you connect anything to one of the 12 electrodes to control sound, video and more. Pi Cap is perfect for designers, engineers, artists, students or educators who are looking for ways to connect the physical world to the digital world.

It is compatible with Raspberry Pi A+, B+, Zero and later models (any of the 40-pin Raspberry Pi's) and comes with extensive programming libraries and examples written in Python, C++ and Node.js.

Technical Details

• High quality audio output function
• Rich and easy tutorial, and startup
• Python, C ++, Node.js library
• Programmable RGB LED, multi function button
• Prototyping area with GPIO breakout
• A +, B + models with GPIO connector of 40 pins available, and available in Zero

Since the software of this product is in the official Raspbian OS repository, installation is easy. At the same time, updating can also be done with apt-get, just like you do with the core Raspberry Pi packages.

Setting up your Pi Cap

Bare Conductive was kind enough to send me one of their Pi Caps for review and here's my experience after using it. Setting it up and configuring it was a breeze. You can follow their excellently written tutorial to get started in minutes provided you already have a Pi running with Raspbian installed. You can install the “picap” package simply by typing “sudo apt-get install picap” at the terminal. Once the installation process is complete, you need to configure the Pi Cap by typing “picap-setup” at the terminal.

Now that all of the software installed you will probably want to do something with it! Open the terminal and type “picap-intro” and hit Enter. This will take you to an interactive text based tour of the example codes and show you what the Pi Cap is capable of. This tour provides you with an opportunity in terms of interacting with the hardware working and seeing it work in real time. The example codes are well documented and and it shouldn’t take much for a beginner to unpick the code and adapt it to their own uses.

Controlling LIFX LED Using Custom Touch Pads

After going through the example codes you can easily get the flavor of the example libraries provided by Bare Conductive and easily adapt it to your requirements. I had a spare LIFX LED smart bulb lying around and decided to control it via custom touch pads designed using "Conductive Electric Paint" which is just like any other water-based paint, except that it conducts electricity!

Since there is no official API supporting local interface to control the bulbs, I used petrklus python script to control the bulb. You can find the code below which will change the on-board RGB LED on Pi Cap along with WiFi controlled LIFX LED.

# https://github.com/petrklus/lifx-simple

from time import sleep
import signal, sys, MPR121, subprocess as sp
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO

red_led_pin = 6
green_led_pin = 5
blue_led_pin = 26

# init GPIO using BCM pinout
# look here for more info on pins: http://pinout.xyz
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setwarnings(False)

# set up color pins as outputs
GPIO.setup(red_led_pin, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(green_led_pin, GPIO.OUT)
GPIO.setup(blue_led_pin, GPIO.OUT)

try:
  sensor = MPR121.begin()
except Exception as e:
  print e
  sys.exit(1)

# handle ctrl+c gracefully
def signal_handler(signal, frame):
  sys.exit(0)

def light_rgb(r, g, b):
  # we are inverting the values, because the LED is active LOW
  # LOW - on
  # HIGH - off
  GPIO.output(red_led_pin, not r)
  GPIO.output(green_led_pin, not g)
  GPIO.output(blue_led_pin, not b)

signal.signal(signal.SIGINT, signal_handler)

while True:
  if sensor.touch_status_changed():
    sensor.update_touch_data()
    if sensor.is_new_touch(11):
      print "electrode {0} was just touched".format(11)
      light_rgb(0, 0, 1) # blue
      sp.Popen(["python","set_colour.py","192.168.1.12","120","50","100","3500"])  # LIFX Bulb control
    elif sensor.is_new_release(8):
      print "electrode {0} was just touched".format(8)
      light_rgb(0, 1, 0) # green
      sp.Popen(["python","set_colour.py","192.168.1.12","220","50","100","3500"])  # LIFX Bulb control
    elif sensor.is_new_release(5):
      print "electrode {0} was just touched".format(5)
      light_rgb(1, 0, 0) # red
      sp.Popen(["python","set_colour.py","192.168.1.12","320","50","100","3500"])  # LIFX Bulb control

  sleep(0.01)

Veridict

Overall its a nice little add-on board designed for adding capacitive sensing capability to Raspberry Pi. When used in conjunction with the "Conductive Electric Paint" it allows you to express your creativity in every way that you can. By connecting anything conductive to one of the 12 capacitive touch pads, you can easily turn your Pi into a audio effects board via 3.5mm audio jack, or control other applications. Also the extensive tutorials and powerful Python / C++ libraries lets you get started in no time!

The only thing odd with this HAT is how its attached with the Pi. In most of the cases you have the Pi sitting in your desk and then you plug the HAT on top of it. But this is actually the one where you attach it upside down. This is done purposefully so that the Pi Cap can lie flat against the table or a piece of paper so that you can use the conductive ink to draw your circuits!

To learn more about the Pi Cap and its potential applications, do visit their product page here. You can also buy the Pi Cap from Bare Conductive for around $34.50 ex VAT.

Introduction

Infallibility

Accuracy

Reduced Risk

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