Connexion
Nvidia has made its complete Run:ai GPU orchestration platform open source. Here's what's free, which support options cost money, and what IT teams still need to operate.
The post Nvidia Run Is Now Open Source: What’s Free and Paid appeared first on TechRepublic.
Uber and Wayve have launched 15 supervised robotaxis in London. Learn how the rides work, why safety drivers remain and what comes next for riders and Uber.
The post Uber and Wayve Launch UK’s First Supervised Robotaxi Rides appeared first on TechRepublic.
"Maintenant", ce n'est pas qu'un adverbe à la con pour apprécier l'instant présent ou faire péter ses ordres comme votre Belle Mère ! C'est également un conteneur à lancer, qui se connecte en lecture seule à un socket Docker pour réaliser en un battement de cil, tout l'inventaire de votre home lab !
Il relève ainsi l'état de chaque conteneur, ses healthchecks, ses boucles de redémarrage, ses logs, et vos projets Compose regroupés comme vous les avez écrits.
Ensuite, tout ce qui vous alerte pour de bon se déclare à la main. Les checks HTTP et TCP se configurent sous la forme de labels sur les conteneurs à surveiller. Par exemple, un maintenant.endpoint.http avec son intervalle et son seuil d'échec, un maintenant.endpoint.tcp pour la base...etc. Pas besoin donc d'aller mettre votre gros nez dans un fichier de config spécifique.
Vos tâches planifiées reçoivent chacune une URL à appeler quand elles finissent comme ça si la sauvegarde de trois heures du matin ne se manifeste pas, vous êtes prévenu. Vos certificats HTTPS sont surveillés et signalés cinq fois avant leur expiration, un mois avant puis de plus en plus près. Il compare aussi l'empreinte de vos images à celle publiée sur le registre, ce qui vous permet ensuite de savoir lesquelles ont pris du retard sans lancer des docker pull à l'aveugle. Ah et il sert une page de statut publique pour vos utilisateurs.
Le tout tient dans un binaire Go qui occupe environ 17 Mo de RAM et qui se repose sur une simple base SQLite.
Par contre, l'édition gratuite (Community) gère une seule machine. Si vous voulez du multi-hôte, il faudra passer par la case payante. Toujours en gratuit, il y a aussi des plafonds... Vous avez le droit uniquement à 10 endpoints, 5 heartbeats, 5 certificats, 3 composants de page de statut et uniquement 7 jours d'historique.
Attention quand même, y'a 2 choses à savoir avant de vous enflammer et de poser ça sur une machine exposée sur le net. Il n'y a aucune authentification intégrée, et de ce que j'ai compris, c'est assumé ! A vous donc de mettre en place un reverse proxy et un Authelia ou un Authentik devant.
Pour situer "Maintenant" par rapport à d'autres solutions que je vous ai déjà présentées, Beszel fait les métriques par conteneur sans aucun plafond gratos, mais pas les checks HTTP. Uptime Kuma lui, fait les checks, mais ses monitors doivent être créés un par un dans l'interface, sauf à lui greffer AutoKuma pour lire les labels. Donc, il n'y a pas vraiment de solution tout-en-un gratuite...
Uber's new Teen Accounts feature gives linked guardians a live view inside participating rides, while encrypted recordings remain on Uber's servers for 14 days.
The post Uber Lets Parents Watch Teen Rides Live: How It Works appeared first on TechRepublic.
Uber faces a $966 million Dutch privacy fine over automated driver suspensions, raising questions about GDPR compliance and meaningful human oversight.
The post Uber Fined $966M: The High Cost of Automation Without Oversight appeared first on TechRepublic.
Waymo has sharply increased its lobbying spending as it seeks to persuade US regulators to clear a path for fully autonomous taxi services, intensifying its battle with rival Uber over the future of robotaxis.
The Alphabet-owned company spent more than $1 million between April and June on lobbying the federal government, more than double its outlay a year earlier, according to filings. That put Waymo’s spending close to Uber’s and well ahead of rivals including Amazon’s Zoox and Tesla.
The rise in lobbying comes as Waymo and Uber push competing visions for the future of ride-hailing. Waymo wants a faster route to fully driverless commercial services, while Uber is advocating a staggered rollout in which robotaxis operate alongside human drivers.
Amazon wants to grow its Prime Air delivery drone service sixfold to reach nearly 500 cities and towns across the United States by the end of 2026. The planned expansions from Amazon and its rivals could make the convenience of delivery drone services available to tens of millions more people in the coming months—but will also test more communities’ tolerance for increased noise from daily drone flights.
On August 19, Amazon announced it would soon launch Prime Air in the metropolitan areas of Chicago; Cleveland; Atlanta; Syracuse, New York; and Boise, Idaho, with more to come later in the year. Each Prime Air site offers delivery drone service within an area of about 175 square miles, with delivery times ranging from half an hour to an hour.
Prime Air already operates out of Amazon warehouses in 10 cities across seven states. Those include primarily suburban neighborhoods of Phoenix; Tampa; Kansas City; Omaha, Nebraska; Baton Rouge, Louisiana; Detroit; Houston; and San Antonio, Dallas, and Waco, Texas.
London has cleared Wayve vehicles for supervised Uber rides, but a licensed human driver will remain responsible behind the wheel.
The post London Licenses Wayve Vehicles for Supervised Autonomous Uber Rides appeared first on TechRepublic.
Uber by Women permet aux passagères de voyager avec une conductrice. Mais dans certaines villes, cette option peut coûter plus de deux fois plus cher qu’une course classique, selon un message publié par une utilisatrice sur X le 16 juillet 2026.
Uber’s $14.8 billion Delivery Hero acquisition would expand its global delivery business and intensify consolidation across Europe and Asia.
The post Uber’s $14.8B Delivery Hero Deal Expands Its Reach Across Europe, Asia appeared first on TechRepublic.
Si vous hébergez vos propres services derrière une IP dynamique, vous connaissez sans doute des outils merveilleux comme DynDNS, NoIP, ou encore Cloudflare DDNS.
Sauf que dès que votre homelab mélange du Docker, du Proxmox et un cluster Kubernetes, ça devient vite le bordel à maintenir ! Mais Maxfield Allison, un contributeur du projet OPNsense, qui visiblement en avait marre lui aussi de gérer tout ça à la mimine, nous a pondu dnsweaver .
dnsweaver, ça fait pas repousser les cheveux sur les sysadmins (désolé ^^) mais c'est un outil en Go qui peut se lancer comme un service et qui se configure avec la clé API de votre Cloudflare (ou d'un autre provider) pour mettre à jour sa zone DNS. Comme ça, quand l'un de vos conteneurs démarre avec un label Traefik, hop, l'enregistrement DNS apparaît automatiquement. Et quand vous le virez, il disparaît.
C'est génial parce que ça vous permet de ne plus jamais toucher à votre zone DNS à la main.
Et une fonctionnalité incroyable de dnsweaver, c'est le split-horizon DNS qui permet de donner accès à votre réseau local et à ses services depuis n'importe où sur Internet, mais avec la bonne tête selon d'où vous vous connectez. Vous aurez grâce à ça, votre bitwarden.maison.fr qui pointe vers le 192.168.1.10 quand vous êtes chez vous sur le réseau local, et vers votre IP publique quand vous tapez la même adresse depuis l'extérieur. Comme ça, plus la peine de maintenir 2 configs séparées qui finiront toujours par diverger à un moment...
Et dnsweaver ne se contente pas d'un seul fournisseur et ça c'est cool. Comme ça, si vous voulez allier la puissance des services de Cloudflare (pour le cache, la sécurité, la protection DDoS...etc.) à, par exemple, un Technitium perso pour votre réseau interne, bah c'est possible ! dnsweaver pousse comme ça vers 7 backends en parallèle: Technitium, Cloudflare, Pi-hole, AdGuard Home, dnsmasq, le bon vieux RFC 2136 (pour BIND, PowerDNS ou le DNS de Windows Server) et même un webhook pour brancher un truc maison.
Côté détection, vous aurez capté, ça va lire les labels Traefik, Caddy ou nginx-proxy sur vos conteneurs Docker, les annotations Ingress sur Kubernetes, et côté Proxmox il récupère vos VMs (via l'agent QEMU) comme vos conteneurs LXC. Très cool donc pour les furieux qui gèrent plein d'instances sur différents serveurs !!
Pour l'installer, maintenant vous avez le choix: Soit vous passez par l'image Docker maxamill/dnsweaver, le registre ghcr.io ou un chart Helm si vous êtes plutôt team Kubernetes. Vous lui passez les credentials de vos providers (via des secrets Docker ou Kubernetes, et pas en clair dans un fichier qui traîne comme un gros nooooobbzzzz) et vous le laissez tourner. Il expose même des métriques Prometheus, du coup vous le surveillez comme le reste de votre stack.
Alors oui, je saiiiis, ExternalDNS fait déjà ce genre de boulot, sauf que c'est du Kubernetes only. Alors que dnsweaver, lui, avale les trois plateformes d'un coup, ce qui colle pile poil à l'ADN même du homelab bordélique que vous avez chez vous ^^.
Le projet est encore assez récent et porté par une seule personne mais ça évolue à une vitesse impressionnante (déjà des dizaines de versions livrées en quelques mois), alors je vous recommande de tester ça quand vous aurez 5 min (pas en prod tout de suite par contre, promettez le moi, bande de fifous !!)
Voilà, si gérer votre DNS maison vous bouffe un temps de dingue, dnsweaver est à envisager (pas comme votre cousin.e, donc... )
En Corée du Sud, des sites permettent de simuler une commande de nourriture en ligne ou une pause cigarette virtuelle avec des inconnus, rapportait le Korea Times fin mai 2026. Populaires chez une partie de la Gen Z, ces « sites à dopamine » promettent un petit shoot de satisfaction, sans avoir à dépenser le moindre won.
Vous avez un service qui tourne sur le port 8080, mais aucune authentification native dessus et vous voulez ajouter OAuth2 sans avoir à toucher au code ? Vous êtes vraiment exigeant dans la vie !
Mais comme vos désirs sont des ordres, je vous présente oauth2-proxy dont c'est EXACTEMENT le boulot !
Le principe avec cet outil c'est qu'il se glisse entre l'utilisateur et votre application. Ainsi, si la personne n'est pas connectée, elle est alors redirigée vers son provider OAuth2 ou OIDC. Et une fois le token validé, popopop, la requête repart vers son point d'origine avec les infos utilisateur dans les headers HTTP. Et voilà comme votre app reçoit le nom, l'email, et les groupes associés à l'utilisateur ! Plus besoin de gérer l'auth dans votre code c'est que du bonheur !
Et la liste des providers supportés par oauth2-proxy est longue : Google (c'est celui par défaut), GitHub, GitLab, Microsoft Entra ID, Keycloak, Gitea / Forgejo, NextCloud, DigitalOcean, LinkedIn, Bitbucket, Cisco Duo... et un bon vieux client OIDC générique pour tout ce qui expose un accès standardisé. Comme ça si votre SSO interne parle OIDC, vous êtes déjà couvert !
Côté déploiement, c'est un simple binaire en Go et c'est également disponible en image Docker sur quay.io/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy, pour AMD64, ARM64, ARMv6/v7, et quelques architectures plus exotiques du genre ppc64le, s390x pour les bandeurs de mainframes ^^.
Ensuite, l'outil peut fonctionner de 2 façons : Soit en proxy autonome devant votre service, ou en middleware intégré dans un reverse proxy existant comme nginx via le mécanisme auth_request. Dans ce second mode, oauth2-proxy ne fait en réalité que vérifier la session et répondre du code 202 ou 401. C'est nginx qui gère le routage et le proxy lui se contente d'authentifier les gens.
Et voilà, si vous cherchez à minimiser la surface d'attaque, c'est la config à privilégier. Tout est là : github.com/oauth2-proxy/oauth2-proxy , avec la doc complète. Et si vous cherchez quelque chose de plus intégré, avec tunnel et gestion des tunnels VPN en prime, il y a aussi Pangolin dont je vous ai parlé. Et pour du plus simple en contexte Docker, TinyAuth fera également très bien le taf.
Merci à Mathieu Passenaud pour le lien !
Dans ses résultats financiers, Alphabet, la maison mère de Google, annonce que Waymo réalise désormais plus de 500 000 courses par semaine rien qu'aux États-Unis. L'activité est encore loin de géants comme Uber, mais est la preuve que la demande existe pour des véhicules 100 % autonomes. Google va pouvoir poursuivre l'expansion de Waymo avec beaucoup de confiance.
À l'occasion de sa conférence annuelle Uber Go-Get, le géant des transports a annoncé qu'il allait proposer des réservations de chambres d'hôtel grâce à un partenariat avec Expedia. Uber veut transformer son application en super conciergerie pour vous permettre de réserver une chambre, de commander à manger, de faire appel à un coursier ou de déléguer vos demandes à une intelligence artificielle.
Après s'être allié à Lucid et Nvidia, Uber annonce un investissement massif de 1,25 milliard de dollars dans Rivian pour déployer une flotte de 50 000 robotaxis R2. Le géant des VTC ne veut pas laisser Waymo, Zoox et Tesla lui voler son marché et se prépare à la nouvelle génération de taxis.
À Atlanta, Waymo paierait des livreurs DoorDash pour fermer les portières de ses robotaxis laissées ouvertes. Une information repérée sur X et Reddit, qui illustre un problème très concret pour les taxis 100 % autonomes : sans porte bien refermée, pas de course suivante.
Uber a annoncé le déploiement de son service de taxis autonomes dans quatre nouvelles métropoles mondiales. Une étape stratégique pour celui qui veut rester la plateforme incontournable de la mobilité urbaine.
An artist and maker, Geeky Faye describes themself as a one-man band, tackling whole areas of creation. In the latest issue of The MagPi Magazine, Rob Zwetsloot meets the cosplaying polymath.
Having multiple hobbies and interests can be fun, but they can sometimes get on top of you. Allie, also known online as Geeky Faye, seems to have thrived with so many. “As it currently stands, I will happily refer to myself as a maker, artist, designer, and filmmaker because all of those are quite accurate to describe the stuff I do!” Allie tells us.
“I’ve been making almost my whole life. I dove headlong into art as a young teen, to be quickly followed by cosplay and building things that I needed for myself. I would go on to get a degree in fine arts and pursue a professional career as an artist, but that actually ended out resulting in me being on a computer all day more than anything! I’ve always needed to use my hands to create, which is why I’ve always been drawn to picking up as many making skills as possible… These days my making is all very ‘multimedia’ so to speak, involving 3D printing, textiles, electronics, wood working, digital design, and lots of paint!”
I’d heard about Raspberry Pi years ago, but I didn’t really learn about it until a few years back when I started getting into 3D printing and discovered that you could use one to act as a remote controller for the printer. That felt like an amazing use for a tool I had previously never gotten involved with, but once I started to use them for that, I became more curious and started learning a bit more about them. I’m still quite a Raspberry Pi novice and I am continually blown away by what they are capable of.
I am actually working on my first ever proper Raspberry Pi project as we speak! Previously I have only set them up for use with OctoPrint, 3D-printed them a case, and then let them do their thing. Starting from that base need, I decided to take an OctoPrint server [Raspberry] Pi to the next level and started creating BMOctoPrint; an OctoPrint server in the body of a BMO (from Adventure Time). Of course, it would be boring to just slap a Raspberry Pi inside a BMO-shaped case and call it a day.
So, in spite of zero prior experience (I’m even new to electronics in general), I decided to add in functionality like physical buttons that correspond to printer commands, a touchscreen to control OctoPrint (or anything on Raspberry Pi) directly, speakers for sound, and of course user-triggered animations to bring BMO to life… I even ended out designing a custom PCB for the project, which makes the whole thing so clean and straightforward.
Most recently I redesigned my teleprompter for the third time and I’m finally really happy with it. It is 3D-printable, prints in just two pieces that assemble with a bit of glue, and is usable with most kinds of lens adapters that you can buy off the internet along with a bit of cheap plastic for the ‘glass’. It is small, easy to use, and will work with any of my six camera lenses; a problem that the previous teleprompter struggled with! That said, I still think my modular picture frame is one of the coolest, hackiest things that I’ve made. I highly recommend anyone who frames more than a single thing over the course of their lives to pick up the files, as you will basically never need to buy a picture frame again, and that’s pretty awesome, I think.
Subscribe to Geeky Faye Art on YouTube, and follow them on Twitter, Instagram, or TikTok.
You can grab the brand-new issue right now from the Raspberry Pi Press store, or via our app on Android or iOS. You can also pick it up from supermarkets and newsagents. There’s also a free PDF you can download.
The post Meet Geeky Faye: maker, artist, designer, and filmmaker appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
This Raspberry Pi-based build aims to deter porch pirates from stealing packages left at your front door. In recent times, we’ve all relied on home-delivered goods more than ever, and more often than not we ask our delivery drivers to stash our package somewhere if we’re not home, leaving them vulnerable to thieves.
When internet shopper and AI project maker Ryder had a package stolen from his porch, he wanted to make sure that didn’t happen again. He figured that package stealers would be deterred by blaring sirens and flashing red lights. He also went one step further, wanting to hamper the thief’s escape with motion-activated water sprinklers and a blast of flour ready to catch them as they run away.
A simple motion detector wouldn’t work because it would set off Ryder’s booby traps whenever an unsuspecting cat or legitimate visitor happened across his porch, or if Ryder himself arrived home and didn’t fancy a watery flour bath. So some machine learning and a Python script needed to be employed.
The camera keeps an eye on Ryder’s porch and is connected wirelessly to a Raspberry Pi 4, which works with a custom TensorFlow machine learning model trained to recognise when a package is or isn’t present. If the system detects a package, it gets ready to deploy the anti-thief traps. The Raspberry Pi sets everything off if it detects that someone other than Ryder has removed the package from the camera’s view.
And Ryder had an interesting technique to train the machine learning model to recognise him:
If you want to make your own anti-porch pirate device, Ryder has shared everything you need on GitHub.
We can always rely on Ryder Calm Down’s YouTube channel for unique and quasi-bonkers builds.
If you’re not familiar with Ryder’s dog-detecting (and happiness-boosting) build, check it out below. We also blogged about this project when we needed a good dopamine boost during lockdown.
The post Deter package thieves from your porch with Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Forget Beanie Babies as McDonald’s Happy Meal toys, or U2’s new album magically appearing on everyone’s iTunes list: the collaboration of the century is here. Estefannie Explains it All answered a call from LOOK MUM NO COMPUTER (aka Sam) who was looking for a coding genius to bring his cryptocurrency-measuring musical machine to life.
Sam wanted to use the up-and-down nature of cryptocurrency value to generate voltages that would power synthesisers and generate sounds. He’s good at music, but middlingly bad at the coding side of things, and so he roped in Estefannie’s smarts to devise a solution.
Estefannie‘s plan involved a Raspberry Pi and some pulse-width modulation signals, which can be filtered down into analogue voltages.
She marked this all out on a breadboard, with ten LEDs connected to Raspberry Pi standing in for ten cryptocurrencies. The Raspberry Pi pins send voltages to the LEDs that correlate with the real-time percentage of change the cryptocurrency values experience.
In order to make the monotone output of Estefannie’s creation sound more musical, Sam needed more than one cryptocurrency to be heard at a time, and to be able to alter the chords. So he built ten analogue circuits on perf boards. These slow down the changes in the cryptocurrency values, altering the audio output. And ten separate oscillators allow each board to interact with each other. Sam explains it much better, so check out his build video.
This is a cool mash-up of a project, with each maker producing brilliant videos focusing on the separate expertise they brought to the build.
If you want to dig deep into the marathon coding session Estefannie performed to create this musical machine, check out her project video:
And if you’re interested in the analog musical side of things, check out Sam’s:
If you actually trade cryptocurrency, this would be a whimsical way to keep an eye ear on market changes. If you don’t trade cryptocurrency and you also don’t have the skills to build something like this, then you can just pretend.
Sam has produced an hour-long ‘performance’ video of the machine doing its thing. So stick it on in the background next time you’re doing busy work at your desk and pretend you’re also a crypto-trading coding artist.
The post Raspberry Pi turns cryptocurrency into music appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
I speak English. Super well. And I can read the rough, overall vibe of writing in French. I can also order beer and taxis in Spanish. Alas, my dog can do none of these things, and we are left in communication limbo. I try asking them (in English) why they’re so mean to that one Cockapoo who lives across the road, or why they don’t understand the importance of the eyedrops the vet insists I have to hold their eyelids open to administer. They just respond with a variety of noises that I cannot translate. We need to fix this, and thankfully NerdStoke has harnessed Raspberry Pi to build a solution.
The dog wears a harness with a microphone that picks up its barks. The barks get processed through a device that determines what the dog is saying and then outputs it through speakers.
Raspberry Pi Zero is the affordable brain powering NerdStoke’s solution to this age-old human-and-pup problem. But writing code that could translate the multitude of frequencies coming out of a dog’s mouth when it barks was a trickier problem. NerdStoke tried to work it through on Twitch with fellow hobbyists, but alas, the original dream had to be modified.
Spoiler alert: fast Fourier transforms did not work. You would need a clear, pure tone for that to work in a project like this, but as we said above, dogs bark in a rainbow of tones, pitches, and all the rest.
Because of this, a time-based model was devised to predict what a dog is likely to be barking about at any given time of day. For example, if it’s early morning, they probably want to go out to pee. But if it’s mid-morning, they’re probably letting you know the postman has arrived and is trying to challenge your territory by pushing thin paper squares through the flap in your front door. It’s a dangerous world out there, and dogs just want to protect us.
Nerdstoke had his good friend record some appropriate soundbites to go with each bark, depending on what time of day it happened. And now, Nugget the dog can tell you “I want to cuddle” or “Why aren’t you feeding me?”
While the final project couldn’t quite translate the actual thoughts of a dog, we love the humour behind this halfway solution. And we reckon the product name, Holler Collar, would definitely sell.
NerdStroke is all over the socials, so follow them on your platform of choice:
TWITCH – twitch.tv/nerdstoke
INSTAGRAM – instagram.com/nerdstoke
TWITTER – twitter.com/nerdstoke
GITHUB – github.com/nerdstoke
EMAIL – nerdstoke@gmail.com
The post Translate dog barks with Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Even if you don’t follow Simone Giertz on social media or YouTube, there’s a good chance you know of her work. Originally hailed as the Queen of S***** Robots, Simone’s early videos of questionable contraptions, such as the Toothbrush Machine and Hair Washing Robot, quickly went viral, birthing a variety of GIFs and shareable content that quickly took over the internet. But, nowadays, she’s shelved her bots and focuses her attention on more reliable projects, such as her highly successful crowdfunding campaign for The Every Day Calendar, and the impressive Truckla, a Tesla pickup truck that beat Elon Musk’s Cybertruck to the post when shared online in June 2019.
Alex Bate caught up with Simone Giertz (pronounced Yetch, not Gerts) to discuss how she went from unreliable robots and GIF stardom to bunk-beds made of leaves and office chair sidecars for needy pets, and why her openly discussed brain tumour helped to realign her business model.
HS To me, as a viewer, it feels like your YouTube career is split into two halves. There’s Simone, the Queen of S***** Robots, and then there’s everything post-surgery, like Truckla and The Every Day Calendar. Do you see it too?
SG The difficult part about YouTube, and also the good side of it, is that if you have a really long career, you grow up during that career, and you change and your interests change. And I don’t want to just play a role, I want to be genuinely excited about the things I do – you get sick of things, and you want to explore new things. So, in order to do that, I’ve really tried to be ‘theme agnostic’ for my YouTube channel.
And that was something that was really hard with S***** Robots, because it was something that I knew that people really liked, and that I had a level of success with. But I was just not that excited about it anymore. And I think the brain tumour became a really good page turner for me, because I had such limited energy capital, you know, and I really just wanted to spend my time and my very limited energy on doing things that I was super-pumped about.
I think the projects I build now still have some elements of the stuff I did in my early days, but they’re definitely less GIF-compatible.
In the beginning, all I was thinking about for every project was a GIF. That was the main deliverable that I had in my head, and the main piece of content that I focused on, and then I kind of built a YouTube video around it, and around the process of creating this GIF. And I let go of that. Not every project needs to have a punchline. It can be fine. It can be a little bit more dull.
But, I still feel guilty about it.
HS Really?
SG Yeah. People are very sweet about it, but I still get comments with people being like, ’Oh, I miss the robots.’ But, at the same time, you have to think, ’It’s my life, and I really want to do the things I want to do.’ And I’m also so drawn to my product business and wanting to focus on that. And the way that my YouTube channel can co-exist with that is for me to explore different products and make videos about them. And it’s actually becoming a pretty good tag team.
HS Talking about your product business, the biggest one to date was obviously The Every Day Calendar. 2300-odd backers, and over half a million dollars raised. How did you feel when your first Kickstarter just soared like that?
SG It was fun and scary. Because, as somebody who’s terrified of disappointing people, crowdfunding campaigns are kind of like the worst position to put yourself in because you really risk disappointing people. But, I don’t think we did. I mean, we were late, but I really just wanted to deliver a good product because it was expensive. And, yes, we raised over half a million dollars, but it’s not until now that we’ve actually broken even.
HS Wow.
SG It’s so expensive. And so much of that is in product development. When it comes down to it, and you’re actually putting something out in the world, it’s just crazy how much it costs. And I mean, we probably didn’t do it in the most efficient way we could, because we were rookies. But, it was definitely very humbling and terrifying.
HS Would you do further products with Kickstarter? Or do you think you’re now at a point where you would just create a product and sell it, and not have to rely on crowdfunding?
SG We’re hopefully launching our store this summer, and we’re going to have four different products in it. And, I’m hoping that any easier products can be self-funded. And, if there’s something more complicated, like the Companion Chair, which is definitely going to be a bigger project, it might end up being crowdfunded because with funding, you also get market testing. You can get a lot out of it. But, that said, after I did The Every Day Calendar, I remember saying I’d never do it again. Every night at 3 am, I would just wake up and be like, ’Oh my god, what if we send out the calendars and then, in two years, all of them stop working! People are going to be really angry.’ I’m scared of that. But, I guess that also, even if customers are buying your product off the shelf, you are always going to live with that fear over your head.
HS It’s really interesting to go back and watch your earliest videos, particularly the first one in Swedish, and see how far you’ve come. Was it always the aim to start the business? To have staff and be opening an online store and selling your products?
SG I mean, no, I would definitely be lying if I said that this is some sort of master plan. There was no scheming where I had the large whiteboard – ’This is the trajectory of how I’m going to become known as the Queen of S***** Robots. And then I’m going to pivot that into running a product business.’ I’m definitely not that smart.
But, I had an inkling of what I was interested in. And I mean, I really liked making videos. And I think that everything kind of happened in a very fortunate way. Because I had this job where I was a Maker in Residence at a US company called Punch Through Design. And my job was just to build different things. And right when my job there was ending, I posted the Toothbrush Helmet, and that started getting some traction. I was moving back to Sweden because my visa expired, and I just had this year of living with my mom again, and having very few expenses and I was like, ’OK, I’m gonna just make sure I work enough to get by, but then the rest of the time, I’m just gonna spend it on building these machines that I want to build.’
So I was very fortunate in the way that I could structure things so I was able to spend time on my YouTube channel in the early days.
But, it’s also so easy to look back and be like, ’Of course, all these things led me to where I am today.’ But when you’re in the middle of it, you’re just flailing. And my flailing, fortunately, landed me in a position that I’m very happy with today.
[It’s at this point of the conversation that Simone’s three-legged canine sidekick, Commander Scraps, decides to join us. Those who have seen Simone’s build video for the Companion Chair or Lego-based Dog Selfie Booth will already know of Scraps. Those who haven’t, well, Scraps is adorable, so you should definitely check them out.]
HS Some online content creators are often stuck within a theme – wood working, electronics, 3D printing, and so on. But, for you, it seems that you’re the theme, you’re the brand, and you can get away with creating whatever content you want. Do you see that when you interact with your community? That freedom?
SG It’s something that I thought a lot about in the early days, like, how much is the channel about me and my life? And how much is it about the things that I build? And I think what I struggled with is that I’m not that interested in my life. Like, I really want to make videos that I myself would want to watch. I’m not really interested in vlogs, so I decided early on that while it’s about my life to an extent, it’s still centred around these projects I’m building.
In some ways, I’m pretty private on the internet, but also very open, like when it comes to brain tumour stuff. I was really open about it, and I wanted to tell everyone about it because it was a way for me to process what was happening. I remember having to tell myself that I had to stop telling waiters or Uber drivers that I had a brain tumour. ’Hi sweetie, how are you today? Well, I have a brain tumour, but other than that, I’m pretty good.’
When it came to talking about it online, it was a no-brainer. Haha.
But then there’s other stuff that I don’t talk about, like, I don’t really document my life. I don’t talk about my friends really, or my relationship status, or anything like that. Because you have to draw the line somewhere. And I always felt like documenting my life was just too intrusive.
HS When you look at your most popular videos on your channel, even though you’re known as the Queen of S***** Robots, those videos aren’t actually in the Top 5. Instead, it’s the video of you in the zero gravity simulations, and Truckla, and locking yourself in your bathroom for 48 hours. It’s interesting that the thing you’re most known for isn’t the thing your audience is most interacting with.
SG Those robot videos mostly did really well on other platforms, like Twitter and Reddit. Not so much on YouTube because it has its own metrics and algorithms.
The thing that is really useful for other creators who are getting started is to figure out what is your hook, or what is the very simple version of what you’re doing. Like, Queen of S***** Robots kind of became the headline. And it was this very clear message, and it was something that was really easy for journalists to write about. It was a spearhead for branding.
This was not something I was thinking about at the time, but looking back, my fear then was to make sure I didn’t get pigeonholed, and that I could never move on from it, because that’s the problem when people only know you for one thing – you can’t really move on beyond that. It’s really nice to have that spearhead, and then you can broaden it, and that’s how you have longevity.
I didn’t want this to be over in a year. I wanted to be able to keep on doing it because I was really enjoying it. And now, I want to make sure that I have more legs to stand on, because when you’re going through health problems, you realise that if you can’t be in front of a camera, everything grinds to a halt. If you’re not well enough to work, or if YouTube changes its algorithm, it becomes such a fragile business structure. So, that was one of the reasons why I decided I needed to go into products.
HS I guess you can’t really be known as the Queen of S***** Robots where everything you make doesn’t really do what it’s meant to do, and then expect people to buy serious products from you and trust they’ll work.
SG That’s definitely one of the things when we launched The Every Day Calendar – I was wondering how are people going to be able to take this seriously? But, I think that’s what’s really nice, that my audience has been around long enough and they’ve seen that there’s more to it than that – there’s actually, ironically, a lot of work that goes into making S***** Robots.
HS I remember the first time I saw your work was when you collaborated with Adam Savage to make an automated popcorn machine in 2016. It’s a great video that really highlights how great collaborative work can be when two people focus on what they’re really interested in to make a final product. And you’ve worked on other videos with creators such as Laura Kampf. Is there anyone else you’d like to work with?
SG I’m really interested in people who are kind of beyond the community that I’m currently in. It would be really fun to do stuff with musical artists; I’d love to collaborate with OK Go. Or venture beyond that and work with people who make art, and fashion designers. People who are outside the world where I’m creating. And there are people that I just love and would always want to work with, like Laura. She’s the sweetest, most talented, down-to-earth and funny person. I really love working with her. I should really think of who’s on my bucket list.
Something I’ve really missed during the pandemic is just getting to spend time with people who are excited about what they’re doing, and having that excitement rub off on me. There’s nothing more inspiring than someone being pumped about something, even if you don’t understand what it is. In some ways, lockdown has been great for creating as I’ve had more time to loiter in the shop, but I definitely miss that input and just being able to talk to people.
HS And are there any projects you’d like to build that you just haven’t gotten around to doing yet?
SG Honestly, I just want to build stuff for my house right now, which I know isn’t the most interesting answer. I still have the CEO Bouncy Chair on my list – I want to make this kids’ bouncy chair, the type where you’re almost in some sort of plastic diaper. But I want it to look like a mahogany desk with a Rolodex and it’s for grown-ups. And make some spoof commercial for it when it’s marketed as an exercise device, but there’s just some balding white guy in it. I think that’s the only one that I’m still eager to build. Let me look at my notes…
[Simone proceeds to pull out her phone and list project ideas from the notes app. Should I tell you what they are or should I leave them as a surprise? With great power comes great responsibility!]
HS Those are definitely some interesting ideas…
[I’m very responsible].
HS Going back to your audience, you seem to have been somewhat spared a lot of the negativity people receive in comments, and online in general. Why do you think that is?
SG I’m just always so scared. Haha. I’ve been spared from the trolls and the hate, and I’m just terrified of ruining whatever equilibrium is happening right now. That’s one of the reasons I post so seldomly. I was looking the other day and thought, ’Oh, it’s been 45 days since I last posted on Instagram!’, and I notice I keep getting DMs from people asking if I’m OK. I’m just always scared to overstep, or do something that would upset people, or cause me to fall from some sort of pedestal. I just never want to post something that doesn’t work for other people, you know?
HS I get it. The comments section of YouTube alone can be an awful place sometimes. Speaking of YouTube, are there any other makers at the moment who are inspiring you?
SG I love 3×3 Custom. She’s my happy place because she’s at a level of making that I’m just not at. Her jig work is just wild, and the quality she puts out. And I love Nicole McLaughlin. She does these really fun and weird fashion contraptions, like shoes made out of tennis balls. She’s very cool. She’s a level of coolness that I aspire to and never expect to get to.
But, one of the most inspiring things for me is time. And I know that if I run out of ideas, it’s because I’m overworked and I haven’t had enough downtime and time to just loiter in the shop. I try to enforce this on Fridays, where me and my teammates just work on whatever project, and it doesn’t have to be work-related. And some of my best ideas have come from that type of work, where I don’t know what my end goal with this is, but I’m just going to tinker with it for a little bit.
You can follow Simone on Instagram for behind-the-scenes photos of her project, and subscribe to her YouTube channel for new content. Also, because why wouldn’t you, you can follow Scraps on Instagram too!
Each month, HackSpace magazine brings you the best projects, tips, tricks and tutorials from the makersphere. You can get it from the Raspberry Pi Press online store or your local newsagents.
As always, every issue is free to download from the HackSpace magazine website.
The post Meet Simone Giertz: Inventor, robotics enthusiast, and YouTuber appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Did you catch the very cool Raspberry Pi Pico piano project shared on the latest Digital Making at Home livestream? The sibling maker group from the GurgleApps family, Amelie, Caleb, and Ziva, chatted about how they got into coding before inviting us into miniature musical mayhem.
The siblings made two separate keyboards: one coded in MicroPython and another coded in Circuit Python. The Circuit Python-coded board also has MIDI functionality! Watch the video below to learn more about the exploration process.
So how do the resistors power this project? Four resistors are connected from ground to power in series, with the highest voltage in the far right-hand resistor (see image below). The voltage drops as we move along the series to the far left-hand resistor. Analog pins sit between each resistor and act as the ‘notes’ on the piano.
You don’t even need a board like the kids made, you can just twist or solder a series of resistors together to make the base of your piano and then ‘play’ it by pressing an analog pin against the wires. With a board, the piano looks much cooler though.
A perf board would also work for this project if you don’t want to go to the trouble of making your own piano board but still want something that looks a little more ‘piano-like’ than a bunch of resistors.
To make the snazzy board you see in the video, the kids grabbed a copper-plated board and drew out designs on sticky paper (their printer was broken so this was a homely, if more time-consuming, option). Stick the paper designs to the copper board, put that board in etching solution, and you’ve got a homemade piano keyboard. They also tried using a Sharpie to draw designs straight onto the board, but the sticker designs look a lot more slick.
Resistor placement took some time to perfect: the siblings tried out a few cheap copper boards before they got it right. The video below shows you how to code your Pico piano.
Subscribe to the GurgleApps family’s channel on YouTube for more electronics and coding projects. And subscribe to our YouTube channel for young people and educators for even more fun, family-friendly coding and physical computing videos!
The post Build a Raspberry Pi Pico piano appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Level up your Guitar Hero gaming with Nick O’Hara’s Jon Bot Jovi Guitar Hero robot. While Nick admits this is an expensive project (around $1000 to build), it’s something that was so “ridiculous, hilarious, and awesome” he felt he just needed to do it.
You’re halfway to shredding a Bon Jovi chorus perfectly on Guitar Hero and you can taste the fame. Problem is, you’re no Jon Bon Jovi. Or Peter Frampton. Or Slash. So you need Raspberry Pi to assist your rockstar dreams. Enter Jon Bot Jovi.
A solenoid is just a coil of wire, but when you pass an electric current through it acts as an electromagnet, and a magnetic field is generated. When you turn the current off, the magnetic field goes away. Inside the coil of wire is a metal rod, when the current is on and the magnetic field is present, the rod is free to move in the direction of the field. In this way, a solenoid converts electrical energy into movement and the rod moves in or out of the coil depending on the current applied.
Here, a Raspberry Pi controls a bunch of solenoids as they press and release the buttons on the guitar controller to give Nick his god-like skills. Watch the build video on YouTube for a simple walkthrough of how this all works.
Building the mechanical fingers and solenoids was one of the trickiest parts of the build. Nick ended up burning through a lot of them as he’s new to robotics and didn’t understand the relationship between power, voltage, and current, so they burnt out quickly. Luckily, he found a robotics guy to give him a 30-minute crash course, which set the project on the right path. Heroes come in all shapes and sizes.
Note recognition was also far from an easy task. Nick originally tried to look at specific pixels on the screen, which worked for slow songs, but for faster songs it would miss around 30% of the notes. He eventually turned to OpenCV, but it took a fair amount of effort to hone the perfect filtering to make the note recognition accurate. Fiddly, but worth it.
Nick’s favourite part of the project?
“Seeing Jon Bot Jovi absolutely shred on the guitar. Did you see how fast he’s strumming during Through the Fire and the Flames?!”
We love seeing a maker so happy with a final build and we wish we could come and play too! (We are similarly stunted in our guitar-playing abilities.)
Nick wrote a project post on Hacker News for those who are curious about the more technical details. And the original build video on YouTube is a wild ride, so check it out and subscribe to Nick’s channel.
The post Shred through Guitar Hero with a Raspberry Pi-powered robot appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Problem: I really want an arcade machine at home, but I don’t have the space for it.
Solution: Build Alexandre Chappel’s giant two-player machine, which is sleek and hidden in plain sight on your wall.
Alexandre’s goal was to build something that looks like an ordinary piece of furniture, and that you’d have no idea is an arcade machine until you flip it open. It’s a fully functional two-player device and it requires no coding skills to set up.
It’s a big piece of furniture, so you’ll need a big space and a good table saw to get all the wood cut. Alexandre made the whole thing out of just one piece of oak plywood. He’s a woodwork perfectionist, and didn’t want any visible screws on the finished product, so he had to get fancy with biscuit joints. He also ironed on edge banding, to give an extra-smooth finish to the rough cuts of plywood.
The electronics for the build arrived by way of a complete kit containing everything needed to make the joysticks and buttons. The kit came with a little circuit board which all the buttons and joysticks plug into, and the output is a simple USB which connects to the Raspberry Pi brain of the system.
(These are all links to the actual products used in this project)
Alexandre had never used a Raspberry Pi before, but still found the electronics the easiest part of this build.
This tutorial video made it easy to load up RetroPie software on the Raspberry Pi’s SD card and get some games onto a USB stick. And this video showed him how to run games from a USB device.
Everything is so neatly tucked away in this design. A slot for the USB cable and a Raspberry Pi reset switch are built into the wooden frame, so absolutely none of the electronics are on show.
Alexandre’s beautiful online shop allows you to buy full woodworking plans to recreate his projects. You can buy the design files for this project for $15.
The post Hide a huge arcade machine in plain sight with Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
In the latest issue of The MagPi magazine, we meet the smart young computer scientist behind an exciting new YouTube channel. When did you have that ‘ah-hah’ moment with computing? Ellora James remembers when she had hers.
“When I was about 14/15 years old, I was considering taking Computer Science at exam level, and so my teacher gave me a Raspberry Pi to borrow and a booklet on Python to play about with,” Ellora tells us. “I remember taking it all home, setting up Raspberry Pi on my kitchen table, and writing my first-ever line of python where I got it to print ‘Hello World’. I was just fascinated by the concept of being able to get computers to do what we tell them, and I’ve been hooked ever since.”
Ellora James
Several years, one company, and many awards later, Ellora is an up-and-coming young computer scientist who has recently launched her own amazing YouTube channel.
“I continued to work through the Python booklet at home and started to dive deeper into Raspberry Pi itself. The big thing that really cemented my love of Raspberry Pi was being selected to attend the Raspberry Pi Digital Making Day in Cambridge, back in 2016. We had to create a 60-second video to apply and despite mine, from what I can remember, being very cheesy, I was selected to attend.
Me and my Mum travelled to Cambridge, which was a fun trip in itself. We tried soldering, set up bird-boxes with infrared cameras and Raspberry Pi Zero, and got to use electric paint to create circuits on T-shirts. It was so much fun, and I’m still planning on setting up my bird-box one day. Being specifically selected to attend gave me a lot of motivation to keep making. And that must have stayed with me over the years, as I’m back making again, and this time on an even bigger scale with my channel!”
“Envirocache is a mobile app designed to get children (and adults) outside, active, and educated about the world around them. The app allows you to search for walking routes near you and shows you points of interest you can find along the way. You unlock badges and earn points for finding these, like a nature treasure hunt.
The concept started off as an entry to the Apps for Good competition and has grown from there. I now work on the app alongside my team members, Mari-Ann Ganson and Jamie Smith. The app is still in its development stage, but we’re looking at a potential release date this year.”
“My first big project was my ‘PiAlarm’. I got a touchscreen display for the Raspberry Pi for Christmas back in 2015, and ended up designing an alarm clock in Python. It took many hours of work and I also lost my code at one point and had to start again, but I learned a lot from that project, and being my first big one it definitely holds a special place in my heart.
It had a full user interface, let me pick from multiple songs, and even tweeted the time it took me to get up and turn it off in an effort to encourage me to get out of bed quicker. I actually made a short video about it and still have the code somewhere, so I’m thinking of revisiting it on my channel as a future project. I also took part in the 2016/17 European Astro Pi Challenge, where my project idea involved measuring environmental data on the ISS to see how this impacted the circadian rhythms of astronauts.
The idea was that the astronauts would log how long they slept for, the quality of their sleep, and also hunger levels, to gain an understanding of their circadian rhythm. I also planned to create a reaction game to test how sleep and hunger levels affected their reaction times.”
If you like the sound of Ellora’s projects, why not subscribe to her YouTube channel. Ellora describes her channel as such:
Hi everybody! My name is Ellora James and I’m a University student studying Ethical Hacking. I love all things technology and digital making, and this channel is dedicated to that. I’m also mildly *obsessed* with the Raspberry Pi, so you’ll see a lot of them on this channel!
The post Meet Ellora James appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Recently listed as one of Instagram’s Top 7 Women in STEM, software engineer and content creator Estefannie talks to Alex Bate about electronics, her online community, and why she can’t stop giving away free tech in her Instagram Live streams.
Based in Texas, Mexican-born Estefannie graduated summa cum laude from the University of Houston with a degree in computer science and a passion for helping people discover computing.
Some years later, with an established career as a software engineer under her belt, Estefannie is best-known for her YouTube and Instagram accounts, Estefannie Explains It All, and can often be found with a soldering iron in one hand, a rescue cat in the other, all while sporting the most fabulous pair of circuit board Louboutin heels and laser-cut lightning bolt earrings. Yes, it’s fair to say that we all want to be Estefannie. But how did she get here?
Alex You originally made videos on your channel four years ago to make sure that you’d retained the information that you were learning at the time?
Estefannie Mm-hmm, that’s right.
A But why did you decide to move away from the early explainers and start making other types of content, such as your Daft Punk helmet, and running weekly live streams and giveaways? Because I’m assuming that when you were making those early Estefannie Explains It All videos, you didn’t plan on becoming an influencer?
E No. The influencer part? Oh, no. I was studying for an interview with Google and I decided to make explainer videos and put them online because I knew people would correct me if I was wrong. And, if they didn’t, I knew my explanations were correct and I was better prepared for the interview.
The YouTube comments section was the scariest place on earth for me, so that’s why I went for YouTube.Later on, it was close to Halloween, and I was about to have an interview with Microsoft, this time to be a product evangelist. And I knew that IoT, the Internet of Things, was ‘the latest buzzword’, and I already wanted to dabble with that technology. So, I decided I wanted to make an IoT project and put it on my YouTube channel. That way, when the Microsoft interview arrived, I’d also have that video to show.
Halloween happened and I’d made this stupid pumpkin robot thing that wasn’t even IoT, but I put it on YouTube anyway and realised that I’d really liked doing it. I really, really liked it. And that’s when I found out about Simone Giertz and other makers, and this whole world I hadn’t known about. I thought, ‘I really like doing this, so I’m going to keep doing it.’ I didn’t even care about the interview anymore because I had found ‘the thing’, the thing that I wanted to do.
Microsoft actually loved the video and they wanted me to keep doing more of them, but on their platform, and they would own the content, which I didn’t want. So that’s how it transformed from explainers as prep for interviews to wanting to make videos. And the influencer thing happened a little bit differently. It’s a bit more Instagram-my.
A It’s more personal. You’re creating a brand.
E A brand, yes, I think that’s the key. So the Instagram thing happened for two reasons. The first one was that, before YouTube, I was going to start a business making little video games and mobile apps. And I decided to make it an ‘umbrella’ business so that anything I made could go under there. Because I thought [she laughs], ‘they’re going to go viral and so I need to be prepared legally.’
And while I was doing all of the business stuff, I realised I also need to learn how to do social media, because I need to promote these video games. So I took the time to understand Instagram, follow the people that I thought were interesting or would be doing the same stuff as me. I started out with my personal account as a test and, again, I really liked it. I started seeing people follow me because they were interested in the lifestyle of a software engineer. And I thought it was cool because I would have liked to see how software engineering was as a career before going for it. It was like a window to that world.
A Do you think there’s been a change, though, because your brand was that you were a software engineer? And now you’re not in the same job. You’re a full-time creator now. Do you think that’s affected who follows you and how people interact with you?
E I was very afraid of that when I quit my job. I tried to not talk about it at first. But it didn’t really matter because the people who have followed along, they’ve seen all the changes. And when I quit my job, they congratulated me because I was now able to do this full-time. So it was like the opposite. They were following ‘The Estefannie Experience’, ha ha. For a lot of them, it was like, ‘Oh, that’s another cool path that you can take as an engineer.’
A What was it like to make the leap from software, from something you can control totally to hardware, an area where things can go wrong all the time?
E Oh, well, software can go wrong all the time, too. When I did that first Halloween pumpkin video, I think that really sparked a new interest in me of like, ‘Oh, I should have studied electrical engineering or computer engineering’. Because I am really passionate about the hardware aspect of it. I’d studied a low-level class as part of my computer science degree about gates and how they work. I remember having to draw them out.
And I really liked that class and understanding how electricity goes through those gates. But it didn’t matter because I was there to learn how to do the programming part. With electronics, it was so fun to go back and actually try it, and I was hurting myself, shocking myself, burning myself. It was great; I love it. It was like I was putting everything in my imagination into real, physical things. And I think that helps me. I like seeing things or touching things.
A You’re a big advocate for celebrating failure and learning from failure. You’ve done talks about it at Coolest Projects and Maker Faire, and you talk about it in your videos. In the earthquake simulator you built for Becky Stern, you showed the first way of making it and how it didn’t work, before showing the final project. Do you think it’s important to share failures on YouTube, instead of editing a perfect project build?
E I think so. Yes. It comes from a place within me where, when I wasn’t good at something when I tried it for the first time – I’m a nineties kid, I don’t know if this is anything to do with it – but you try, and you fail, and you just assumed ‘OK, I’m not good at it.’ I’m not supposed to be playing piano, or whatever. That’s how I grew up thinking. And so, when I became an actual engineer, and I say ‘engineer’ because studying computer science is one thing, but to become an engineer is something completely different.
And when I actually became an engineer, that’s when it hit me that you have to really just go for it, stop thinking, stop planning, stop analysing, and just do it and see what happens, and learn from that.So that was a great lesson in life for me, and I want to show people like me that I make mistakes all the time and that I struggle sometimes, or that it takes several steps; it takes several tries to get somewhere. And so I want to show it for those people who feel maybe like they can’t do something because they didn’t do it the first time. I want to show them the human side of engineering.
A That’s cool. I liked when you were making the visor for your Daft Punk helmet and it was just a series of Instagram Live videos of you unsuccessfully melting plastic in your oven as you tried to learn how to vacuum-form.
E The plastic melting was so fun, and I learned a lot. I would never do that again, ha ha.
A Of all the projects you’ve made and shared, what has been the thing that you’ve been the proudest of because you managed to overcome an issue?
E I think with most of my projects, I’ve had to overcome something. Except with the Jurassic Park Goggles. Although it was a pain to do, I already knew what I was doing, and that was because of the Daft Punk helmet. I struggled so much with that one that I knew exactly what do to with the goggles.I’ve been working on a smart litter box project for my cats, Teddy and Luna. That one required me to do a lot of woodwork and play with tools that I had never played with before. And so those days terrified me. But, I try to push myself with every project, so they’re all scary.
A You have projects that you’ve put your blood, sweat, and tears into, that you’ve worked hard on, that you’ve written all the code for. Where do you stand on whether you should give that code away for free? Do you provide it all the time? Do you ever think, ‘no, I’m going to keep this for myself’?
E Oh, I am a true believer in open source. My plan is to continue to give it all away and put it on my website. This morning, I was finishing up a blog post I’m writing about the Daft Punk helmet. A step-by-step on how to do it, because I know people watch the video, but they might not be able to follow it to make their own. So now I’m going ‘here, here’s what I use’. And all those links in the post, Home Depot, etc., all the links I’m using, they’re not even affiliated. I’m making zero dollars out of that post I’ve been working on.
I know lots of the people who want to recreate my projects are kids, and they have no money. This is the type of education I wish I had had when I was younger. If I had known about this stuff, I would have started when I was very young. So, I can’t charge them. I feel, if they have to buy electronics, there’s no way I can charge extra for the schematic and the code. I cannot do that. It’s about being very conscious of who my audience is. I don’t want to stop them from making it. It’s the opposite. That’s why I do giveaways every week on Instagram Live. I want to give them the boards. I want to give them everything so they can do it. I didn’t have any money growing up, and I know the feeling.
I respect people who want to charge for it. I understand. But I’m not in that boat. Even the smart little box that I’m currently working on, someone who I respect very much said, ‘oh, that’s a great idea, why don’t you patent it and manufacture it? There’s a market for it.’ And I know there’s a market for it, but that’s not the point. The point is to show that you can do it. Anything that’s in your imagination, you can build it, you can do it, and here are the steps. Yeah, I want more money, but I think I can get there in different ways, through YouTube ads and sponsorships.
A There are a million different ways to make an LED blink, and none of them is the wrong way, they’re just the comfortable way you find to do it. Do you get backlash when you release your code from people saying, ‘Well, you should have done it this way’?
E I have never received backlash on code and, in fact, I would encourage people not to be scared to publish their code. I know people who say they want to open-source their code but they have to ‘clean it up first’, and they’re scared to publish it. But the whole point of open source is that you put it out there, you know it works, and it’s going to be OK. And it gets better because people will contribute. I’m never afraid of showing code.
A Do you think, when you talk about financial accessibility that that’s one of the reasons that’s holding you back from starting a Patreon? That you’d be putting a financial wall up against people who can’t afford it.
E One hundred percent. I don’t want to add to people’s financial strain. In fact, I am starting my new cryptocurrency so that I can send tokens to people around the world and, kinda like arcade tickets, they can spend them on things.
A How does that work? How can I spend your cryptocurrency?
E OK, so it has zero monetary value. The idea is that instead of giving out imaginary internet points to people in my live streams, they get actual internet points. And they can exchange them back to me for real items. I’ll have a menu of tech – so many points gets you a Pico, or a Raspberry Pi 400, or some other board – and people exchange their internet points for prizes. It helps me see how active someone has been in the live streams so I can say yes, it’s worth the $200 to ship this item to someone in India.
A Ah, I get it. It’s like house points in school.
E This is why it takes me so long to release a video because I’m like, let me do the cryptocurrency and then also that live stream, and then also this video about so and so. I just want to have a voice.
A How do you decide what content to make? Is it just about creating content you think your audience will like? Or more about content you think is important for people to know?
E I think I’ve always made videos that I felt were important, but I was always trying to, y’know, ‘play the algorithm’. And that was happening while I was still working and trying to quit my job so, of course, that was a period of my YouTube career where I was trying as much as I could to get views and hop on trends. Not the trends that were just ‘trends’, but trends by people I liked. Back then, I was a big fan of a YouTube baker, so I did a project using her stuff in the hopes she would see it. But I’m not really like that any more. If I see a channel I really like, I’ll try and do a collab, but not just because it would be beneficial for my channel. None of that any more. Just stuff I like.
One piece of advice that a lot of YouTubers have told me – that I’ve decided not to follow – is that you have to stick to one thing so that the audience knows what to expect. The same with Instagram. But I disagree, and I’ve gained more followers by being myself more. I’m Estefannie who also really, really likes crazy fashion. I like make-up and weird earrings, and why should I have to tone that down? Because I’m an engineer? I only post things that I would like. It’s not always me soldering. It’s not always code.
A You create the content you want to see, not the content you think people want to see.
E Yes. That would be easy to play that game, but that’s not what I want to do.
A A lot of content creators would create a separate Instagram account or YouTube channel for their other passion, but all that’s doing is showing that it has two different audiences. I think, especially when you are a woman in tech, if you then separate out the other things that you like, it’s almost like you’re saying, ‘Oh, well, these are two separate things that can’t exist together.’
E Exactly. You’re saying, ‘I go to work. And I’m a scientist, and I look like this. But then I go home, and I look like this’. And it’s not true. There are some creators who have a million YouTube channels, and I don’t understand why because people really like them for who they are. But it’s following the example of how, if you want to do vlogging, you have to have a separate channel, and I don’t think you necessarily have to.
A You are the brand, and people subscribe to you. You love fashion, and I couldn’t see you doing a ‘come shopping with me down Melrose Place’ video because that’s not who you are, but I could totally see you trying to make your own lipstick.
E Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah.
A You would make that video and your audience would love it because it’s you, and you’re doing something you’re passionate about.
E Yeah, I mean, it’s like, the best example for me is Colin Furze. He is who he is. He wears his tie, he’s great. That’s very transparent. That’s him.There’s a maker who influenced the way I dressed for a bit, and I see it on all the other maker women in how they dress. And I didn’t even like those clothes. And when I noticed, and I stopped myself, and I was like, ‘this is not the Estefannie Experience’. It’s the other person experience, and I don’t need to replicate that because that’s not me. And if I want to wear my giant heels, I’ll wear my heels. You have to be yourself.
If people want to be creators, it’s OK to be yourself. And if you’re the only one and you don’t have a team like other creators, that it’s OK to take your time and not do it for the algorithm. That’s my advice. You don’t have to post every week. I mean, you can, but don’t kill yourself. It’s a one-woman show over here. I do my taxes, I do the website, I do the videos. That’s the advice I want to give here. That’s what I want people to take from this interview.
Subscribe to Estefannie on YouTube, and follow her on Instagram. And make sure to take part in her weekly live streams for a chance to win some exclusive Estefannie Internet Points.
Alex spoke to Estefannie for the latest issue of HackSpace magazine. Each month, HackSpace brings you the best projects, tips, tricks and tutorials from the makersphere. You can get it from the Raspberry Pi Press online store or your local newsagents. As always, every issue is free to download from the HackSpace magazine website.
The post Meet Estefannie Explains it All appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Our friend Mike Perez at Audio Arkitekts is back to show you how to build PiFi, a Raspberry Pi-powered Roon Endpoint Music Streamer. The whole build costs around $150, which is pretty good going for such a sleek-looking Roon-ready end product.
Roon is a platform for all the music in your home, and Roon Core (which works with this build) manages all your music files and streaming content. The idea behind Roon is to bring all your music together, so you don’t have to worry about where it’s stored, what format it’s in, or where you stream it from. You can start a free trial if you’re not already a user.
Fix the HiFiBerry DAC2 Pro into the top of the case with the line output and headphone outputs poking out. A Raspberry Pi 4 Model B is the brains of the operation, and slots nicely onto the HiFiBerry. The HiFiBerry HAT is compatible with all Raspberry Pi models with a 40-pin GPIO connector and just clicks right onto the GPIO pins. It is also directly powered by the Raspberry Pi so, no additional power supply needed.
Next, secure the bottom half of the case, making sure all the Raspberry Pi ports line up with the case’s ready-made holes. Mike did the whole thing by hand with just a little help from a screwdriver right at the end.
Download the latest RoPieee image onto your SD card to make it a Roon Ready End Point, then slot it back into your Raspberry Pi. Now you have a good-looking, affordable audio output ready to connect to your Roon Core.
And that’s it. See – told you it was easy. Don’t forget, Audio Arkitekts’ YouTube channel is a must-follow for all audiophiles.
The post How to build a Raspberry Pi Roon Endpoint Music Streamer appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Resisting the desolate consumerism of the suburbs is a serious business for hardware hacker Zack Freedman. Zack transformed a Raspberry Pi 400 into the Voidstar Data Blaster, a portable cyberdeck to fight against becoming a normie.
Zack explains:
“A data blaster [cyberdeck] is the trademark battlestation of console cowboy antiheroes running nets through cyberspace.”
There’s a whole subreddit devoted to exploring what does and does not make a real-life cyberdeck, so if you were looking for a rabbit hole to go down, knock yourself out.
Added features to transform a Raspberry Pi 400 into the Voidstar Data Blaster include:
Handles make the cyberdeck nice and portable. Console cowboys can also use them to flip the deck up onto their forearm and easily “jack in” to cyberspace.
Rules around which keyboard you can use on a legitimate cyberdeck are pretty tight. It can’t be touchscreen (because that means it’s a tablet); however, it can’t fold away on a hinge either (because that makes it a laptop). Enter Raspberry Pi 400, a computer built into a mechanical keyboard about the length of an adult forearm. Perfect.
The SDR receiver means that users are cyber snooping-ready, while the head-mounted display provides a cyberpunk design flourish. That display acts as a second screen alongside the mini touchscreen. You can drag anything from the main display into sight on the headgear.
A lot of trial and error with a 3D printer finally yielded a faceplate that allows the screen and headgear to fit in perfectly. Zack also designed and printed all the flair and logos you see stuck around the cyberdeck. LEDs make the decorative filament fluoresce. Integrated pegs keep all the wiring neat – an inspired practical addition.
Here are all the STL files if you’d like to create your own cyberdeck. And the design files let you take a closer look at a 3D render of Zack’s creation.
We saved the best bit for last: not only can you play Doom on the Voidstar Data Blaster, you can play it on the wearable display. Stay punk.
The post Transform Raspberry Pi 400 into a hacker cyberdeck appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
YouTuber Alfredo Sequeida turned a Nerf gun into a controller for playing Call of Duty: Warzone. This is a fun-looking modification project, but some serious coding went into the process.
Funnily enough, the Nerf gun that Alfredo chose was a special edition Fortnite model. This irked him as a Call of Duty player, but this model had the most potential to accommodate the modifications he knew he wanted.
The controller uses the Nerf gun’s original trigger. Alfredo designed extra 3D-printed buttons (white dots on the far right) to let him perform more in-game actions like moving, plating, and jumping.
A Raspberry Pi 4 powers the whole thing, running Python scripts Alfredo wrote for both the Raspberry Pi and his gaming PC. Here’s all the code on GitHub.
Gameplay movement is controlled by getting accelerometer data via the command-line tool ADB logcat from an old Nexus 5 Android phone that’s mounted on the Nerf gun. The data is logged using a custom app Alfredo made on Android Studio.
The controller’s design makes players feel part of the action as their Call of Duty operator scouts around locations. It’s a much more immersive experience than holding an ordinary game controller in your lap or tapping away at a PC keyboard. Alfredo even plays standing up now his NERF gun controller is in action. He might as well be on a real life Special Ops mission.
So what’s next, Alfredo? We vote you make some modded night vision googles out of an old Viewmaster toy. That’ll totally work, right?
The post Play Call of Duty with a Raspberry Pi-powered Nerf gun appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
We here at Virtual Raspberry Pi Towers are looking forward to our weekends getting warmer, now that we are officially in British Summer Time. But we wanted to make the most of these last Saturdays and Sundays in which we have no choice but to cosy up against the typically British spring weather with a good old-fashioned YouTube rabbit hole.
Here are a few channels we think you’ll like. Some we’ve known about for a while, others are new friends we’ve made over the last year or so, and one is almost brand new so we’re putting you ahead of the curve there. You’re welcome.
Subscribe to Sophy Wong’s channel if you love the idea of wearing the tech you create. She collaborated with HackSpace magazine to publish a book, Wearable Tech Projects, which is currently on sale at the Raspberry Pi Press online store for just £7.
Sophy describes herself as a “maker, designer, geek, addicted to learning how to do new things.” And she even visited NASA to watch a SpaceX launch.
Subscribe to Sophy’s channel here.
Blitz City DIY (aka Liz) is a “DIY-er on a quest to gather and share knowledge” and has already built something cool with our newest baby, Raspberry Pi Pico. Her busy channel features computing, audio, video, coding, and more.
We love Liz an extra lot because her channel features on entire playlist dedicated to Raspberry Pi Adventures. She also shares a healthy dose of festive content showing you how to Tech the Halls. No, April is NOT too early for Christmas stuff.
Subscribe to Blitz City DIY here.
Our new friends at Electromaker share tutorials, community projects, and contests where subscribers win hardware and massive cash prizes. Flat cap aficionado Ian Buckley also hosts The Electromaker Show – a weekly roundup of all that’s new and interesting in the maker community.
You can also swing by the super useful online shop where you can buy everything you need to recreate some of the projects featured. If you’re daunted by shopping for every little bit you need to create something awesome, you can choose one of these electro {maker KITS} and get right to it. We especially like the Lightsaber and Daft Punk-esque helmet kits.
Follow Electromaker here.
You must have seen an Estefannie Explains It All video by now. But did you know about the weekly livestreams she hosts on Instagram? We know you’ll watch just because she’s cool and sometimes holds her pet cat up to the camera, but you’ll definitely want to tune in to try and win one of her tech giveaways. Some lucky viewers even got their hands on a Raspberry Pi 400.
Estefannie is another top collaborator whose channel has a dedicated Raspberry Pi playlist. Some of the things she has created using our tiny computers include Jurassic Park goggles, an automated coffee press, and a smart gingerbread house.
And as if all that wasn’t enough, Estefannie graced the Princesses with Power Tools calendar this year as Rey from Star Wars. You can buy a copy here.
Subscribe to Estefannie Explains It All here.
Ruth Amos and Shawn Brown use their channel Kids Invent Stuff to bring kids’ ideas to life by making them into real working inventions. Young people aged 4–11 can submit their ideas or take part in regular invention challenges.
We first gave this channel a shout-out when Ruth and Shawn teamed up with Estefannie Explains It All to build the world’s first Raspberry Pi-powered Twitter-activated jelly bean-pooping unicorn. For real.
The MagPi Magazine got to know Ruth a little better in a recent interview. And Ruth also features in the 2021 Princesses with Power Tools calendar, as a welding Rapunzel. Go on, you know you want to buy one.
We saved the best (and newest) for last. Ellora James is brand new to YouTube. Her first tutorial showing you how to use Pimoroni’s Grow HAT Mini Kit was posted just three weeks ago, and she added a project update this week.
We really like her video showing beginners how to set up their first Raspberry Pi. But our favourite is the one above in which she tackles one of the Universe’s big questions.
Subscribe to Ellora James here.
The post Go down a Raspberry Pi YouTube rabbit hole appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
YouTuber Chris Courses takes hydration seriously, but all those minutes spent filling up water bottles take a toll. 15 hours per year, to be exact. Chris regularly uses three differently sized water bottles and wanted to build something to fill them all to their exact measurements.
(Polite readers may like to be warned of a couple of bleeped swears and a rude whiteboard drawing a few minutes into this video.)
The solenoid valve determines when water can and cannot pass through. Mains water comes in through one tube and passes through the water filter, then the solenoid valve releases water via another tube into the bottle.
The Raspberry Pi sends a signal to the solenoid valve telling it to open for a specific amount of time — the length of time it takes to fill a particular water bottle — and to close when that time expires. Chris set this up to start running when he clicks a physical button.
Chris also programmed lights to indicate when the dispenser is turned on. This manual coding proved to be the most time-consuming part of the project.
Chris agreed, so he 3D-printed a beautiful enclosure to house what he dubs the ‘Hydrobot 5000’. It’s a sleek black casing that sits pretty in his kitchen on a wall next to the fridge. It took a fair bit of fridge shuffling and electrical mounting to “sit pretty”, however. This Raspberry Pi-powered creation needed to be connected to a water source, so the tubing had to be snaked from Hydrobot 5000, behind appliances, to the kitchen sink.
Check out those disco lights! Nice work, Chris. Follow Chris on YouTube for loads more coding and dev videos.
The post Raspberry Pi automatically refills your water bottle appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
You can always rely on Ryder’s YouTube channel to be full of weird and wonderful makes. This latest offering aims to boost dopamine levels with dog spotting. Looking at dogs makes you happier, right? But you can’t spend all day looking out of the window waiting for a dog to pass, right? Well, a Raspberry Pi Camera Module and machine learning can do the dog spotting for you.
Ryder’s Raspberry Pi and camera sit on a tripod pointing out of a window looking over a street. Live video of the street is taken by the camera and fed through a machine learning model. Ryder chose the YOLO v3 object detection model, which can already recognise around 80 different things — from dogs to humans, and even umbrellas.
But how would Ryder know that his Raspberry Pi had detected a dog? They’re so sneaky — they work in silence. A megaphone and some text-to-speech software make sure that Ryder is alerted in time to run to the window and see the passing dog. The megaphone announces: “Attention! There is a cute dog outside.”
Ryder wanted to share the love and show his appreciation to the owners of cute dogs, so he added a feature for when he is out of the house. With the megaphone poking out of a window, the Raspberry Pi does its dog-detecting as usual, but instead of alerting Ryder, it announces: “I like your dog” when a canine is walked past.
Also, we’d like to learn more about this ‘Heather’ who apparently once scaled a six-foot fence to pet a dog and for whom Ryder built this. Ryder, spill the story in the comments!
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