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A portable, affordable Raspberry Pi-powered blood analyser is helping to “establish a robust healthcare ecosystem” in remote parts of India. Samples can be tested in just 30 seconds, and the cost and size of the parts make it an attractive solution for rural and resource-strapped areas.
It is the work of researchers Sangeeta Palekar and Jayu Kalambe from the Department of Electronics Engineering at Shri Ramdeobaba College of Engineering and Management.
Regular blood tests are vital in the tracking and elimination of many diseases, but there is a huge time and monetary cost currently tied to this type of laboratory work.
The researchers’s device measures light absorbance through a blood sample, a common type of analysis, and they harnessed the processing capability of Raspberry Pi 4 Model B to analyse the absorbance data. Their Raspberry Pi-powered solution was found to perform on a par with the kind of expensive lab-based blood test typically used.
Sangeeta and Jayu’s analyser is not only cheaper to build and maintain than the lab-based version, it also does the job better. Using the lab-based method means that samples from patients in rural areas must be sent away for analysis, with results communicated back to patients at a much later date. In contrast, Sangeeta and Jayu’s device can process blood samples there and then. All you need is an electricity source. Patients get their results immediately, and there is no need to transport delicate samples across rural terrain.
Incorporating an IoT element into their design, which would allow for remote monitoring, is the next step for the researchers. They also intend to develop their invention to allow it to carry out different types of blood analyses.
The full research paper is behind a paywall, but the abstract does a great job succinctly explaining all the science. Sangeeta herself also explains a lot of the magic behind her creation in this interview with IEEE Spectrum.
The post 30-second blood analysis with Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Inspired by NASA’s attempt to launch a helicopter on Mars, one maker made an Earth-bound one of her own. And she tells Rosie Hattersley all about it in the latest issue of The MagPi Magazine, out now.
Like millions of us, in April Avra Saslow watched with bated breath as NASA’s Perseverance rover touched down on the surface of Mars.
Like most of us, Avra knew all about the other ground-breaking feat being trialled alongside Perseverance: a helicopter launch called Ingenuity, that was to be the first flight on another planet – “a fairly lofty goal”, says Avra, since “the atmosphere on Mars is 60 times less dense than Earth’s.”
With experience of Raspberry Pi-based creations, Avra was keen to emulate Ingenuity back here on earth.
NASA chose to use open-source products and use commercially available parts for its helicopter build. It just so happened that Avra had recently begun working at SparkFun, a Colorado-based reseller that sells the very same Garmin LIDAR-Lite v3 laser altimeter that NASA’s helicopter is based on. “It’s a compact optical distance measurement sensor that gives the helicopter ‘eyes’ to see how far it hovers above ground,” Avra explains.
NASA posted the Ingenuity helicopter’s open-source autonomous space-flight software, written specifically for use with Raspberry Pi, on GitHub. Avra took all this as a sign she “just had to experiment with the same technology they sent to Mars.”
Her plan was to see whether she could get GPS and lidar working within NASA’s framework, “and then take the sensors up on a drone and see how it all performed in the air.” Helpfully, NASA’s GitHub post included a detailed F Prime tutorial based around Raspberry Pi. Avra says understanding and using F Prime (F´) was the hardest part of her Epigone drone project. “It’s a beast to take on from an electronics enthusiast standpoint,” she says. Even so, she emphatically encourages others to explore F´ and the opportunity to make use of NASA’s code.
The Epigone Drone is built around Raspberry Pi 4 Model B; Garmin’s LIDAR-Lite v4, which connects to a Qwiic breakout board and has a laser rather than an LED; a battery pack; and a DJI Mini 2 drone borrowed from a videographer colleague. Having seen how small the drone was, Avra realised 3D-printing an enclosure case would make everything far too heavy. As it was, positioning the Epigone onto its host drone was challenging enough: the drone’s rotors passed worryingly close to the project’s Raspberry Pi, even when precisely positioned in the centre of the drone’s back. The drone has its own sensors to allow for controlled navigation, which meant Avra’s design had to diverge from NASA’s and have its lidar ‘eyes’ on its side rather than underneath.
Although her version piggybacks on an existing drone, Avra was amazed when her Epigone creation took flight:
“I honestly thought [it] would be too heavy to achieve lift, but what do ya know, it flew! It went up maybe 30 ft and we were able to check the sensors by moving it close and far from the SparkFun HQ [where she works].”
While the drone’s battery depleted in “a matter of minutes” due to its additional load, the Epigone worked well and could be deployed to map small areas of land such as elevation changes in a garden, Avra suggests.
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 ‘Epigone drone’ pays homage to NASA’s Mars Helicopter | The MagPi #107 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Imagine walking through a doorway, and your entrance music begins playing. You’re a pro wrestler, or perhaps a character in a 1940’s hardboiled crime drama? Or the Queen, who no doubt gets to hear the national anthem on a regular basis.
Ty and Gig Builds have a tonne of cool Raspberry Pi projects on their YouTube channel, but we especially liked this one. Why? Because it’s the perfect device to welcome everyone to Raspberry Pi Towers each day. At least, once the time comes to leave our home offices and head back to Pi Towers.
A Python script running on a Raspberry Pi continuously searches for nearby Bluetooth devices in a ‘known’ list. It uses the Bluetooth MAC address of each detected phone in range to determine which entrance music its owner wants. All ‘known’ device owners have already nominated a chosen track, which is stored on the Raspberry Pi, and when it recognises one from its list, the Raspberry Pi plays the owner’s chosen audio file.
Raspberry Pi uses the Bluez stack to communicate over Bluetooth, it’s this service that lets the Raspberry Pi talk to your phone. Ty admits this was the fiddliest part of the build, but he explains it all very clearly, step-by-step, from this point in the video. A sound card, connected via USB, lets Raspberry Pi output audio through a big speaker. But you could also make the sound play through an HDMI TV.
Wanna walk into the house with your own entrance music playing? Here’s the github repo with everything you’ll need. A Raspberry Pi 4 powers this project, but any of our boards with Bluetooth support would work.
You’re also going to need a separate sound card and here’s the one used in this build.
Some suggestions from the soon-to-return to Raspberry Pi Towers team:
Comment with your entrance tune of choice.
The post How to play entrance music on your Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
If you liked the look of yesterday’s Raspberry Pi Roon Endpoint Music Streamer but thought: “Hey, you know what would be great? If it had a touchscreen,” then look no further. Home Theater Fanatics has built something using the same RoPieee software, but with the added feature of a screen, for those who need one.
The build cost for this is a little higher than the $150 estimate to recreate yesterday’s project, given the inclusion of a fancier Digital Audio Decoder and the touchscreen itself.
The brilliant Home Theater Fanatics show you how to put all of this together from this point in the build video, before moving on to the software install. They take care to go through all of the basics of the hardware in case you’re not familiar with things like ribbon cables or fans. It’s a really nice bird’s-eye view walkthrough, so beginners aren’t likely to have any problems following along.
Same as yesterday’s build:
At this point in the build video, Home Theater Fanatics go through the three steps you need to take to get the RoPieee and Roon software sorted out, then connect the DAC. Again, it’s a really clear, comprehensive on-screen walkthrough that beginners can be comfortable with.
Aside from being able to see the attributed artwork for the music you’re currently listening to, this touchscreen solution provides easy song switching during home workouts. It’s also a much snazzier-looking tabletop alternative to a plugged-in phone spouting a Spotify playlist.
The post Raspberry Pi touchscreen music streamer 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.
When we heard that James Dawson had rescued a load of well-worn Raspberry Pi 1 Model B and Model A computers from eBay, refurbished them, and sold them on, we felt warm and fuzzy knowing that some of our oldest devices would be finding new homes.
But the feels really hit when we learned that James is donating the money from those resales to us for our Learn at Home campaign, where we get Raspberry Pis into the hands of UK young people who need them the most.
We decided to learn a little more about the guy behind this generous idea.
I’m a 25-year-old guy from Newcastle Upon Tyne. I’ve always been into computers and started weekend work experience in a computer repair shop, which turned into an apprenticeship and then a full-time job, giving me a basic knowledge of board-level repairs and hardware diagnostics.
Around the time the first Raspberry Pi (the Model B) came out in 2012, the company I worked for took on a large client in their business IT support division that ran Linux based servers. I immediately purchased a Raspberry Pi and set about learning my way around the Linux terminal and picked it up pretty quickly.
I ended up supporting the aforementioned Linux-based servers for several years before moving on. Seven years later I’m a Senior Linux System Administrator / Platform engineer for a multinational company, and I’m not sure I’d be in this position if it wasn’t for Raspberry Pi!
This isn’t something I had planned to do, it just happened! I was looking for some Raspberry Pi accessories on eBay one night, when I came across a box of 200+ broken Raspberry Pis. I had to have them and save them from becoming e-waste, but I didn’t have a plan for them, or even know if they were in a fixable state.
Once I found out the condition and performed some diagnostics, I realised that well over half of them were repairable. Using a cheap 3.5″ TFT Raspberry Pi display and a hacky bash script, I created a diagnostic tool that tested the USB ports, Ethernet port, and display output.
The technical side of the repairs are detailed in a five-part (so far) blog. Get started on Part 1.
I initially decided to see if I could donate the refurbished units to schools or maker spaces, but it turns out donating seven-year-old hardware is harder than it sounds!
Thankfully, there are still a lot of people out there who are interested in early Raspberry Pi models, so I decided to sell them and donate the money. The Raspberry Pi Foundation, specifically their Learn at Home campaign, stood out to me.
The first batch I repaired sold out in two days. That raised £400, which has already been donated. I hope to raise around £800 in total, and the next batch will be listed for sale soon.
Keep up with James’s tech projects on his blog, or follow him on Twitter.
His latest refurbished batch of Raspberry Pi Model A computers is for sale on eBay, as well as a ton of Raspberry Pi Model B units.
Since last summer, we’ve been distributing free Raspberry Pi computers to young people in the UK who don’t have access to a computer at home to do their schoolwork. The £800 that James is raising will allow us to give four disadvantaged young people free Raspberry Pi computer kits and ongoing support so they can continue learning while at home during the pandemic.
Find out how you can donate to our Learn at Home campaign to help solve this urgent issue.
The post Raspberry Pi 1 Model B units brought back to life for charity appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
In the latest issue of HackSpace Magazine, out now, @MrPJEvans shows you how to add voice commands to your projects with a Raspberry Pi 4 and a microphone.
It’s amazing how we’ve come from everything being keyboard-based to so much voice control in our lives. Siri, Alexa, and Cortana are everywhere and happy to answer questions, play you music, or help automate your household.
For the keen maker, these offerings may not be ideal for augmenting their latest project as they are closed systems. The good news is, with a bit of help from Google, you can add voice recognition to your project and have complete control over what happens. You just need a Raspberry Pi 4, a speaker array, and a Google account to get started.
For a home assistant device, being able to hear you clearly is an essential. Many microphones are either too low-quality for the task, or are unidirectional: they only hear well in one direction. To the rescue comes Seeed’s ReSpeaker, an array of four microphones with some clever digital processing to provide the kind of listening capability normally found on an Amazon Echo device or Google Assistant. It’s also in a convenient HAT form factor, and comes with a ring of twelve RGB LEDs, so you can add visual effects too. Start with a Raspberry Pi OS Lite installation, and follow these instructions to get your ReSpeaker ready for use.
You’ll see later on that we can add the power of Google’s speech-to-text API by streaming audio over the internet. However, we don’t want to be doing that all the time. Snowboy is an offline ‘hotword’ detector. We can have Snowboy running all the time, and when your choice of word is ‘heard’, we switch to Google’s system for accurate processing. Snowboy can only handle a few words, so we only use it for the ‘trigger’ words. It’s not the friendliest of installations so, to get you up and running, we’ve provided step-by-step instructions.
As we’ve just mentioned, we can have a hotword (or trigger word) to activate full speech recognition so we can stay offline. To do this, Snowboy must be trained to understand the word chosen. The code that describes the word (and specifically your pronunciation of it) is called the model. Luckily, this whole process is handled for you at snowboy.kitt.ai, where you can create a model file in a matter of minutes and download it. Just say your choice of words three times, and you’re done. Transfer the model to your Raspberry Pi 4 and place it in your home directory.
After the trigger word is heard, we want Google’s fleet of super-servers to help us transcribe what is being said. To use Google’s speech-to-text API, you will need to create a Google application and give it permissions to use the API. When you create the application, you will be given the opportunity to download ‘credentials’ (a small text file) which will allow your setup to use the Google API. Please note that you will need a billable account for this, although you get one hour of free speech-to-text per month. Full instructions on how to get set up can be found here.
To use Google’s API, we need to install the firm’s speech-to-text SDK for Python so we can stream audio and get the results. On the command line, run the following:pip3 install google-cloud-speech(If you get an error, run sudo apt install python3-pip then try again).
Remember that credentials file? We need to tell the SDK where it is:export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS="/home/pi/[FILE_NAME].json"(Don’t forget to replace [FILE_NAME] with the actual name of the JSON file.)
Now download and run this test file. Try saying something and see what happens!
Now we can talk to our Raspberry Pi, it’s time to link the hotword system to the Google transcription service to create our very own virtual assistant. We’ve provided sample code so that you can see these two systems running together. Run it, then say your chosen hotword. Now ask ‘what time is it?’ to get a response. (Don’t forget to connect a speaker to the audio output if you’re not using HDMI.) Now it’s over to you. Try adding code to respond to certain commands such as ‘turn the light on’, or ‘what time is it?’
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, The Raspberry Pi store in Cambridge, or your local newsagents.
Each issue is free to download from the HackSpace magazine website.
The post Talk to your Raspberry Pi | HackSpace 36 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Welcome to October, the month in which spiderwebs become decor and anything vaguely gruesome is considered ‘seasonal’. Such as bats. Bats are in fact cute, furry creatures, but as they are part of the ‘Halloweeny animal’ canon, I have a perfect excuse to sing their praises.
Tegwyn Twmffat was tasked with doing a bat survey on a derelict building, and they took to DesignSpark to share their Raspberry Pi–powered solution.
UK law protects nesting birds and roosting bats, so before you go knocking buildings down, you need a professional to check that no critters will be harmed in the process.
The problem with bats, compared to birds, is they are much harder to spot and have a tendency to hang out in tiny wall cavities. Enter this big ultrasonic microphone.
After the building was declared safely empty of bats, Tegwyn decided to keep hold of the expensive microphone (the metal tube in the image above) and have a crack at developing their own auto-classification system to detect which type of bats are about.
The ultrasonic mic picks up the audio data using an STM M0 processor and streams it to Raspberry Pi via USB. Raspberry Pi runs Alsa driver software and uses the bash language to receive the data.
It turns out there are no publicly available audio records of bats, so Tegwyn took to their own back garden and found 6 species to record. And with the help of a few other bat enthusiasts, they cobbled together an audio dataset of 9 of the 17 bat species found in the UK!
Tegwyn’s original post about their project features a 12-step walkthrough, as well as all the code and commands you’ll need to build your own system. And here’s the GitHub repository, where you can check for updates.
The post Ultrasonically detect bats with Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
8 Bits and a Byte created this voice-controllable, interactive, storytelling device, hidden inside a 1960s radio for extra aesthetic wonderfulness.
A Raspberry Pi 3B works with an AIY HAT, a microphone, and the device’s original speaker to run chatbot and speech-to-text artificial intelligence.
This creature is a Bajazzo TS made by Telefunken some time during the 1960s in West Germany, and this detail inspired the espionage-themed story that 8 Bits and a Byte retrofitted it to tell. Users are intelligence agents whose task is to find the evil Dr Donogood.
The device works like one of those ‘choose your own adventure’ books, asking you a series of questions and offering you several options. The story unfolds according to the options you choose, and leads you to a choice of endings.
8 Bits and a Byte designed a decision tree to provide a tight story frame, so users can’t go off on question-asking tangents.
When you see the ‘choose your own adventure’ frame set out like this, you can see how easy it is to create something that feels interactive, but really only needs to understand the difference between a few phrases: ‘laser pointer’; ‘lockpick’; ‘drink’; take bribe’, and ‘refuse bribe’.
Google Dialogflow is a free natural language understanding platform that makes it easy to design a conversational user interface, which is long-speak for ‘chatbot’.
There are a few steps between the user talking to the radio, and the radio figuring out how to respond. The speech-to-text and chatbot software need to work in tandem. For this project, the data flow runs like so:
1: The microphone detects that someone is speaking and records the audio.
2-3: Google AI (the Speech-To-Text box) processes the audio and extracts the words the user spoke as text.
4-5: The chatbot (Google Dialogflow) receives this text and matches it with the correct response, which is sent back to the Raspberry Pi.
6-7: Some more artificial intelligence uses this text to generate artificial speech.
8: This audio is played to the user via the speaker.
The post Raspberry Pi turns retro radio into interactive storyteller appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
Nandu Vadakkath was inspired by a line-following robot built (literally) entirely from salvage materials that could wait patiently and purchase beer for its maker in Tamil Nadu, India. So he set about making his own, but with the goal of making it capable of slightly more sophisticated tasks.
Nandu had ambitious plans for his robot: navigation, speech and listening, recognition, and much more were on the list of things he wanted it to do. And in order to make it do everything he wanted, he incorporated a lot of software, including:
So how did Nandu go about trying to make the robot do some of the things on his wishlist?
The engine uses spaCy to analyse sentences, classify all the elements it identifies, and store all this information in a MySQL database. When the robot encounters a sentence with a series of possible corresponding actions, it weighs them to see what the most likely context is, based on sentences it has previously encountered.
The robot has been trained to follow Nandu around but it can get to know other people too. When it meets a new person, it takes a series of photos and processes them in the background, so it learns to remember them.
Nandu didn’t like the thought of a basic robotic voice, so he searched high and low until he came across the MBROLA UK English voice. Have a listen in the videos above!
The robot has an excellent group photo function: it looks for a person, calculates the distance between the top of their head and the top of the frame, then tilts the camera until this distance is about 60 pixels. This is a lot more effort than some human photographers put into getting all of everyone’s heads into the frame.
Nandu has created a YouTube channel for his robot companion, so be sure to keep up with its progress!
The post Nandu’s lockdown Raspberry Pi robot project appeared first on Raspberry Pi.
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