Raspberry Pi 3 Arrives

Got my new RPi3 today , I was able to get it ordered early Monday morning by poking around Element14’s website. Even though they didn’t have it posted they did an available part number, 77Y6520, so I used that to place an order and I got notified on Tuesday that it was sent 🙂 The CPU is a little beefier and its 64bit and the board now has wifi and bluetooth onboard. So I’ll probably implement some bluetooth geo-fencing with IFTTT in my home automation project.

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Automated Signal Capture

Using Flask and JQuery, a friend helped me out with automating capturing the 433mhz signal from remotes so you don’t have to manually add them in the code.

Basically the Flask starts a webserver when you click n the add button, the code executes the RFSniffer binary and receives the data when a signal is received, then displays it to the webpage. Still have to finish the code for adding the data to the MySQL db , but thats the easy part.

Raspberry Pi touch display

So I received an official 7″ touch display for xmas. Even though it’s $60, it brings my total cost over 200$ for the project. But I thought it would be an awesome addition to the project because you don’t have to whip out your phone just to control everything. I’s a pretty sweet 800 x 480 10 point capacitive touchscreen display all you need to do is connect the DSI ribbon cable and feed ground/5v from the Pi’s GPIO pins. Im thinking starting the browser in kiosk mode should suffice once I finish the node.js interface. The only issue I havent resolved was to power down the screen fully when the Pi shutdowns. If anyone knows how to let me know.
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Pilybius

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Working on mini MAME arcade machine. It was designed in Solid Works 2015 then cut out of 1/4″ MDF on our Epilog laser cutter. Will be powered by a Raspberry Pi and a 9″ TFT screen. The software is MAME4ALL-Pi running the MAME 0.375b5 romsets. The joystick and buttons are connected directly to the GPIO pins and the 9” monitor is connected to the Video out port.

Pilybius is based off an arcade cabinet described in an urban legend about a game called Polybius, which is said to have induced various psychological effects on players. The story describes players suffering from amnesia, night terrors, and a tendency to stop playing all video games. Continue reading

Raspberry Pi Nutritional Facts

This is based off a webpage i found around 2003-ish that had pseudo nutritional facts of the server specs. Only problem is I had just the html output saved. So I finally got around to doing the backend code to give realtime outputs of hdd space,memory,network stats,users,& uptime. Tested on a Rapsberry Pi running Raspian. The code is ugly nd was quickly done so there may be some inherent security issues in the code so dont put on a production server facing the web without testing. Result may vary on your system due to system calls, adjust accordingly.
https://github.com/xillwillx/Nutional_Server_Facts

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DS18B20 and php

As part of the cheap home automation project I am currently working on, I needed to get some temperature sensor info to my webserver. For the brain of my project I’ll be using a Raspberry Pi.

I had ordered a 5pk of DS18B20 temperature sensors so i can visualize monthly temperatures and eventually control my thermostat. In order to get the sensors working on the Pi, I needed to do a few things:

First I had to setup the pi to add OneWire support. I started by editing the boot config file with nano by running
sudo nano /boot/config.txt
I scrolled to the bottom and added the following line:
dtoverlay=w1-gpio
then pressed ctrl+x and y to confirm, then

sudo nano /etc/modules
add the following 2 lines to the bottom:
w1-gpio

w1-therm
I again press ctrl+x and y to confirm , then shutdown my pi.

I then hooked my sensors up to a 4.7k pullup resistor using the following diagram:
DS18B20 ds18b20-pinout

I booted my Pi back up and tested to see that my sensors were detected by typing the following command into the terminal:

cd /sys/bus/w1/devices

ls

cd 28-xxxx (change this to match what serial number pops up)

cat w1_slave
if all goes well you shouldn’t have seen any errors and it should have outputted some gibberish like this:
modprobe

The temperature is shown in the last five digits on the second line. (You need to divide this number by 1000 to get the temperature in degrees Celcius).

You finally need to have Apache2 and PHP5 installed on your Pi.

I had looked online for php code that had outputted the temperature from sensors and found that everyone had hardcoded the sensor ID’s in their code , since I wanted my automation to be as painless as possible, I wrote my own php script to automatically get all the sensor ID’s and then convert the output to Celsius and Fahrenheit. I have this on https://github.com/xillwillx/DS18B20
Add temp.php to /var/www/ then visit http://127.0.0.1/temp.php

Page output should look similar to this:

Sensor ID#: 28-0214640d18ff = 26 °C / 79 °F

Sensor ID#: 28-02146409b9ff = 25 °C / 77 °F
And that’s it! I will be added more posts as i finish each portion of my home automation project. My goal is trying to get it all done for less than $200.

Pi Bar

Using parts made from a Makerbot Replicator 2X 3D printer, some square metal rods, and a series of 5 peristaltic pumps. The project was based off a project called Bar Mixvah. The problem with the orginal is that you had to use a sluggish MongoDB database and a laptop in order to get it up and running. I wanted something that was self contained. Using an old Raspberry Pi with 256mb ram, I worked with a few guys from NESIT to redesign the top portion to fit the raspberry pi into and then created a slim MySQL backend with PHP and node.js.

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Continue reading

RFPiD – Raspberry Pi Access Control

We’ve been working on our new door entry system for NESIT that will allow members to enter the space through our sliding door. This will replace our current Arduino RFID door access system. It utilizes a RFID card reader that checks the tag against a SQLite database then opens the door by triggering a 5v relay connected to a garage door opener. It also tweets when someone arrives @ the space to Twitter.com as well as logging the arrival into the database. Connected to the front of the device is a small 4.5 lcd screen connected by s-video port that plays videos when someone scans their card. Continue reading