Table of contents for Issue #04 in MakerSpace

Lenticular images store multiple exposures in the same area. Animation is achieved by tilting the image. Another application creates a spatial appearance without special tools (autostereoscopy). The digital version of this often shows up on social media as a “wigglegram.” Lenticular Cameras On the consumer market, lenticular cameras are sold under the name Action-Sampler. More than 40 years ago, the fourlens Nishika (Nimslo) appeared, followed by Fuji’s eight-lens Rensha Cardia in 1991. Unlike the Nishika’s synchronous shutter action, the Fuji exposed the 35mm film sequentially. Even today, the analog scenes are still very popular on Instagram and the like. One way of creating a multilens digital recording system is to use a Raspberry Pi and a Camarray HAT [1] (hardware attached on top) by ArduCam [2]. The camera I make…

In this article, I work with the DJI Ryze Tello drone, which is available on Amazon [1] and from other vendors for around $99 (£99/​ EUR100). Why this model? The drone was designed for educational use and has open interfaces for that purpose. In other words, you can develop programs for the drone in Scratch or Python. To familiarize yourself with the drone’s capabilities, you first need to download the app that gives you manual control of the drone. The drone’s battery lasts about 13 minutes, and the control range is about 100 meters. Because it is intended for operation inside buildings, this range is fine. If you get lost, the built-in 720p camera with electronic image stabilizer lets you view your current location. For more intensive use, a Tello…

When implementing my greenhouse control system, I didn’t have to start completely from scratch. An older control system already existed with which I had a little experience. Building on this established setup, I decided to use power windows for the hinged sky-lights (Figure 1) and a fan to circulate the air in the greenhouse. Also, when nighttime temperatures dropped in the spring and fall, I wanted a heater to switch on automatically. In contrast, crops needed protection against excessive heat in summer. An intelligent control system would also be nice to reference the outside temperature, allowing it to close the windows in time for cool evenings and build up a heat reserve for young crops during the night. At the same time, a reliable clock was essential to adapt to…

The Sinclair ZX Spectrum [1] was one of the great home computers of the 1980s: Its first models from 1982 had a rubber keyboard and only 16KB or 48KB of RAM. Driven by a Z80 CPU that ran at 3.5MHz, owners would typically connect a cassette recorder and load games from tapes. Over the years, Sinclair made some improvements: For example, the ZX Spectrum+ had a better keyboard, and the culmination of the development process was the ZX Spectrum 128K with lots of RAM (also known as the “Toast Rack” model). After that, Amstrad bought Sinclair and released new Spectrum models with built-in cassette or disk drives, but those machines looked nothing like the old Speccies, and in 1992 the product line was discontinued. That is, discontinued until 2016 when…

External displays that continuously show data without a real screen, even when the computer is taking a nap, are a genuine upgrade to any office. Of course, they can be used to display the time or weather, but they can also perform unusual tasks tailored to your needs. The reasonably priced Ulanzi TC001 [1] ended up on my doorstep within a week for around $60, after traveling all the way from China to the USA. My original idea was to use it to build a “Wealth Clock” that shows the current gold level in all my money stores so that I know how wealthy I am at any given time. Flashing Custom Firmware The LED display has a retro feel. Of course, there are higher-resolution displays available today, but the…

When my venerable bedside clock radio and alarm – a present from my parents in the 1980s – finally died, as a maker, my first thought was not, “Where can I buy another?” but “Can I make one?”! I didn’t really use the radio (I think it was AM only, and here in the UK, AM is no longer used much), so my ideas began to form around a simple, retro-style digital clock with an LED display in an attractive wooden case. The case needed to be simple to build because my woodworking skills are limited. I chose a large green LED display for its restful color in the dark, and I wanted the clock to run off a USB wall socket to simplify the power supply design whilst retaining…

You have a pet, but you need to be away from home for a day. Is it really worth paying for a kennel when all you want is to keep an eye on your pet while you’re away? Of course, you could use a video doorbell service (like Ring or Arlo) and simply locate the camera device inside your home, but it seems like overkill to pay for a monthly service for something that you only need occasionally. Also, for privacy reasons, some people might not want to invite a streaming video service into their home when they don’t have control over how the video is processed and stored. On the other hand, if you have a Raspberry Pi, an Internet connection, and a Pi-compatible camera, it is actually pretty…

Artificial intelligence (AI) is on everyone’s minds, not least because of chatbots and the ChatGPT text generator. Of course, the capabilities that AI has developed go far beyond chats with a chatbot on countless websites. For example, AI can be used to process acoustic speech signals, and it is the precondition for autonomous driving. Some applications – and generating AI models – require computers with powerful processors and a generous helping of storage space and RAM. Small computers like the Raspberry Pi, on the other hand, are more likely to benefit from ready-made methods and applications that draw on AI for their implementation. All of these processes are founded on machine learning (ML), which itself is based on self-adapting algorithms that process information from reference data. Deep learning, as a…

New technologies and new providers are constantly expanding the range of potential smart home applications. Solutions from various manufacturers are often mutually incompatible, which means customers cannot leverage the full potential of home automation services. But there is another approach. Zigbee is a protocol for low-power wireless communication based on the IEEE 802.15.4 standard. The Zigbee protocol is often used for home automation devices. Dresden elektronik [1] has been working on light control systems based on the Zigbee protocol for some 10 years and now offers numerous vendor-agnostic systems for the smart home. The company also distributes the RaspBee module for home automation with a Raspberry Pi. A Rasp-Bee device with the accompanying software can help you reap the benefits of the smart home without expensive gateways and cloud connections.…

There have been many attempts to bring back the Commodore C64 or some machine that looks like it: You can get replacement mainboards that work in the original case, you can buy a THEC64 or its mini version from Retro Games Ltd, and there’s also the MEGA65 project which created a modern FPGA-based version of the Commodore C65 – a successor to the C64 that never reached the manufacturing stage. All those machines have one thing in common: Their main goal is to let you run original C64 programs, either with an emulator or with an FPGA-based reimplementation of the original hardware. For those of you who only care about the look and the unique bread-box form factor of the C64, the Commodore 64x (with an extra “x”) is a…

Imagine you come home and the blinds come down in the living room, subtle lighting turns on, Alexa says hello, and the coffee maker prepares a cup of coffee. You can arrange all this magic at the push of a button without staying up all night writing code thanks to the low-code Node-RED platform [1]. With Node-RED, a few elements control the flow. Each element represents a whole block of instructions that would require a large number of lines of code in conventional programming (Figure 1). Every Node-RED flow follows the same programming principle. First, you need a trigger. In the example shown in Figure 1, the trigger evaluates a ping signal from a cell phone. You could also use geodata as the trigger by replacing the ping evaluation with…

People want a variety of information presented in the same place. On the road, a smartphone plays a central role for most. At home, you might have legacy displays for heating control, an alarm system, a weather station, and so on. A common display is useful for grouping data from different sources without the need to call up different apps or read the data in different places. A Raspberry Pi Pico W lets you build your own model. A home automation solution already collects many useful values. For this sample project, I added news and a weather forecast through a connection to the Internet. To make the device compact and mobile, it has a battery. The display and controller need to be frugal in terms of power consumption, which is…

This article is about the joy of tinkering, and the project I look at is suitable for all kinds of situations when your hands are full or just dirty. The hardware requirements turn out to be quite low: a Raspberry Pi, a screen, and a gesture sensor. My choice of sensor was the APDS9960 (Figure 1), for which you can get breakouts and an I2C connector for a low price at the usual dealers ($3.20-$7.50). However, you should note whether the sensor has soldered jumpers. The left jumper (PS) controls the power supply of the infrared lamp with the pin for positive supply voltage (VCC) and definitely needs to be closed. The right jumper (labelled 12C PU on the sensor in Figure 1) enables the pullups on the clock line…

In the 1960s, the main high-level programming languages were Fortran, Basic, Algol 60, and COBOL. To optimize code or to provide low-level operations, assembler programming offered the only means to access registers and execute specific machine instructions. BCPL, which was used as a teaching language in many universities, provided a language with a rich syntax, addressed the scoping limitations of the other languages, and had low-level operations such as bit manipulation and computation of variable addresses. Where BCPL differs from the other languages is that it is typeless; all variables are considered to be a word, typically 16 or 32 bits. Programmers can access individual bits and bytes of a word, perform both arithmetic and logical operations on words, compute the address of a word, or use a word as…

If you want to build some fun Pi projects but are still working on your Python skills, then mixing low-code Node-RED with Python might be an option for you. As we’ve discussed in the previous article, Node-RED [1] is a low-code drag-and-drop interface that is extremely powerful for the creation of Raspberry Pi robotic and Internet of Things (IoT) projects. Node-RED’s custom scripting is JavaScript; however, you can also use Python, which offers a platform to play and learn Python basics for high-level tasks such as scheduling and web dashboards while taking advantage of Node-RED’s low-code interface. In many cases, Raspberry Pi features are only available in Python, so even die-hard Node-RED users could benefit from knowing how to integrate Python into their projects. In this article, I look at…

Scratch [1], from MIT, is a graphical coding environment that was originally designed for young programmers. Scratch is bundled with many Raspberry Pi releases, and it lets you create digital stories, games, and animations that communicate with the Pi’s General Purpose Input/​Output (GPIO) pins. There also some options for using Scratch with Arduino modules, however most of these implementations are somewhat limiting. Snap! [2], which was created at the University of California, Berkeley, is an extended implementation of Scratch. The major difference between Snap! and Scratch is that Snap! has a rich set of technical libraries. Some of these Snap! libraries include database and SQL interfaces, graphical trends, matrix manipulation, MQTT (standard messaging protocol for IoT), and Neural Net modeling. These additional libraries and other advanced features mean that Snap!…