The latest obsession…

…is Raspberry Pi(s).

At the moment I have 3 projects:

  1. A Pi 2b which is running as a smart mirror.  The idea is that you run a small LCD screen behind an observation (1 way) mirror.  The Pi, with LAMP, boots up and runs Chromium in kiosk mode.  The home page is white content on a black background showing the date, time, today’s weather and a 5 day forecast.  You can put whatever you want on there but this is plenty for me.At the moment, the frame is being built.  It’ll be housed in a nice box frame allowing the electronics to be hidden away whilst still allowing the mirror to be hung flush on the wall.
  2. A Pi 3b running as a security camera.  This was a really quick build but takes a bit of patience to fine tune it.  It uses changes in the pixel value of the image to determine whether there’s been in motion in the area that it covers.  Once it crosses the threshold for this, it starts recording stills and/ore video.  These are saved to local storage but I’ve got it setup to delete these after 1 day and send them to Google Drive.  I’ve also set up a little bash script to send me an SMS when motion is detected.
  3. A Pi 3b+ running RetroPie as a games console emulator.  This is very much work in progress.  It all works but I’m looking for a nice case to 3D print so that I can house it all.  I’ve done a load of experiments with battery packs to make it portable.  The favourite so far is a 20000mah power pack – the sort of thing you use to charge your phone.  This will power the Pi and a screen for between 8 and 14 hours depending on the activity.

I’ll stick some pics in and provide more information when I get time to write more.