Raspberry Pi Official Magazine #131

We love animals and robots here at The MagPi. There’s lots of similarity: both need training, feeding, and nudging with frustration and love. Lately, we’ve tested some incredible bots with arms, legs, and limbs. All are controlled by Raspberry Pi and powered by servo motors. So, we thought it time to limber up and herd them together into a giant Python Robots feature (page 28). If real-life animals are more your thing, check out Rob’s feature on capturing wildlife with Raspberry Pi (page 66). Setting up camera traps to snap wildlife is a great hobby that lets you take only photos without scaring critters. This month’s magazine ticks a lot of boxes for me. But there’s much more to it than animals and robotics. Flick over the page and take…

Software engineer Jonathan enjoys challenging code projects and has been using Raspberry Pi for nearly a decade. trains.jo-m.ch MAKER Living in sight of a railway has proved inspirational for many: Suggs from Madness; Rod Stewart, your writer’s Dad! It was also the catalyst for Trainbot, an automated photography project triggered by the engines and carriages running past the window of maker Jonathan Muller in Zurich, which stitches shots together to appear as complete trains. Acknowledging the geeky but passionate hobby of trainspotting, he created a website on which to view the resulting photos and named it OnlyTrains. Room with a view Jonathan first came across Raspberry Pi when he was still an electrical engineering student back in 2014. He promptly put his first Model A Raspberry Pi to good use…

01 Use a tripod, or other fixing mechanism, to train your camera on a single spot. You will need plenty of footage samples of whatever you’re photographing to train the software to autorecognise their presence. 02 Use Jonathan’s Go code to train the system and stitch together the images it recognises as belonging to the same vehicle or object: magpi.cc/trainbot. 03 Set up the camera, Raspberry Pi 4, and connectors in a sturdy weatherproof case where photos can be taken without the lens getting wet. Use FTP and SQLite to automatically upload photos to a web server for everyone to view.…

Thomas graduated from UCCS with a major in Computer Science and a minor in Statistics, He's an outdoors enthusiast dog dad, and music junkie, magpi.cc/ohsillyscope MAKER Watch the official video for the Arctic Monkeys’ Grammy-nominated single, Do I Wanna Know?, from 2013 and you’ll see sound-waves vibrating in synchronisation with the percussion, lead guitar, and singer Alex Turner before turning into an animation. It’s a simple yet compelling effect and it certainly struck a chord with music fans, surpassing more than a billion views on YouTube in 2020. “My favourite part of going to concerts is always going to be the visuals and the music video definitely inspired me,” says Thomas McDonald. It’s led to the creation of an open-source version of an oscilloscope which displays live audio as a…

AlterD creates retail displays for clients and shares office space with interactive design agency Kakapo Labs, which routinely uses Raspberry Pi in its creations. magpi.cc/kakapolabs MAKER Last issue, we brought you details of the Love Machine ChatGPT project which dished out compliments and sometimes sweets based on cutesy WhatsApp exchanges. Raspberry Pi staffers and TheMagPi magazine readers weren’t the only ones to fall for its AI charms. A company that shares office space with Love Machine makers Kakapo Labs were equally entranced, and soon made a move, proposing a coupling up and a glow-up! The result: Olga The Fortune Teller, a shiny new ChatGPT model designed to appeal to the Insta-savvy influencer keen to check out both the latest skincare options and receive reassuring messages about their future fame and…

01 Olga’s look is very much down to you. Create the fortune teller’s face with or without a computer using items such as cardboard and Perspex, adding micro servos and Pico W if you’d like to include changing facial expressions. 02 Pico W controls the LED lights around Olga’s make-up mirror, as well as the servo motors I creating her facial expressions, while another connects to the Zebra printer to produce the allimportant fortune readings. 03 Use the instruction in the main article to get ChatGPT to tell a fortune. Connect everything to a web server and thermal printer to print them out on demand.…