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Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

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Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#961

Post by benj111 »

mlang23 wrote: post #960
benj111 wrote: post #904

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. You make reference to fonts. I assume this isn't font in the traditional sense, ie the look (feel?) of a character.

Nope, I actually do refer to fonts as you know them. Long story short, prior to linux kernel 4.19 and brltty 6.0, only those characters that are mapped to a glyph in the currently loaded console font can be backtranslated to the actual codepoint. So to be able to read unicode braille (0x2800-0x28FF) I needed to load a braille font in addition to the standard latin glyph. This dependency on the loaded font has been re…

Interesting.

I assume its for differing reasons? You would want an X to always be an X and what feels most like an X to you, and not be worried about whether the X is Ariel or Times New Roman.

Does it extend further to do italics and such?

I had naively thought the screen would do all the heavy lifting in this situation, feed it text, and it converts it to braille.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#962

Post by kimball »

Aromasin wrote: post #783

I have a (basically non-existent) side business selling LED strips and RPi lighting controllers for surfboards! If you've seem some viral videos with guys surfing around at night, they were probably using my gear :-) Briefly put, I use the Glediator and Jinx! control software on an RPi, which communicates with an Arduino, which drives the LEDs. I put them in a permanently sealed box, water proof it as much as I possi…

This is so cool! It's an amazing idea and it's probably more than a non-existent business market.

I am a complete surf noob (went only thrice for a week or so to a surfing site in the north of Spain), but this sounds like it's probably an important need for some and otherwise it looks so rad you could probably sell them for good money.

Props to you, really impressed and from the video it looks like you've done them very robust too

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#963

Post by FerretFred »

Good question! I have quite a few Pi sipping small amounts of power here, so... Web server, mail server, gopher server, key server, NTP server, SMS gateway (with SMS hat), NTP client network reference clock (Pi Zero), MQTT server, Flightaware box, PiHole, XMPP server.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#964

Post by mmcwilliams »

peteforde wrote: post #900
abrookewood wrote: post #810

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The model looks fantastic. Can you share any details on how the project worked or what your company is?

First: sigh. First-coda: past tense Second: I worked alongside a brilliant team with rare knowledge of geometry reconstruction. We took the 70 images of people, algorithmically removed the backgrounds and then used a proprietary process to create a mesh geometry from the intersection masks of those shapes in 3D space, which all had to be carefully calibrated on the regular. That geometry was smoothed to create a vali…

Was any of the geometry reconstruction or texture mapping done on the Pis themselves? I can imagine with 70 of them you’d have a nice little cluster to work with. Cool project, either way!

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#965

Post by 7373737373 »

jameslk wrote: post #656
tylerjaywood wrote: post #217

I have it set up to run a project where a subreddit has control over the watering of a live plant in my apartment. The pi runs a reddit bot that reads the votes, and can switch on a pump to water. It also collects data about sunlight, moisture, temp and humidity to help inform the decision about watering. Despite many people's preconceptions about the goodness of the internet, I must admit that they do a wonderful jo…

It would be interesting to create a live feed of plants taken care of by remote botanists at an industrial scale. Maybe to train an ML model. Of course I know next to nothing about botany so this probably wouldn't work for some reason.

The website letsrobot.tv lets you do this. Many people on there use raspbis to receive commands from the crowd, control the motors, and stream back a video feed to the site. If you write something into the chat, the robots say it.

I interfaced a toy excavator remote with an Arduino and also put a small Cozmo robot online from time to time. Some people took their robots outside even :)

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#967

Post by gregsadetsky »

sAbakumoff wrote: post #956
gregsadetsky wrote: post #617

There's a bus station across from my studio / coworking space. I can see people waiting for the bus and doing either: 1) staring into the void 2) looking at their watches 3) desperately glancing in the direction where the bus is coming from. I figured that it'd be nice to let people know when the bus is supposed to be there. So, I installed a 28" display on a monitor stand, installed the stand on my window frame, tur…

I am just wondering here - why does not the bus stop have the digital schedule set up? Is it normal for Canada?

Canada's a big country :-) As far as I understand, local transit authorities in every city have the autonomy to decide how they spend their budgets. A digital sign is useful, but is it worth having one at every single stop, considering the cost to buy them, the necessary infrastructure (electricity, internet access), the support costs to repair/replace them, etc.?

Also, paper schedules have been part of all stops here for a long time. Considering that the buses are pretty reliable, the paper schedule typically does the job. And you can always use the transit authority's website or one of the many mobile apps to see if there's an unexpected delay.

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#968

Post by omgmog »

agentultra wrote: post #273

My most recent use has been teaching game development. I have kids and their friends are often around the house. A couple of them asked if I knew how to program games and I've been teaching them using Pico-8. Many of these kids don't have computers at home so as a reward for finishing their first project I'm making them a home console with some RPi's I have laying about and Pico8.

That's great! Do you have an enclosure design for the home consoles, perhaps a physical pico-8 style enclosure?

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#969

Post by abrugsch »

mlang23 wrote: post #761

As a braille user, I was always fond of "laptops" without a built-in display, simply to save ssace, weight and power. I found a braille display which features a small compartment with micro-USB inside. Used a Pi Zero (these days 0w) to transform that braille display into a full-features Linux laptop. I documented the first version here: https://blind.guru/brlpi.html

This is amazing! I played (very very briefly - like literally a 5 mins hands on) with a braille display sometime in the mid 90's. My dad was an early blind computer + speech user. like Apple II with ECHO-II speech synth kind or early and one summer had a visitor to the house with an earlier incarnation of the braille display. The guy had a whole load of adaptive tech with him but the braille display was the most interesing at the time. My dad never got into using anything like that, in fact never really got into portable tech as it was all still very big and bulky up to the point he passed away in 2003. I think he'd have loved getting involved in the Raspberry pi ecosystem and had he still been alive may have nudged me to making more use of them in assistive use cases. Thanks for the link!

Re: Ask HN: What do you do with your Raspberry Pi?

#970

Post by elroyjetson »

I just recently went on a vacation that included two 14 hour days of travel. I setup a Raspberry Pi as a Wifi hotspot for the car, added a 128GB USB thumb drive, loaded it up with movies, attached it to a 20,000mAh battery pack. My wife and son were able to watch movies on their iPads using the VLC iOS app for the whole trip.
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