Ok It is that time again.
Noon to 3 pm at Blue Door Cafe this Sunday. Come by if you happen to be in town this
Labor Day weekend.
I will bring some power supplies, breadboards, leds, buttons, sensors, pre-loaded raspbian sd cards, and couple extra PI.
I'm already bringing a lot, so don't count on me having extra keyboard and monitor. You should expect to ssh or vnc to your Pi.
I find the "gadget mode" that Bob did at the last LUG very interesting. So I will try to bring along a
Pi Zero and OTG cable.
It was really interesting:
First was a Pi Zero with an SDR dongle picking up ADS-B signals from planes flying overhead.
ADS-B gives the planes position and altitude and it can be picked up with a usb sdr dongle. The
guy used a Flightaware branded dongle and raspberry pi sd image. He was able to pick up planes in a 200 mile radius with a $7 antenna indoors.
Second was a Pi 4 doing remote video stream from a camera mounted on a helmet. So it is battery powered and connecting on WIFI. He wants to have it on Cellular so he has ordered a cellular connection hat for the PI. The idea is to be able to go along virtually with a friends trip, like on a hike. This guy is wheelchair bound, so that is the motivation.
Last was a Pi 1 or 2 working as a garage door opener. Using a reed switch to detect if the door was open and sending a txt if the garage was left open. Also the PI had a relay connected in parallel to the button in the garage.
Next Meetup is in October. The website has the meeting on the 4th Tuesday and the theme as "Organize the Chaos (with Node Red" but we decided on a Halloween theme instead and change to the 5th Tuesday.
I volunteered to receive a free Raspberry Pi kit. So now I am pretty much obligated to come up with something. My idea right now is a picture with eyes that move and track you around the room. Like in those old cheesy horror movies. So my thought is to use a PI with camera and either do motion detection or some image processing. Google has a hat that does image processing in the AIY vision kit and I think there is also a usb dongle too. The last meetup before this one, there was an rc car controlled by a PI with camera running autonomously around a track. ( There is a Bay Area autonomous car bi monthly event -- ask Peter Mui about it) So this will be my project for the next couple Pi days.
Hope to see you there,
Thomas