We got an email from a reporter at CBC looking to do a story on raspberry Pi and projects involving them. It’d be some neat exposure for VHS, and just a nice feel good story about hackable electronics.
If anyone has a project they wouldn’t mind us talking about, or if you want to be featured in the article, please post here. Failing anything cooler I can talk about cheap computers for kids/kodi/home servers/cheap way to control things with GPIO.
I’ll be linking this post to the CBC reporter.
Time to rebuild Marvin 
Face has been made
just needs a voice and some sensors
I’d like to put my jigsaw solving robot on a pi, and i could sure use the exposure.
We are currently looking into using a raspberry Pi to control part of an experiment at TRIUMF. I believe another experiment has already implemented one.
@climber whoa, super interesting. Would you be willing to talk about it, or perhaps write a short description? The reporter is going to get back to us next week, leaving a few days for us to collect the projects.
@Rob_MacKenzie I think it’s awesome too!
I’m super busy for the next 7 days but I can look into it. I should check with other group members to fact check all my information and to see what they’re willing to share first. Could you please send me an email to remind me and to let me know the deadline for the info? bk00tte at triumf dot ca (change any '0’s to 'o’s)
Thank you.
p.s. we also have an Arduino randomizing a signal. It’s major overkill.
whats the deadline for this?
I built a photobooth in the spring which I used at my wedding, and then at 6 other friends’ weddings and events this summer! It was a huge hit.
It uses a Canon DSLR camera connected to a Raspberry Pi. The Pi’s GPIO pins are used with some basic electronics to be triggered by a handheld big red button, and some blinking status lights on the front of the camera. The Pi runs a python script that can either upload photos immediately to Instagram, or add them to a slideshow that can be shown on a TV or projector via the Pi’s HDMI or composite video port. It uses ImageMagik to crop or resize images (to Instagram’s specs).
The camera has a remote flash trigger, and a really nice 12mm f2.0 wide angle lens, so the photos turn out great.
The project took a weekend to build (mostly done at VHS), but it took months to refine and perfect. Reliability, timing, network uplink, exposure/focus, and little UI/UX details were unexpectedly fiddly.
Here are some photos taken by it:
Wow, that photobooth looks amazing! Well done man.
I did a relatively similar thing, but it captured five second videos with a
webcam, big red button and all. Yours looks like a million times better
though.
Ok, so, Greg from CBC is going to come down to the space tomorrow for open night with a camera op.
Anyone with an rPi project that they don’t mind being shown, or talking about, come to the space before 8:00 PM tomorrow. I’d like to see some that are headless and some that show they are “computers” that can run a screen. I think I’ll bring one and have it just do kodi, as that’s a nice polished product that’ll look good on camera.
@lukecyca, any chance you have the parts and could re-assemble? Yours looks like it has the most fit and finish of the projects mentioned.
@climber if you have any more details about TRIUMF that we could casually throw out there, that’d be great. If not, do you mind if we say something like “TRIUMF uses them for control”?
@jon I’ll try to get the LED wall going on one, and maybe make sure the Laser/isvhsopen.com is looking spiffy.
@iMakeRobots Did you manage to get your robot running on the pi?
If anyone has anything else, let me know if you’ll be coming down.
I have it mostly running. I think I can fit it into the car. Maybe it should be a VHS project…?
Unfortunately I’ll be unable to get down to the space before Wednesday, but I’ve finished updating the code for the SpaceTime RPi, and anyone can get it from GitHub onto the RPi if they want. The process should be quick and painless, assuming I didn’t leave any bugs. 
From the VHS network (wifi should work fine), open an SSH connection to the SpaceTime IP. Putty works just fine for this. Username and Password are written on the top of the wooden SpaceTime enclosure. Run the following commands:
> cd /usr/local/bin/SpaceTime
> sudo git pull
> sudo reboot
And hopefully it’ll work with the new isvhsopen.com!
I’ll plan to be there with my photobooth. It’s half assembled still and I should be able to get it working for 8pm.
Done
I got permission to tell you about what we’re doing.
I’ll send more interesting tidbits tomorrow afternoon if I think of
anything, but basically the Pi is a flexible (hackable), low-cost
control system for our ion trap that we plan to start using in the near
future. We’re programming it with Python so it should also be relatively
user friendly. It can be integrated with other TRIUMF control systems to
manipulate short-lived isotopes with high voltages.
I know of at least one other experiment using one.
Science empowers technology and technology empowers science!
Brian
Janet and I cleaned up the space yesterday a but (it was SUPER dusty)
There are still large amounts of stuff that are piling up, it’d be nice if people could tidy up a bit before CBC comes, or at the very least, don’t make it super messy again 
Thanks for calling, @Rob_MacKenzie. I’d had an exhausting day and the jigsaw robot wasn’t running, so I had to pass.
I’m slightly less embarrassed than had it not worked on camera.
Did it go well?
It went super well. We were able to demo a bunch of stuff, all worked!
Shame your robot wasn’t ready, but considering the super short notice, yeah, I was surprised we had as much working as we did. We were hoping to get a shot of the vending machine selling one, but we couldn’t get it to accept my cash.
Big thanks to everyone being there for speaking, not minding being in shots, and keeping VHS looking good.