Raspberry Pi ideas / projects

120mA draw on 5V with camera support.

I have come up with a new way to win at chess: I have connected up a Raspberry Pi Zero in my pocket to some buttons and vibration motors in my shoes, so that I can surreptitiously communicate with a chess engine running on the Pi. The project is called "Sockfish" because it's a way to operate Stockfish with your socks.

TLDR : My brand new laptop did not support DisplayPort over USB-C. I had a Raspberry Pi lying around unused, with its RJ45 and Ethernet ports, and I felt that I should be able to use it to bridge the gap between my laptop and my 2nd external monitor. After a lot of trial and error, I managed to get to something that I can comfortably use daily. This is a tutorial to reproduce this project in the form of a detailed writeup

I made this project a few months ago, and got some good feedback when I shared it. I also made a Github repo with scripts and config files (there is a link in the blog post), but I did not get a lot of feedback on it.

Anyway, I’d love to read your thoughts about this project.

I’m also looking for lemmy communities related to DIY tech projects and Raspberry Pis, so feel free to recommend some communities :)

Merlin is a free bird identification tool that uses both computer vision and computer audio to identify birds, with models that have been trained by bird watchers and ornithologists all over the world. It's a powerful tool for seeing what might be around when all you can hear is a song somewhere in the trees.

The audio model that Merlin uses is its own, using a neural net to identify birds from their sounds, analyzing the spectrogram of their calls. It's a standalone model and can be used even when your phone is offline, although that does limit what it can identify to about 700 mainly North American species. If you want to identify more and in more of the world, then you need to take a look at another Cornell project, BirdNET, from its K. Lisa Yang Center for Conservation Bioacoustics.

If you want to build a BirdNET system on a Raspberry Pi, there's an easy enough way to get started, with the BirdNET-Pi project. All you need is a recent Raspberry Pi running a 64-bit version of the Bullseye release of Raspberry Pi OS. I set up my system with the latest Raspberry Pi OS Lite release, which is designed for headless systems and removes the UI components.

Once my system was set up, I used the instructions on the BirdNET-Pi GitHub to download and run the installer. It's a simple script that loads the required packages and configures a Python environment for the BirdNET Lite machine-learning models. The system is designed to take a 15-second sound sample every minute or so, analysing it for bird sounds. The only additional hardware needed is a USB sound card and a microphone, as the Pi's audio port doesn't support a microphone.

Fully compatible with all Raspberry Pi versions including the high-power Raspberry Pi 4.
The LiFePO4wered/Pi+™ is a high-performance battery power system for the Raspberry Pi. It can power a Raspberry Pi for up to nine hours from its battery (depending on installed battery size, Raspberry Pi model, attached peripherals, and system load) and can be left plugged in continuously.

The Raspberry Pi and LiFePO4wered/Pi+™ communicate with each other over the I2C bus. A command line tool, shared library and language bingings for Python and Node.js are available to allow users to easily access the data inside the LiFePO4wered/Pi+™.

Using these tools, the user can access system parameters and configure features such as the wake-up timer, auto-shutdown timer and auto-boot settings. Some of the parameters can be written to flash to make changes permanent even if the battery is removed.

Detailed instructions at link (see posts below for RPI 4)

• Switch OFF USB/LAN IC: If you don't need any USB devices switching off the USB BUS chip off can save more than 100mA of power (!!!)
• Turn OFF HDMI: it is possible to switch off HDMI output by a simple command. This can save you up to 30mA
• Throttle CPU:
  we can down clock the core by changing some parameters in the /boot/config.txt file (power savings likely neglible)
• Disable Wi-Fi & Bluetooth in /boot/config.txt dtoverlay=pi3-disable-wifi dtoverlay=pi3-disable-bt
• Disable on-board LEDs in /boot/config.txt: dtparam=act_led_trigger=none dtparam=act_led_activelow=on power saving around 30mA.

This looks great.

Solar panel

Battery

Charge Controller

Assembled and tested OK:

• This battery does not have a programmable on/off cycle, but there is a different model which does.
• The problem with that is that the battery will deep cycle if it runs all night and charges during the day, which will shorten the battery life. (Maybe there's a way to have the pi sleep and reduce consumption, or at least minimize CPU cycles when there's no solar.

Some hummingbird photos from the pi