Raspberry Pi Projects

So, I've recently had a crash-course through dealing with Raspberry Pi hardware, linux programming, motor programming, and now that I've gotten my feet wet and a taste for this, nothing is going to fucking stop me from continuing with shit I know I can do.

So, what all am I working on?

• Drones
• Cameras
• Sex Toys
• Fireworks
• Smart House Modules
• Electric Vehicle Platform
• Night Vision Goggles

Drones

There are a number of open-source modules on the internet that I'm currently researching.  I have a picture in my head of a medium-range VTOL type drone... actually I've got a substantial repository of my own designs I'll be pursuing in this regard eventually, but for now, the primary development centers around the raspberry pi zero and the ardupilot board to make a small nimble drone capable of carrying a camera.

No current participants- this is an area of research.

Camera Turrets

This is a project  to make a general purpose robotic camera.  A fully developed feature set will include google earth placement integration (so the cam knows where it is and where it's pointing), object tracking, panorama shots, and it can do things like patrol a perimeter and track who's what and when's where.

No current participants, but this is an active area of development of mine personally.

Sex Toys

Because why not? This began as a conversational joke that quickly grew out of control when I realized how easy it is to make sex toys better than 99% of the ones on the market using off-the-shelf components.  The idea for this is two devices, roughly a fleshlight-type pocket pussy thing with a plastic sleeve around the outside  that manipulates it on the user; then there is a correlating version that is essentially a fleshlight-sized tube, out of which a dildo emerges and retracts, so it's basically a very small tame version of the terrifying exercise bike thing you'll find if you google "fucking machine" and click on the image tab.

The end goal of this is basically sex online, and having sex over a wifi network actually allows for some really cool possibilities.  For example, men and women may have different sexual rhythms, and having two machines work independently means that both partners can have totally different sex- she can go fast and he can go slow- and their responses can be more or less 'steered' by the output, ie, how fast or slow the thing runs, temperature and vibration settings, things like that- which means that there is the romantic possibility of getting two people who love each other but have some mismatch or other to finally come together, even far apart.

Then there's the possibility of running simulation games- pair this with an occulus rift for example, and suddenly you don't *JUST* have sex online available to anyone with (probably) $100, and not only that- with off the shelf components that can't be regulated as sex toys, which allows this to circumvent all sorts of idiot "moral" authorities in places like Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia and Thailand. Y'all obsolete motherfuckers can go fuck yourselves, and I'll help, and hopefully real governments can emerge in these countries.

There is currently one podcast participant who's collaborating on this.

Fireworks

This is another "wow wouldn't it be cool if..." conversation that gave me the idea.  Essentially, it comes down to a grid of connections between a positive and negative rail, so that you can literally address the fireworks and send them off individually with a small capacitor bank and alligator clips on the normal fuses (which lets them fall off when the fuse ignites). The basic premise, from my non-electrical-engineer outsider perspective, remembering that electricity is a bit like water in a pipe, but the pipe is solid, so it's kind of like a stack that electrons are popped into one end of and out the other end of, like a newton's cradle, and the progress from the source of the current to the ground- so the idea is to use the pi to send a control signal to a chip that is turning on and off the circuits between ground, or the negative pole absent that.  Maybe this will require two chips, one for positive and one for negative? I will have to do more research and push this along, but the rough idea is to use a 12 v battery as the current source to set off the fuses.

As stated, there is a podcast participant also collaborating on this.

Smart House modules

This is a set of features to control lights, door locks, a house wifi network and media storage, and other basic commodity functions.

Currently there is one podcast collaborator and others possibly interested.

Electric Vehicle Platform

This is a basic controller platform for general use in controlling high-power motors and input and output motor circuits for applications like electric cars and motorcycles, ebikes, segways, hoverboards, and so on.

Currently there is one podcast participant actively researching and collaborating on this- more to come.

Night Vision Goggles

This is a project to take 3 primary sets of graphics visualization- a pair conventional wide-angle cameras with the wide spectrum (infrared and UV) filters removed or replaced, a thermal infrared camera, and a small passive/active radar pinhole camera that can pick up and graphically represent the location of a radio source on a field of view, which is kind of like the splinter cell EMF vision, and it can also activate a flash of electrons and see the response, allowing relatively low resolution 3d mapping of stuff in front of you by reactive hardness- so glass will be non-responsive, metal will reflect greatly, different plastics have different characteristics, etc.  The wide angle wide spectrum cameras already exist, the thermal camera already exists, the radar modules exist but have not to my knowledge been assembled into





So, that's a rough overview of the pi projects I'm planning for the future- it is not a complete list, the one I'm working on today for example is a toy for babies that is based on using a raspberry pi to control a TV with a normal remote control so that a kid can safely play with a controlled set of the TV functionality with a cheaply replaceable remote control that won't be such a loss if it is destroyed by slobber, and I've got some green energy and waste processing stuff that I think will be game-changing that is also going to be based on the pis, but these are detailed separately elsewhere, including the post on the sun-tracking steam turbine here.