We all like making New Year’s resolutions. Sticking to them is another matter, and there’s only so many times you can promise to give up cake and fail after three days.
So, rather than resolving not to do something fun, we thought it would be a great idea to find the greatest Raspberry Pi-powered tech projects with a healthy, feel-good vibe. The makers of these projects have done us proud. What we have here are some of the world’s coolest projects to see you into the new year.
The full article can be found in The MagPi 41 and was written by Lucy Hattersley
These tech projects will help you live a little healthier, be a better citizen, and save some money to boot. Not bad, eh? More importantly, you can do all this while having fun.
Motivational bathroom scale
Living a little healthier is a great place to start, so our first project is Dot Silverman’s Motivational Bathroom Scale. “You type your goal weight into the scales using the keypad,” explains Dot, “and the device compares your weight to your goal weight.
“If you’re on target, it’ll give you a flattering compliment. Otherwise, it’ll sass you to get back to the gym. Remember that you’re beautiful, no matter what the scale might tell you.”
E-Wheelchair
If you want to get a little more serious about monitoring health, Cooking Hacks’ E-Health v2 sensor is worth investigating. It enables you to connect nine sensors to the Pi to measure blood pressure, oxygen levels, airflow, body temperature, and glucose levels, along with electrocardiogram and electromyography results.
One Raspberry Pi project maker making use of the E-Health sensor is Preston-based Phil Case, whose life goal is to build an affordable smart wheelchair. Phil’s ‘E-wheelchair’ is mind-controlled, using Neurosky MindWave Mobile and Mindflex EEG products to measure the user’s brain activity. The E-Health system is used to monitor electrocardiogram levels and blood sugars, and he plans to implement a body position sensor.
Phil is raising money towards the development of his smart wheelchair project, and a GoFundMe page can be found for those looking to be more charitible in 2016.
Techfugees
The power of geeks to organise for a good cause was highlighted this year thanks to Techfugees, a UK tech community response to the European refugee crisis first propoed by Mike Butcher. The initiative brings together hackers in the UK to crowdsource ideas. So far, Techfugees has organised two conferences and a hackathon, and raised £5,000 to provide free WiFi to the Calais refugee camp. So how about for the New Year you invest some time in providing tech skills to charities?
Raspberry Pi piggy bank
If your New Year’s resolution is to save more money, then take a look at Alex Strandberg’s amazing Raspberry Pi Piggy Bank. “After a coin is inserted, it’s placed into a stack with the same type of coin,” explains Alex. “The LCD screen displays the total amount of money in the bank. If I want to access the coin from inside, I hold my finger on the sensor to unlock the bank.”
Pibrick Reader
Another Lego Mindstorms-based project to investigate is the fabulous BrickPi Bookreader, built by Dexter Industries founder John Cole. This robot manually flips pages, photographs each page, and then reads it out loud. “We wanted to build a digitizer that could read books out loud,” John tells us. “We were fascinated by the Google Books project and thought ‘why couldn’t we build this at home?’”
You’ll need a Dexter Industries BrickPi device and Lego Mindstorms equipment. The BrickPi turns a Raspberry Pi into the brains for Lego Mindstorms robots. It controls two Lego EV3 motors: one pushes the pages up, and another acts as an arm and flips it over. The Pi Camera Module snaps an image of the page, and OCR software turns it into text. “Just for fun, we used some free text-to-speech software so the Raspberry Pi reads the book out loud,” says John.
Read part two for five more new year projects!
