Raspberry pi - projects and ideas

[Nick]

Please help me/us find ideas to use the awesome hardware that is the Raspberry pi.

The only things I can think of are robot controller and portable, retro-gaming box. That and a computer to run hard drives for off loading pictures while camping.

[Brad]

House automation, time lapse photography, balloon photography, web controlled motion detecting automated Nerf gun defense system.

[Brad]

What about a digital picture frame that streams live from Randomland or another online picture repository?

[Brad]

What about wireless wilderness media storage? So you can connect your cameras or phones and download and share photos and videos in the woods.

[Nick]

Like wilderness wifi?

I like the picture frame idea. It would be cool to have a communal repository of pictures that people can all have their frames pointing to.

[Brad]

More ideas.

Retro gaming machine: Put a pi inside the shell of a broken NES, SNES, etc... Put all the old game emulators it along with the Roms for all the games ever. Then take some old SNES controllers and hack them to be USB connected. Then use HDMI output to connect to TV. Awesomest retro gaming machine ever. 16 bit in HiDef woo-hoo!

RC submarine: Pis have no cooling Or ventilation requirements so they can be placed inside a waterproof container. This would allow you to build an RC submarine which would be really cool. You could use a USB camera to see where you are going. Not sure about Bluetooth penetration distances in water... Might be something that needs looked into. Rising and floating would be interesting problems too. If you were too lame for a sub you could always create a boat with an underwater camera at least.

[Nick]

If I remember high frequency is crappy under water. Most just bounces off the surface. And according to this rather awesome site, water just absorbs the signal, because that's what water does to microwaves.
http://www.societyofrobots.com/robotforum/index.php?topic=8408.0

I do like the guys serial-over-sonar idea.

Idea:
      WIfi/bluetooth cave exploring robot. Complete with USB cameras and lights
The problem here is rock is even less permeable to signals then water is. Might have to have a cat5 tether.

Idea:
      Arial sensor and photography platform
Take pictures and read weather conditions from an RC plane/glider or dirigible.

[Brad]

With a sub a cat 5 tether wouldn't be a terrible idea. Give you something to haul it back in with when it inevitably fails underwater. Less scuba required that way.

I've always like the idea of underwater and aerial photography. With aerial it is much more cost effect to use balloons rather than rc copters or planes. Also there is a lot less chance of them crashing into your face.

Plenty of air and plenty of water around. Caves are a little harder to find. And how do you get it back if it fails or gets stuck?

[Nick]

Big tires and pull the tether back?

[Brad]

As long as it doesn't get stuck between two rocks or fall down a deep hole or something. Not saying it couldn't be done or anything it just seems to imply greater risk than air or water. Also the terrain would be the most difficult. If you want to try it though I am totally up for helping

[Brad]

Nick and I talked about a vehicle/not which would be a boat/raft that could lower a tethered submersible with lights and a camera. This could communicate via cat5 or some other cable. That removes the problem of the water eating all the microwaves.

Of course for simplicity you could create just the sub and still have it tethered. Then just drop it off the edge of a boat or dock.

Maybe attempt it in stages? First stage tethered sub. Second stage RC raft which lower a tethered sub.

Or just scrub the whole thing and go ballooning.

[Brad]

Blah, you don't need a raft or boat or anything to drop your submarine! All you need is a floating antenna! Super simple and then you can use WiFi or bluetooth with no problems. Then as the sub drives around it just drags its floating antenna along with it. So much easier...

[Brad]

Sorry for the idea vomit...

What about using Wifi to control the ROV? You can connect the antenna to a USB wifi dongle in the ROV and have it host it's own ad hoc network. Then you could use a smartphone to connect to the network and browse to the ROV's IP on your phone's browser. Then you could control the ROV via the webpage... It would also let you have multiple people connect to the ROV and watch it's video feed (or control it, which would be weird with multiple people fighting over control).

Wifi should be plenty fast to stream video and do all the controlling and monitoring you need. If you need more distance (either between the antenna and the ROV or between the operator and the floating antenna) you could make the floating "antenna" actually be a wireless router connected to the ROV via cat 5. This would cause a bunch of issues namely now you have to drag around a much heavier float and you have to power the router necessitating big batteries on the float and other crapola.

[Nick]

That could work too. And I also think Wifi is better then bluetooth for anything like this (much more flexable).

I also think it would be better to have a floating, waterproof enclosure for all the fancy bits and have the camera lowered from there. But that is all based of my guessing. I have no idea how stable a small craft like this would be. You would probably need very calm water to get useable video feed.

I not have a desire to get some USB headers, mount them to a plastic box and try to waterproof them. I wonder where you can get that black resin they pour into transformers to make them waterproof.

Should we make a project-specific thread for the aquatic camera platform? What are the design goals for this project?

[Brad]

We could totally make another thread if you want as yhis one got sort of taken over.

If you lower the camera then you are stuck with a maximum depth of like 10' due to having to use USB to connect to the camera. All of the resources I've seen for photography and video recommend no longer than 10' and for faster speeds (USB 3.0) more like 6.5'. Also if you want to use pi camera (if they ever stop being back ordered) you can't even use that much.

I think we could create a backup water proof container to keep the pi in if necessary. Just in case the main PVC case leaks.

Our goal I think, should be to create an underwater ROV capable of a depth of 20' with a live camera feed. Little grabber hands and other fancy stuff not necessarily included.