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Warm weather is not so far away and that means the outdoor cooking season coming up. With that in mind, I thought it would be interesting to talk about how to build a variety of outdoor ovens. In today's episode of Food Makers, a Google+ hangout on air at 2pmPST/5pmEST, I'll be talking to experts Kiko Denzer and Eva and Max Edelson. Kiko is the author Build Your Own Earth Oven and Eva and Max founded Firespeaking, a website about masonry heaters, wood-fired heaters, and natural building.

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Your Raspberry Pi has on-board connectors for cameras and displays, but until now no hardware demigod has taken up the challenge of connecting an image sensor or LCD to one of these ports. It seems everyone is waiting for official Raspi hardware designed for these ports. That wait is just about over as the Raspberry Pi foundations is hoping to release a camera board in the coming weeks.

The camera module is based on a 5 megapixel sensor, allowing it to capture 2560×1920 images as well as full 1080 video with the help of some drivers being whipped up at the Raspberry Pi foundation.

Considering the Raspi USB webcam projects we’ve seen aren’t really all that capable – OpenCV runs at about 4 fps without any image processing and about 1 fps with edge detection – the Raspberry Pi camera board should be less taxing for the Pi, enabling some really cool computer vision projects.

The camera board should be available in a little more than a month, so for those of us waiting to get our hands on this thing now, we’ll have to settle for the demo video of the Pi streaming 1080p video to a network at 30fps after the break.

Filed under: Raspberry Pi

That’s how. [via Reddit]Filed under: Home

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[Elvis Impersonator] spent three full days but in that time he managed to hand control of everything in his house over to Siri. The technique used is a familiar one. A Raspberry Pi running SiriProxy listens for commands from the iPhone and acts on them based on [Elvis'] predefined configuration. The difference here is that it’s not just a single device (read: lamp) that is being controlled to prove the concept. His video (embedded after the break) shows him operating an entire range of devices in his home.

The demonstration starts off with his garage door being opened and closed. From the YouTube video description we know that he’s using Trendnet IP cameras and it looks like one of them lets him see if he remembered to close the garage.  Next he disarms his home security system as shown in the image above. From there he adjusts the Nest thermostat, switches off the living room lights, and changes the TV channels.

We think the need to give voice commands would get old pretty quickly. But that aside we applaud his work to pull everything together into one single interface.

Filed under: home hacks, iphone hacks, Raspberry Pi

Learn how to use heat-bending to shape your project enclosures. Acrylic is a great material to use for this. It's sleek, durable, and easily shaped.

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[Patrick] wanted to have centralized sensing and control over various parts of his house. His Raspberry Pi Home Automation System integrates a bunch of functionality in one rack mount package, salvaged from an old network switch.

The automation system is based on a Raspberry Pi running Arch Linux, which talks to an ATmega over SPI. We’ve seen this setup used many times before to add additional ports to the Raspberry Pi, but what makes [Patrick]‘s build unique is the amount of control he’s built into the system.

The box controls outdoor lighting at sunset and sunrise, generates wakeup calls, controls IR cameras, and plays sounds based on events. It’s capable of monitoring sump pump water level, the state of a house alarm, and more. A custom REST API is used to interact with the device. This allows for programs on any platform to interface with his home, and acts as an API for his house.

[Patrick] provides a lot of details in his build log, which should be helpful to anyone looking to roll their own home automation system. The source is also provided.

Filed under: home hacks, Raspberry Pi

When testing power supplies or LEDs, a constant current dummy load is needed. These devices will draw a constant amount of current, regardless of the voltage at the input terminals.

[Nick] was looking for a load to test out a power supply, and found commercial offerings to be too large, too powerful, and most importantly, too expensive. This lead to the design of the Re:load, his open source alternative.

Like other constant current sources, the Re:load uses an opamp to control a pass element. While most constant current loads will just use a transistor, [Nick] opted for a BTS117 smart low side switch IC. This device has a built in current limiter, over-voltage protection, over-temperature protection, and short circuit protection, which makes it much safer. The project write up goes into detail on how the device works.

If you need a constant current load, [Nick] is selling kits on Tindie. All the design files are available on Github so that you can build your own.

Filed under: tool hacks

Here’s a collection of tricks to get over some surface mount prototyping issues the next time you find yourself in a bind. But first we have to address the soldering atrocity seen on most of the components above. [Rxdtxd] admits he’s using a firestick for soldering his SMD parts. The non-brand 40W iron is just about the worst thing he could be using (well, we guess a candle would be worse). Try to overlook those joints and enjoy his solutions to a couple of other problems.

First up is what to do when you lift a fine-pitch trace like would be found on a TQFP footprint. The fix for this is to grab a junked transformer and use a bit of the enameled wire from the wrappings as a jumper. The wire is quite fine, and the insulation will burn off when soldered which means you don’t need to strip it first.

The second and third tricks both deal with resistors. As you can see above he placed two 1K resistors on a single resistor footprint to make his 2k resistor. The 0603 packages were both soldered standing on end, then connected with a lead from a through-hole component. The other resistor hack piles five components on top of each other to build resistance in parallel. This is not a great idea as it will fail over the long-term, but it will get you though the prototyping stage as long it doesn’t require precise tolerance.

Filed under: misc hacks

Join me tomorrow at 12:30pnPST and 3:30pmEST for a special Google+ hangout on air with WGBH's "Design Squad Nation" for a demo of several sure-fire fun DIY experiments for kids.

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I took the Make: Believe crew back to see our favorite action-figure sculptor, Scott Hensey, and this time we got to talk to him about the toy sculpting wax he uses.

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Ask around and chances are you can find a friend or family member that still has their early generation Kindle but doesn’t use it anymore. There are quite a number of different things you can do with them, and now there’s a single Launcher that works for all models of hacked Kindles. KUAL is the Kindle Unified Application Launcher.

Loading the launcher on your device does require that it be Jailbroken/Rooted, but that’s really the entire point, right? Once on your device the system is easy to configure. Menus themselves can be customized by editing the XML and JSON pair for each list. The screenshot on the left illustrates some of the applications you might want to run. We could see a VNC viewer being useful, and everyone likes to have games – like Doom II or the entire Z-machine library – on hand when they unexpectedly get stuck somewhere. But MPlayer? Does anyone actually use their ePaper device to watch videos?

Filed under: Kindle hacks

Need some winter excitement? Maybe not the safest idea, but a neat one nonetheless, Howtoons shows how you can pop off the wheels on your skateboard and replace them with filed strips of steel and threaded rod to make a gnarly Iceboard (personally, I’d add some toe straps to that [...]

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Get serious about your shell scripting skills and maybe you can pull this one off. It’s a game of snake played in a BASH shell. It seems like a coding nightmare, but the final product turns out to be organized well enough for us to understand and took less than 250 lines of code.

[Martin Bruchanov] started on the project after pining for an old DOS game called Housenka. It’s another version of the classic Snake game which we’ve coded ourselves and seen in several projects including this head-to-head version using musical recorders as controllers. When using a terminal emulator capable of ANSI sequences the game is displayed in color using extended characters.

We give [Martin] bonus points for the way he wrote about his project. It describes the mechanics most would be interested in, like how the user input is captured and what drives the update function and food generation. The rest of the details can be gleaned by reading through the code itself.

Filed under: linux hacks

What you’re looking at here is a close up of the brand new camera module for the Raspberry Pi, which is in the finishing stages of development. The camera connects to the Raspberry Pi via the onboard CSI (camera serial interface) port. There’s still some work to be done with [...]

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The goal of The Deconstruction is to bring people together (physically and digitally) to share ideas, collaborate, create, problem solve, and have a good time.   The event is open to anyone, anywhere, of any age and skill level.

If you enjoy a bit of good competition and feel like taking on a little bit of a challenge, you should definitely check out The Deconstruction. This event pits a bunch of teams from all over the place against each other in a timed hack-a-thon.  The whole time they are building their project, they’re broadcasting live using their webcams too.

If this brings to mind the Red Bull Creation contest, it is because the root idea is from the same guy [Jason Naumoff]. When I met with him last year in New York, he clued me in that he was working on something much more open ended and inclusive.  The Deconstruction is that thing. He explained that they’re really hoping to reach out to families, clubs, and high school groups as well as the usual hackerspaces.

Join up, make something cool, have fun.

Filed under: news

MAKE Asks: is a weekly column where we ask you, our readers, for responses to maker-related questions. We hope the column sparks interesting conversation and is a way for us to get to know more about each other.

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Zwax demonstrated his Amalettomat robot at Roboexotica 2012, the Vienna-based annual festival of cocktail robotics. One thing I noticed from the lineup is how many aren’t actually cocktail robots! Zwax’s breakfast bot pours batter, cooks it up, then rolls up the crepe when it’s ready. Zwax, a member of Austria’s [...]

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Check out the toy this solder is using. It’s a tiny remote-controlled helicopter. The thing comes in a kit that includes a small tablet through which the nose-mounted camera image can be viewed. These are in use in Afghanistan by the UK Military. The purpose is to help protect foot soldiers by allowing them to perform discrete reconnaissance. What would you pay for this type of life saving technology? How does $31 million for 160 units sound? For that price we expect eight propellers and a cinema quality camera.

The drone is manufactured by Prox Dynamics. They’ve been in development since 2008 and you can bet that a lot of that time went into making it “inaudible” which is the main difference we see between this and hobby-built versions. For now you’ll have to deal with trying to make your own since they will only sell to the government.

The best we can do for you when it comes to video of the thing is prototyping footage from 2009 (after the break). If you have a link to a newer clip we’d love to see it in the comments.

[via Reddit]

Filed under: weapons hacks

[John] was looking for a project for his newly acquired Raspberry Pi and decided to include his dog in the fun. although his finished project looks a lot like an old time camera, it’s actually a web-connected treat dispenser that uses his dog’s email address for dispensation.

Let’s take a look at the hardware from top to bottom. There’s a camera with a eagle’s eye shot of his furry friend waiting for treats. The cylinder below that is the motor which drives the treat dispenser. You can see the chain tensioner on the back which connects the motor to the tube dispenser in the center of the box. Just above that outlet is the character display which gives feedback to anyone watching the dispenser. Nearing the bottom is a hopper that catches the treats, then flips over to dump them onto the floor. And finally at the bottom is a slot for the Raspberry Pi which drives everything.

Most of [John's] projects revolve around CNC work. In addition to the demo video found after the break there’s a second that focuses on CAD design. About half way through that clip he gives us a close-up tour of all the hardware.

[Thanks Joseph]

Filed under: cnc hacks, Raspberry Pi

The first car I remember my parents owning was a 1977 Chevrolet station wagon—blue, with fake wood paneling on the sides. A few months after buying the car, Dad reports, something within the passenger-side rear compartment wall, near the spare tire stowage, began to rattle. Soon, the noise irritated him enough that he disassembled the interior paneling to find and silence it.

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