10 Creative And Astonishing Raspberry Pi Inventions!

Necessity is indeed the mother of invention, but the $35 Raspberry Pi has helped many in their quest for something new!    Saturday, October 19, 2013:  Right since the debit card sized mini computer - Raspberry Pi went on sale last February, the hardware hackers from around the world have been busy customising the PC to be everything from a gaming console to a mini Linux laptop to a supercomputer. And the same is the reason why the sales of the mini PC have skyrocketed, with an estimated one million PC hobbyists grabbing these up. The Raspberry Pi which is basically a stripped-down Linux PC that consist of tiny circuit board, ARM-based CPU, a graphics processor, and a few pins and ports is also a blank circuit board based canvas from where the creativity flows. Here we bring to you some niche Raspberry Pi inventions which are worth a look! 1. Picture perfect Raspberry Pi David Hunt, a Linux software engineer and photographer had been thinking about embedding a computer in a DSLR camera for years, but always found high costs to be a barrier. But then came the Raspberry Pi to smash that hurdle. With the $35 he re-purposed one of his old battery grips into a camera accessory that can transmit just-shot images in real-time to a computer via Wi-Fi, and also control the camera remotely from a computer. "There’s plenty of work to be done on the software side of things, but the prototype is working," he says. 2. Supercomputer Raspberry Pi Only because the Raspberry Pi is sized small, it doesn't mean that it should not be taken seriously. Simon Cox, a computer engineer at the UK's University of Southampton together with a team of engineers had built a supercomputer by tying 64 Raspberry Pi systems together. Cox also enlisted the help of his 6-year-old, LEGO-obsessed son, who built the supercomputer's rack out of the plastic building blocks. The University's computer cluster has a total of 64 processors and one terabyte of memory (care of 64 different 16GB SD cards, one for each Raspberry Pi), and uses ethernet switches to link the systems. 3. The beets Scott Garner's Raspberry Pi creation mixes vegetables, music, and wordplay. His BeetBox allows users to play drumbeats by touching real beets. Garner says that his BeetBox was easy to put together, thanks to the versatility of the Pi platform. "The biggest challenge was getting [the Pi] to communicate with the capacitive touch sensor," he says. The beets, however, proved less pliable than the Raspberry Pi. "Things got tricky when the vegetables dried out. Their capacitance changed, which threw the sensor off," Garner says. 4. Palmtop Pi “I just wanted to see if it was possible to make an ultraportable, mobile Raspberry Pi that you can take to go,” explains Nathan Morgan, founder of the laptop parts site Parts-People.com. Morgan's Pi-to-Go minicomputer sports a 640-by-480 pixel display; a touchpad; a 64GB solid-state drive; and support for Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and HDMI. "It's not the lightest or thinnest handheld," Morgan was quoted in an interview, "but I didn't care about that when I was building it. I just wanted it to meet all the criteria for being a portable Pi." 5. Beer can keyboard While this Beer Keyboard isn't the most practical peripheral in the world, it's possibly the most inebriating. Powered by Raspberry Pi, this QWERTY keyboard for the over-21 crowd is tricked out with 44 beer cans from a Prague-based brewery. The company Robofun Create built the system, which requires you to tap the letters on the tops of beer cans to produce letters on a plasma screen above it. 6. Life of Raspberry Pi A group called FishPi is ready to send the Raspberry Pi to sea. The group is planning an Atlantic crossing for a drone boat with its navigational systems controlled by the single-board computer. Measuring 20 inches from stem to stern, the vessel is powered by a 130-watt solar panel. As the boat crosses the Atlantic, it will collect scientific measurements. "We wanted to do something that went outside of the normal bounds of conventional thinking," the group explained on its website. 7. Teeny tiny arcade Jeroen Domburg didn't know what to do with this machine when he bought his first Raspberry Pi. "It's always useful to expand your toolset with something powerful and cheap," he has said. What he eventually cooked up is perhaps the smallest arcade-style gaming cabinet in the world. The cabinet is made of laser-cut plastic and has a 2.4-inch TFT display. 8. Pi Laptop SK Pang Electronics took a slightly different tack in creating a portable computer with the Raspberry Pi board. It uses the monitor from the rear-view camera system of an automobile, a choice that required some power-supply tinkering, a mini-wireless keyboard, a USB power pack, and a cool laser-cut transparent base. 9. Solar-powered FTP server Raspberry Pi owners hungry for a serious challenge can consider building a solar-powered FTP server. The setup here includes a custom-built Raspberry Pi case with a solar panel on one side, and, on the other, compartments for the computer, with holes in all the right places for I/O ports and four AA rechargeable batteries. "You'll always have instant access to all your digital files, from anywhere with an Internet connection, and it won't cost a penny on your electricity bill," says David Hayward, who provides full details about the project here. 10. Sky Pi rig - Pi in the sky Chasing high-altitude balloons has become sport for many who send GPS-enabled gear to the outer limits of the Earth's atmosphere, and then chase it as it floats down. And give an extra edge to his ballooning friends, Dave Akerman created his gear with a custom Raspberry Pi computer which sported a GPS radio, a webcam, and various sensors. He claims that, thanks to his Sky Pi rig, he was able to capture some of the highest images ever sent down from an amateur flight. He has blogged about his achievement and also posted a fascinating Flickr collection documenting his balloon's voyages.