Circadian Pi Desk Light
Blue light in the morning and red light in the evening can help us adopt a more natural circadian rhythm. Blue light is stimulating and ideal to be exposed to early in the day while the removal of blue light allows melatonin production to ramp up so red light in the evening can help get us ready for bed. The Raspberry Pi is the perfect device to help with the timing and driving of long NeoPixel strips. In this post we will show how just a few wires, some code and a tiny bit of hardware we can have a light with some circadian awareness.
LED Breath Stats Mask
Combining Adafruit’s CCS811 gas sensor with a Circuit Playground Express and two NeoPixel Sticks we can quickly put together a mask that displays our breath attributes. This setup will monitor temperature, carbon dioxide, and total volatile organic compounds. The sensor is easy to work with using its I2C interface and pre-calibrated ranges. A mask is an ideal wearable as it provides a place to house the electronics as well as an option for continuous monitoring as it is a hands-free device that could be adapted for exercise or sleep. The gas sensors TVOC monitoring can be used as an indicator of ketosis as it will detect acetone levels on the breath which is a by-product of producing ketones. CO2 levels can also be a helpful indicator of how much glucose is being burned versus fats.
Debug Header for the Feather [M0]
Single Step JTAG Debugging is here and stable for the Arduino. Adafruit's Feather M0 line not only provides 5x the clock speed and 8x the storage of recent Arduino's, but they now have the ability to talk to a debugger. This tutorial will show you how to make a simple FeatherWing PCB and connect to it from MacOS / OS/X.
Schluff - The Sleep Monitor
Schluff is a Yiddish word which means to take a short nap. This project is about finding the ideal environment for quality sleep by monitoring different conditions and biometric data. Ideally, the data from this device would be overlayed with a wrist-based fitness tracker for additional revelations. Schluff records the following: temperature, humidity, light, noise and heart rate. The collected data is sent from a Feather 32u4 (Arduino compatible) over to an iOS device or macOS laptop using BLE (Bluetooth Low Energy). The BLE catchers can save the data locally or relay it up to adafruit.io for storage and graphing.
Pi-Top Assembly
The current generation of single board Linux machines offers an impressive amount of computer power in a tiny little space. Unfortunately, once the keyboard, mouse, display, power supplies and USB peripherals get connected up we are left with a mess of cables and hardware. Fortunately, the Pi-Top fixes the peripheral insanity and provides a 12-hour portable laptop! It's a win-win situation.
NeoPixel Punk Collar
Build the perfect accessory for that next dance party or Burning Man with five color-changing NeoPixels studded onto a leather collar and GEMMA!
Drive a 16x2 LCD with the Raspberry Pi
Adding a LCD to any project immediately kicks it up a notch. This tutorial explains how to connect a inexpensive HDD44780 compatible LCD to the raspberry pi using 6 GPIOs. While there are other ways to connect using I2C or the UART this is the most direct method that get right down the bare metal. This technique allows for less expensive LCDs to be used, it does not require any i2c drivers and it won't steal the only serial port on the Pi.
Raspberry Pi E-mail Notifier Using LEDs
Raspberry Pi’s popularity makes things so easy that it is almost scary. I set forth on a simple starter project of having the Pi show me when new GMail messages arrive. After some searching it seems that lots of people are already talking about how to do this and there are some great examples. Michael over at MitchTech had the most ready to go code which I pilfered from. Adafruit's Cobbler Breakout Kit makes the bread board experience even easier with the clearly labeled pins for each of raspi’s GPIOs.
Playing sounds and using buttons with Raspberry Pi
One of the great things about the Raspberry Pi is how everyone starts with same piece of gear. Since the sound cards are identical on every unit it is trivial to load the drivers and play mp3 files.
This guide describes how to connect input buttons and play audio files using a Raspberry Pi with Python. We make use of the Adafruit's Pi Cobbler Breakout Kit and the python module RPi.GPIO. If you have not already used the raspberry pi as a input device this guide will show you how to wire the pull-down resistors to the GPIO pins and buttons.
Analog Inputs for Raspberry Pi Using the MCP3008
Teaching the raspberry pi how to read analog inputs is easier than you think. The Pi does not include a hardware analog to digital converter, but a external chip can be used along with some bit banged SPI code in python to control read external analog devies such as (but not limited to):
- potentiometer
- photocell
- force sensitive resistor ( fsr )
- temperature sensor
Send Raspberry Pi Data to COSM
The combination of connecting a Raspberry Pi to COSM makes creating a internet of things much easier than it has been in the passed. The Pi with it's easy access to ethernet and COSM's drop dead simple usability will graph all sensor data you send to it.
This tutorial explains how to connect a analog temperature sensor to the Pi and use a small python script to upload that data for storage and graphing on COSM.