PiPlanter 2 | Update / Dirt / Germs

Hi! In order to do PiPlanter 2 at the scale I want, as always, I need money. I’m applying to this grant to hopefully take this project to unreal new heights. In order to apply, one of the component is assembling a budget. In order to do that though, I need to “complete” the whole project… in my head. I have to be able to think of exactly how I want to do the project. From PCB design to pump system, I have to plan it all in order to assemble a realistic budget. There is a lot of good work that comes with this, like schematics and the budget itself. I’ll for sure upload all of the documentation.

On a more stimulating note: I’ve planted the tomato plants in the same manor that I did last summer and here are some pictures of the growth so far.

Here is the dirt and planted seeds:

Here are some very small sprouts that have developed in the last two days.

PiPlanter 2 | Getting Started Again

So I have decided to re write the PiPlanter from the ground up. In essence, it will accomplish the same exact thing but I’d like it to be a lot more of a stable platform to expand upon in the future. I’d also like PiPlanter to be professional enough to bring to market. First off there are a few things you’d need install & a few modifications you’d need to make to Raspian. First thing’s first, you’ll need to enable SPI in the kernel so:

Comment out the spi-bcm2708 line so it looks like this:

Then run this to make it more permanent.

Now for the real meat of it. You’ll need these packages for SPI and the WiringPi library makes things a whole lot easier for us. This program also relies very heavily

Revised python code next post.

Raspberry Pi as a dedicated “Twitch Plays Pokemon” Viewer

Update: 12 October 2016

Thanks to commenter Fishscene for pointing out the following:

livestreamer for twitch is broken. Twitch made a change to require an OAUTH token and disallow annonymous viewing. livestreamer hasn’t been updated in over a year. Project was forked to streamlink and includes twitch fix:

https://github.com/streamlink/streamlink

I’ll leave this for prosperity, it has been linked to several time.

I’m not too proud of this but my laptop couldn’t handle streaming ‘Twitch Plays Pokemon’ and me doing day to day tasks and I can’t stop watching now. I’ve decided to use a spare Raspberry Pi have to keep the stream open 24/7 on a spare monitor I have.

Here’s a video:

Thanks to Livestreamer it is unbelievably easy to view this stream.

The following command will install Livestreamer:

To make things even simpler, I have also written the following python program that will open the stream to HDMI. You can set the line that runs this program as a cron job to run at boot if you wish.

Which you can get on your pi with:

Once it is downloaded you can run it with:

And it will open on your HDMI monitor.

Accessing both SPI ports on the raspberry pi using python

Turns out it’s not that hard at all! Here’s a video of the whole thing working:

This basically works around concepts I first explained here. It’s still really cool though! SPI is really fast and really easy to use, perfect for a novice like me.

Here are the physical representations and schematics of the setup seen on my desk:

Images generated by fritzing.

Here’s the code that makes it all work!

Here is some further reading:

http://www.megaleecher.net/sites/default/files/images/raspberry-pi-rev2-gpio-pinout.jpg

http://hertaville.com/2013/07/24/interfacing-an-spi-adc-mcp3008-chip-to-the-raspberry-pi-using-c/

http://tightdev.net/SpiDev_Doc.pdf

Thanks for reading!

Using Arduino Micro as a USB keyboard for Raspberry Pi

Greetings from WPI! Here’s a video:

Desperate times call for desperate measures. I recently found out that a club at my school is essentially a hackerspace equipped with 3D printers so I could finally print enclosures for the PiPlanter and the DSFU. But that means I would need to finial the designs for both of them. I needed to find a way to interface with this thing here. So being the idiot that I am, I forgot a USB keyboard, I forgot an analog video cable, I forgot a monitor for the pi and forgot to update the Pi to the latest Raspian build.

What I did bring was an Easy Cap Capture Card in addition to my standard idea-kit which among other things consists of an Arduino Micro, some buttons, some resistors, and wire.

Essentially all I needed to do was connect the Pi to the EasyCap, and be able to send 4 different phrases to it over the keyboard. I needed to be able to send ‘pi’,’password’ (not my actual password), ‘ifconfig’ and enter. I realized that I could easily send this data to the Pi via the Micro as it has the Keyboard. functions built in.

As you can see in the video it worked! And I’m kind of stunned that it did. I can now SSH into the Pi.

Here’s the code for the Arduino:

Thanks for Reading!

PiPlanter | Goals and changes

So I am 151 miles away from the PiPlanter. But thanks to the internet, modern day routers, and wifi dongles I can pretty much control everything about it from here.

That being said, there are a few things I would like to change about the project. First of all, the program itself needs to be more modular. Reason being is that the core program should never stop running, even if changes need to be made. I should be able to screen the main program once, and then never have to stop it ever. This would be advantageous in a few ways but the main example is that the plants will require more water as they get larger, and then less once they start yielding fruit. I could script this, but I think that it would be best to be able to edit the ‘ontime’ value from the program without having to stop the whole process.

I’ll keep y’all posted as I try to implement this.

DSFU – Adding Email Functionality, Better User Experience, Stable Set Adding

Big post for this project, here’s a video:

This version of the code implements a few really cool features.

First things first I added 10 LEDs that display the percent uploaded of the batch. For example if 13 / 100 photos have been uploaded, the first LED will light up. If 56 / 100 the first 5 LEDs will light up. Eventually the 10 junk LEDs will be replaced with a bar graph which will be mounted externally on the front panel of the enclosure.

I am using every single available output on my Pi now, but I was able to get away with adding 1 more LED that I should be able to use by using a transistor array explained here:

On the code side of things, I updated the way photos are added to the set. It uses the same principal as described in the previous post (using APscheduler to do the adding on an interval). All of these changes can be seen below, it’s still very poorly commented however.

Thanks for reading!

Multiple Project Update

Hi guys

So I’ve been eeking out all that I can of my last few days of summer, and there hasn’t been much rain or bad weather at all. As a result, I’m not posting much at all.

Doesn’t mean I’m not working though, I’ve been doing a couple things.

First thing’s first my speaker is done. I just need to get a bunch of video edited, and a big post written.

Secondly I’m still working really hard on my dead simple flickr uploader (dsfu). The cool thing about this project is that it has the potential to be very useful to quite a number of people, so I’m trying to make sure that it is very stable, and very easy to duplicate. This means for the most part I’ve been doing a series of 4000+ photo uploads trying to break my script. It’s happened a lot, and you can check my twitter feed to see my brain melt as I try and figure out the problem. This project won’t necessarily be “complete” until I have a 3D printer at my disposal to create the enclosure I want.

As for the PiPlanter, it’s still a work in progress. The update I did with my last post was a start to something really complete it is in no way finished. I still need to move the camera, and the plants.

Thanks for reading!

Pi Uploader | Reliable Batch Uploads to Flickr

Here’s a video:

So basically the program indexes every single file on the SD card and then starts a scheduled interval process to upload them every single upload to flickr every 20 seconds. From there, it creates a set and indexes all of the upload responses and then walks though that list and adds each photo to that list. Then it emails the set URL with some other data.

I had a lot of problems with the flickr API timing out, and solved this problem by using APscheduler (easily my favorite package). You can see a more in depth chronicling my struggle on my twitter account.

I really want this project to be polished so I probably won’t be done with it for a while. I want to like 3D print a really nice looking enclosure and use a lot of panel mount components.

Here’s the python script:

Thanks for reading!