A Nature Documentary on Your Cat, Made with Raspberry Pi @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

Those of us with cats can lose hours to watching our furry friends antics. At times we can feel as if we’re zoologists, observing some strange new animal for the first time. We can even imagine David Attenborough narrating the curious behavior of our cat. Now we don’t have to. Here’s more from Yoko Li via Hackaday:

Detecting a cat with a raspberry pi and camera is one thing, but [Yoko Li]’s AI Raspberry Pi Cat Detection brings things entirely to another level by narrating your feline’s activities, nature documentary style…. “This feline exemplifies both the beauty and the peaceful nature of its kind. No email will be sent as the cat is not on the kitchen counter.”

Hard to believe that just a few years ago this cat detector tool was the bee’s knees in cat detection technology. Things have certainly come a long way. Interested? The GitHub repository has everything needed to roll your own and we highly recommend watching it in action in the video, embedded below.

See more!

 

5 fun Summer projects for Raspberry Pi #Raspberrypi

Summer is coming and Kevin McAleer shared this video highlighting some fun Raspbery pi projects to tackle now that the school year is over!

Here are 5 fun Summer projects for Raspberry Pi that you have to try.

See more!

---

Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit! Be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Adafruit has the largest and best selection of Raspberry Pi accessories and all the code & tutorials to get you up and running in no time!

The official Raspberry Pi 5 M.2 HAT+ out, plus design is published

The Raspberry Pi M.2 HAT+ is now out and enables connection of M.2 M-key peripherals, such as NVMe drives and AI accelerators, to a Raspberry Pi 5. It provides fast (up to 500 MB/s) data transfer to and from these peripherals, and is available to buy today, from Raspberry Pi’s network of Approved Resellers, priced at just $12.

A nice side-effect of launching of the M.2 HAT+ a bit later has been a profusion of third-party products, like the NVMe Base from our friends at Pimoroni. We want to make it easier to build high-quality PCIe accessories for Raspberry Pi 5, and so we’re publishing our schematics as a reference design. You can also browse our documentation for the M.2 HAT+.

Read all the details in the announcement post here.

Farewell, Chuck E. Cheese Animatronic Band

The band that has inspired nightmarish games, tv shows and movies (and infinite actual nightmares) is finally hanging up the wires. Rumblings of Munch’s Make Believe Band‘s last set have been dragging on for a while now but plans are settled. Chuck E. Cheese will phase out the animatronic band

It isn’t shocking but it still feels like a loss. Chuck E. Cheese will focus more on digital media and screens at their locations moving forward. It’s too bad Boston Dynamics didn’t step in to help them update their bots to be a little more modern, and a little less creepy.

More from the New York Times:

For now, Munch’s Make Believe Band still performs every day at the Hicksville location, which sometimes hosts as many as 20 birthday parties on a weekend day, starting as early at 8 a.m. But by the end of the summer, the band will have played its last show there.

Then the band will be removed and replaced by a Jumbotron-size TV, more seating and a digital dance floor. (Chuck E. Cheese declined to say what will happen to the animatronic figures after they are removed from hundreds of locations across the country.)

Read more and more from Gizmodo

‘Portals,’ Connects New Yorkers and Dubliners #ArtTuesday

For a brief moment Dublin and NYC were linked via the ‘Portals‘ project. The project is a really cool idea linking the two cities in real time with large circular screens .

Unfortunately, as of today, some folks made poor choices and the portal has been temporarily shut down. Hopefully they find a way to re-open shortly.

While open the Portal was quickly gaining buzz and crowds. More from the Smithsonian:

The newly installed “public technology sculptures”—collectively named “The Portal”—form an “unprecedented visual bridge between these two iconic cities,” according to a statement from the Flatiron NoMad Partnership, which presented the installation in collaboration with the Simons Foundation and New York City Department of Transportation Art Program.

See more!

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!

Speculative Fiction Reads from Charles Yu and Ken Liu #AsianPacificAmericanHeritageMonth #APAHM #AAPIHM

Today we celebrate the science fiction of Charles Yu and Ken Liu.  Here’s more from the Hoboken Library:

The story focuses on a time machine repairmen and his relationship with his parents, one of whom disappeared and the other of whom has chosen to live in a time loop.  Charles Yu parents were immigrants from Taiwan and some autobiographical details from Yu’s own life are used in the story.

Learn more!

Charles Yu

Ken Liu

200,000 CDs Transformed Into Art #ArtTuesday

Dead media litter the planet. VHS tapes, floppy discs, E.T. game cartridges, cassette tapes, and more can be found all over the world, transforming what was once a slice of the future into a smelly pile of the past. Some enterprising artists use these dead media to make something beautiful. Artist Tara Donovan has done just that with CDs. Here’s more from Colossal:

Because of their mirrored surfaces, the monumental sculptures catch and reflect light depending on the time of day and confront the viewer with the stunning weight of information. Donovan described the material in a recent interview:

“The silver CDs are commercial discs with music, movies, audiobooks, porn, Jesus, Celine Dion. Everything. The green are CDRs, so they’re recordable. They contain whatever people valued enough to put on them, whether it’s a Grateful Dead concert or a mix. The CD is the last quantifiable object of data that exists in the world. We moved from filing cabinets to clouds. These are relics of a very recent past. I remember when the CD became a thing, it was marketed as the future. They made “forever discs” which were gold. When you think about the amount of information that is in this room is staggering.”

See and learn more!

---

Every Tuesday is Art Tuesday here at Adafruit! Today we celebrate artists and makers from around the world who are designing innovative and creative works using technology, science, electronics and more. You can start your own career as an artist today with Adafruit’s conductive paints, art-related electronics kits, LEDs, wearables, 3D printers and more! Make your most imaginative designs come to life with our helpful tutorials from the Adafruit Learning System. And don’t forget to check in every Art Tuesday for more artistic inspiration here on the Adafruit Blog!