Tools Hack Daily

Tuesday, October 31, 2023

Maker Faire Bay Area 2023 – Maker Highlights #makerfaire

We had a wonderful time exploring and exhibiting at Maker Faire Bay Area 2023.

Maker Faire has been on hiatus the last few years, since the COVID pandemic shut down events all over the world. This year it returned in the San Francisco Bay Area, with a brand-new location right on the waterfront in Vallejo, CA.

Vallejo is a suburb of the San Francisco area, and is home to a lot of art warehouses and build spaces. Artists have been moving en masse out of Oakland and SF over the last few years due to rising rents and limited space, especially during the challenging pandemic years when artist income largely evaporated. The city of Vallejo has welcomed a lot of these artists with lower rents and plenty of warehouse space. So many of the people I talked to were delighted and excited to get to participate in this wonderful event in their own backyard.

There was so much creative energy shared on both weekends, and so many wonderful inventions, events, and art pieces that it was hard to see everything. Here are just a few highlights from the event. I was honored to get to exhibit my LED Jellyfish Swarm and some of the costumes I’ve built over the years, and also to participate in a world-class fashion show with a handful of amazing designers. Take a look!

Featured Makers:

We did a few interviews with makers we met during the event, check them out below:

Imaginative Wooden Characters by Yen Jui-Lin

Yen Jui-Lin starts his process with just a pencil and a blank sheet of paper and ends with these super imaginative characters, Via Colossal

Yen Jui-Lui instills a growing group of characters with playful wiles and whimsy in an ongoing series of wooden toys. Just a few of the artist’s recent creations portray pudgy bears that double as receptacles for spare change or fruit, a downcast rabbit enduring an inner tube, and birds that sprout dried flowers from the tops of their heads. Using a variety of wood types local to his home in Taiwan, he repurposes segments of cypress, cinnamon, and beech, among others.

See more!

Latest Raspberry Pi Imager released #RaspberryPi #RaspberryPi5 @Raspberry_Pi

Version 1.8.1 of the Raspberry Pi Imager has been released, which comes with much better support for configuring a Raspberry Pi Operating System installation.

Raspberry Pi has totally rewritten their Getting Started documentation.

Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi Runs through November 6

This year marks 25 years of Sculpture by the Sea. What started as a day long volunteer lead exhibtion has turned into a massive outdoor sculpture event. If you’re in the area you absolutely must check it out.

Now celebrating 25 years, Sculpture by the Sea, Bondi has been the world’s largest free-to-the-public outdoor sculpture exhibition for over two decades, exhibiting 2,691 sculptures by 1,129 artists from 51 countries. It is visited by up to half a million people each year. Most of Australia’s leading sculptors of the last 30 years have exhibited numerous times including May Barrie, Bert Flugelman AM, Inge King AM, Stephen King, Michael Le Grand, Ron Robertson-Swann OAM, Michaelie Crawford & Julie Turpin, and Ken Unsworth AM. The exhibitions international profile has resulted in some of the biggest international names in sculpture exhibiting, including: Sir Anthony Caro, Phillip King CBE (England), Sui Jian Guo, Chen Wen Ling (China), Kozo Nishino (Japan), Fletcher Benton (USA) and David Černý (Czech Republic).

Take a tour on YouTube and plan your visit now – there are only a few days left to explore!

Monday, October 30, 2023

Getting the Raspberry Pi Official Touchscreen to work with RaspiOS Bookworm

Peter Mount’s Blog determines that, for now at least, you cannot use Wayland with the Official touch screen.

There’s quite a few changes to (Raspberry Pi OS), mainly the use of Wayland as the main window manager & back-end rather than the venerable X11 which we have used for decades in the *nix world.

When the Pi booted bookworm for the first time all looked well. The display worked fine and it entered the initial configuration fine – except there was no touch. I had to attach a mouse to it so I could complete the process.

See the details in the post here. Likely there will be an official fix for Wayland at some point.

Saturday, October 28, 2023

Teacher’s Pi cluster controls digital learning classroom

Mike Reed has created a Raspberry Pi cluster using over 30 boards for his students to connect to during class, Via Raspberry Pi

Mike Reed is a completely self-taught digital learning teacher, and during his tenure he has built not one, but three, impressive Raspberry Pi clusters to make his lessons run more smoothly.

…..

Pupils connect via VNC from their classroom computer to one of the Raspberry Pis in the cluster. Using a GUI program Mike wrote — which autostarts on boot — they sync their school Microsoft OneDrive accounts to a folder on the Raspberry Pi’s desktop. Then they can either open existing scripts or create new ones before beginning their work. The whole process takes about two minutes.

The cluster is run from a “Control Pi”, which sends threaded SSH commands to the other boards to reboot them after each lesson, wiping the OneDrive connections ready for the next class. It has a colourful interface with lots of buttons to show Mike exactly what is happening with each Raspberry Pi.

Learn more!

Friday, October 27, 2023

Raspberry Pi-Powered FPV Scorpion #piday #raspberrypi @Raspberry_Pi

Jeremy Cook shares how this little robot by Hannu Hell features a tail-mounted FPV camera that will take video instead of sting you.

The robot is certainly cute, and its “scorPIon” moniker is a clever play on its Raspberry Pi Zero W controller. The Pi gives it the ability to interface with a smart device via Bluetooth or Wi-Fi for control, and it can stream video from its tail for FPV capabilities. It uses a dedicated UPS battery supply for the Raspberry Pi, while servos are powered by a 7.4 V 1300mAH LiPo Battery. This dual-battery setup is somewhat optional, but it mitigates a few hassles.