8 Reasons to Upgrade to a Raspberry Pi 5, Project by Project #piday #raspberrypi

Not that anyone needs convincing but here are some compelling reasons to upgrade your setup with a Pi 5. You’ll still need to act quick to snag one but availability is up compared to the Pi 4 over the past years.

The beefier power lends to better gaming, machine learning, media streaming, and beyond!

Via Make Use Of:

With a far more capable processor and a bunch of extra features, the Raspberry Pi 5 offers far more power than previous models. Let’s take a look at reasons to upgrade to a Pi 5, project by project.

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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!

Computron: A Raspberry Pi Parallel Computer Performs Mandelbrot Calculations @Raspberry_Pi #PiDay #RaspberryPi

The Mandelbrot set is a fractal curve. On one level it is very simple, while on another it is highly complex. The image of the Mandelbrot set was poularized with the rise of chaos theory in the 1990s, as well as posters on an uncountable number of college dorm rooms. Arriving at the Mandelbrot set requires a great amount of computational power. The Computron, a parallel computer made with Raspberry Pi Picos, has the power to compute the Mandelbrot set. Here’s more from Ryan Kolm and Ignacio De Jesus Romo Jimenez:

For our final project, we built Computron, a parallel computer consisting of Raspberry Pi Picos that communicate over a I2C bus. To demonstrate the power of parallel computation among these devices, the Mandelbrot set is computed across Picos. Every Pico computes a portion of the set, while one is also responsible for projecting the set onto a VGA monitor. This projection unit is special, in that it is the only peripheral device on the I2C bus while every other Pico is an I2C controller. We were able to configure the projection unit to dynamically recognize the number of controllers on the network prior to computation, and to distribute work accordingly without a user informing the network directly. In the end, with eight Picos connected together we were able to achieve about a four-times speedup in computation of the Mandelbrot set compared to computation on a single Pico.

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Step into this Musical Cocoonan all-encompassing and transformative audiovisual art experience

Team Musical Cocoon: Zora Che, Hana Chitsaz shared their immersive symbol of transformation over on Hackster.io:

Great music is a window into the sublime. We created Musical Cocoon, an all-encompassing and transformative audiovisual art experience. We built an enclosed “cocoon” to symbolize transformation. A user may pick any song they desire to experience. Inside the cocoon, the viewer’s inputted song is synchronized to lights embedded inside, and the cocoon twists as music climaxes.

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CL-PIGPIO: a Common Lisp interface to the Raspberry Pi pigpio library

pigpio is a C library for the Raspberry which allows control of the General Purpose Input Outputs (GPIO) including hardware devices, like SPI, I2C, and Serial.

pigpio has 1) a direct hardware version (linking with libpigpio.so) that requires the program using it to run as root; and 2) a pigpiod daemon (linked with libpigpiod_if2.so) that allows user-land programs to accesss hardware via network calls to the daemon.

CL-PIGPIO links with both libraries, and allows the user to select whether the hardware or the daemon form is called. If the hardware version is activated but the user’s program is not running with root privileges, an error is generated.

Note pigpio does not work for RPi5 (yet?) because hardware interface is not documented.

See more on GitHub and documentation on pigpio here with a list of other language interfaces.

Art Inspired by the Cosmos #ArtTuesday

A group exhibition at Paradigm Gallery + Studio brings together 18 artists whose work is inspired by the cosmos. Stars, nebulae, gas giants, and more can be found in this lovely exhibition. Here’s more from COLOSSAL:

Curated by Colossal’s founder and publisher Christopher Jobson, Lone Splendor draws its name from John Keats’ poem “Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art” and conjures our enduring fascination with the cosmos and imagined worlds. The exhibition features works in a variety of mediums and styles, including the dense, thread portraits of Danielle Clough, Hari & Deepti’s illuminated sculptures, and Lorraine Loots’ tiny recreation of the enormous Pillars of Creation.

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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!

Edge Impulse Raspberry Pi 5 Santa Tracker #raspberrypi

Catch Santa with AI! Ish Ot Jr. got their new Pi 5 and wanted to test out Edge Impulse. No need to stay up all night, let AI let you know it saw Santa.

Edge Impulse Studio makes it really easy to build a dataset; with your Pi 5 all set up and the camera connected, you can use your browser on another computer, or the Pi itself (the Pi 5’s incredible performance finally makes this not just bearable, but trivial), by just pointing at the object, giving it a label, and hitting Start sampling under Data acquisition. In our case, we captured around 30 pictures of various Santas under the santa label, and 30 pictures of not-Santas under unknown.

Learn more!

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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 Mailblocks: Physical Inbox for Virtual Alerts #piday #raspberrypi

Pick up your dopamine delivery at the Mailblocks. With this project you will only receive push notifications on your phone when you physically “pick them up.” A Pi acts as a router and blocks push notifications network-wide, only sending when your phone is put inside the mailbox.

From Guy Dupont on Hackaday.io:

I find myself easily distracted by push notifications, and Do Not

Disturb just isn’t sticky enough for me. After particularly screen-time-heavy night, I joked to my wife: “push notifications should be like regular mail – you should have to go somewhere to collect them. Once a day, max.”

Seemed like an experiment worth running.

See the full project guide!

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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!