What should we run as the next 'Design Challenge Competition' ? Give us your suggestions!

Using a RPi as an IOT gateway.  Could be home automation, agricultural, etc.  Could be various protocols such as BLE, LoRa, etc.

How about an RPi SDR project challenge?

There are a lot of applications where SDR can be used for downloading data and up loading data.

You can do radio astronomy, download satellite images, upload weather data or any one of a number of projects.

Unleash the RPi, do something interesting.

DAB

I can't guarantee that I'll have time to participate, but here are a few projects that have been on my to-do wish-list for quite a while, that might involve a Raspberry Pi:

1. RPi with a robot arm. My plan was to sort something like smarties using a camera and OpenCV. The consistent shapes and bright colours should help. And then for those really brilliant makers expand it to sort resistors. But basic robot arm control projects would be great to see.

2. RPi to control a CNC ?  Probably has been done before, as I recall people using them to control 3D printers.

3. RPi on wheels. I have a basic wheeled framework gathering dust. Even better would be to have it be useful - maybe something I can run along the edge of my roof to clean my gutters? Or make a bigger version to plow the snow out of my driveway.

4. RPi for edge computing. Gather up data from various sources and make the results available on the Internet.

5. RPi to replace cloud-based services. I've heard of people using them to host their own Git repositories. Can they be reliably used as backup controllers or network storage? (This would most likely require the use of attached external hard drives, as the SD cards seem to have much shorter lives).

I'd be thrilled to see anyone doing such projects, as that will help me out a lot too!

Cheers,

-Nico

I too was thinking along the similar lines to ntewinkel point 2: a CNC challenge. The selected challengers would be given a pack with 3-4 stepper motors, a RPi and suitable shield. They could use this to automate an existing workshop machine, build a 3D printer, make a 2D plotter, a 2D pyro-engraver, a metal engraver, wood router CNC machine, a UV plotter for PCB designs or something extra niche whereby the stepper adjusts feed rate of a wooden/plastic or metal workpiece into the cutter/grinder/sander of an existing machine.

The challenger pack would need to contain enough of the major parts to guarantee success but without providing everything.

Rod

Oh heh, your idea is MUCH better than mine - I was thinking much simpler that, just taking an existing CNC machine and having the RPi throw the gcode at it.

Yours is much more interesting

Another need: I work remotely for a company so we have a lot of video conferences (Google Hangouts usually).

Can a Raspberry Pi with Webcam/mic handle video conferencing?

Then place it on a remotely controlled pan/tilt platform, add a small display to show my side of the video conference.

-Nico

fmilburn  wrote:

 

Using a RPi as an IOT gateway.  Could be home automation, agricultural, etc.  Could be various protocols such as BLE, LoRa, etc.

That, with secure network connections as a criteria.

I've noticed a couple of AI dongles coming onto the market recently (e.g. Movidius).

https://medium.com/deep-learning-turkey/a-brief-guide-to-intel-movidius-neural-compute-stick-with-raspberry-pi-3-f60bf76…

There is also this article linking RPI to Google AI.

https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-ai-on-raspberry-pi-now-you-get-official-tensorflow-support/

So how about an AI RPI design challenge.

At some point I would like to see a design challenge involving near-field communication (NFC/RFID).

There are so many potential applications for access control or system wake-up or identification or device tracking or people tracking or system configuration or secure communications or even data acquisition.....

UV4L

https://www.linux-projects.org/uv4l/

Mark