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

14rhb I will surely apply for this design challenge (if they conduct) as I wanted to create my own 3D printer for a long time.

Wow most of what you have said are on my To-Do list too ntewinkel

I just googled and could find some projects for the topics you had mentioned which can be referenced (but I have not tested these myself),

1.  RPi Robot Arm - https://youtu.be/bL8fScdBOos

2. RPi Control CNC - as you say 3D printers can be made out of it plus white board drawing robots - https://youtu.be/jYue-6A1xE4

3 RPi to replace cloud services - when I search I come across something named Open Source Own cloud - https://www.techradar.com/how-to/computing/how-to-set-up-a-raspberry-pi-powered-cloud-service-1316017

I’ll second BigG  ... an AI Raspberry Pi challenge will be great ... there are more platforms where predefined libraries (MATLAB - https://in.mathworks.com/solutions/machine-learning.html ) and Machine Learning models (AWS ML - https://aws.amazon.com/machine-learning/ ) are available already which we can easily integrate into our projects. What’s more? Python scripts can be used to create a Machine Learning model of your own (Python is preinstalled in Raspbian OS).

You can use Raspberry Pi with MATLAB - https://in.mathworks.com/discovery/raspberry-pi-programming-matlab-simulink.html  So a Raspberry Pi with MATLAB license bundle will be a great kit for this. If you add some sensors to the kit like temperature sensor, pressure sensor then this can become an IoT AI RPi (IAR) challenge.

UV4L

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

Mark

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.....

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.

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.

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

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

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