During these last days of the past year, maybe at least a couple of weeks, I was a bit out of the scene due a back pain that persisted until just a couple of days ago (not yet 100% but better than the past days) and a rush planning some new projects and closing the settings of some new ones. This includes a series of new things that can be considered as the first projects ready to be published during this month of January. I hope that all will sound interesting and you follow them as I start publishing, thankful for all the suggestions, tips, critics and advices you will post in your comments.
Pi-cam II
As many others I have assembled, setup and tested the Raspberry PI with the PiFace CAD 2x16 LCD display. The Pi-cam II will be the evolution of this concept, making a Raspberry Pi based camera where all the controls and settings including the shoot images can be saw and previewed. To have an idea of the behaviour you should think to the Canon 400D controls; the only limitation is that it is not possible to see the live camera image due to the limitations of the small LCD screen. A first article about the HAT LCD screen for the Raspberry PI has already been published few time ago: Essential Raspberry Pi Peripherals #4 : 2.4" Touch Panel and PI Camera module
Hugo evolution
I have already wrote few lines on the first version of the project (Hugo ) and I have also activated an experiment of crowdfunding, without any direct advertisement investment on Indiegogo (link here). This first version is based on the LinkIt ONE board by Mediatek. The new versions will be totally renewed and almost smaller as it will be based on the PSoC 4 with some external components and a couple of strategic innovations: wireless charging and magnetic power on/off to avoid any need to connect the device for charging and no external controls.
Pi-cam II in motion
Thanks to the accessible GPIO pins of the Raspberry PI, the Pi-cam II will be able to drive itself when mounted on the Pi-TiltPan device. Based on a couple of servos, the system will be compatible with both the Pi-cam II and the GoPro, controlled by the Raspberry PI too. A first testing prototype has already been designed mostly to check the two-axis synchronised motion algorithms and successfully used in the TI Educational BoosterPack MK II road test.
The 10$ dual stepper intelligent motor controller
The idea is to create a stepper motor controller cheap and efficient board. Not YAC (Yet Another Controller) but a board that integrating the motor control with the power of the micro controllers will be able to accept high-level commands (e.g. g-code) through the SPI bus. This board will be based on a PSoC 4 and a couple of Half-Bridges L293. Using the same SPI bus multiple boards can be connected together.
