Facial recognition: OpenCV on the camera board

Liz: This post comes from Heather and Trevor Grant, who work with a student-led charity called The Best of Both, based at the British School of Brussels. Thanks both!  For the past five years The Best of Both initiative has worked with state-sector rural schools around Bolgatanga in the Upper East of Ghana to help improve access to water, food – through school gardens – and educational resources (books and access to ICT).  Last year, computer labs based on NComputing… More

Cristos Vasilas from Dash One, a lover of astronomy and electronics, has been trying out the Raspberry Pi camera board as an astrophotography tool. He’s captured some amazingly sharp, short video of the moon, and of Saturn, rings clearly visible, swinging across the sky. Cristos used foam packing material to attach the camera board to the eyepiece of his telescope, and mounted the Pi on the barrel of the telescope with velcro. He says: “A dedicated Celestron 5M pixel imager costs… More

If you’re a beginner with a Raspberry Pi, things just got a whole lot easier. We started this project with the premise that throwing people in at the deep end and making them jump hurdles, to mix my sporting metaphors, is a good way to get them to learn stuff. It is: but it can also put some people off, sometimes terminally. And we don’t want people to put their Raspberry Pi down in horror after five minutes. So with… More

Team MagPi have wiped their bleary eyes after celebrating their first anniversary issue, and have come up with a magazine for June that will have you playing the Archimedes version of Elite on your Pi, writing racing games in Scratch, and making music with Schism. You’ll learn how to solder up a LED matrix, find out about the growing number of expansion boards available for your Pi – and this month, there’s a very special cover feature. You might remember… More

Update: copied Alex’s summary of the changes to Raspbian from the comments into the post. We’ve just posted updated Raspbian, Debian and Arch Linux images on the downloads page, all of which include our most recent firmware and kernel. Raspbian has the following significant changes: Updated Scratch image (significant performance improvements). Updated armv6-optimised Pixman library. Updated armv6-optimised memxxx() functions. Updated raspi-config with new layout, and new functionality (setting hostname and enabling camera support). Native mmap support in the bcm2835 ALSA… More

We’ve been talking a bit about London Zoo’s efforts with the camera board to set affordable camera traps in Kenya, looking not only for wild animals, but also for poachers. This is incredibly important work; rhinos, elephants and other terribly endangered animals are targeted for their body parts, which fetch large sums in some markets. This project is one of several up for a £500,000 grant from Google, but to get that grant, they need your help: please go and… More

SailBot 2013 International Robotic Sailing Regatta is a robotic sailing competition in which the goal is to create an unmanned sailboat that navigates through a variety of challenges with limited, if any, human control. We met the Aberystwyth Sailbot team at the recent Cambridge Raspberry Jam. Their Sailbot uses a Raspberry Pi to make sure its tiny little crew make their way safely back home and we liked it so much that we are proud to be sponsoring them. Daniel… More

We’re getting back to the UK late on Thursday. First stop: a Heathrow branch of WH Smith. I shall forestall the obvious question: it’s a Pibow in Toxic, by Pimoroni. More

A thread about Raspberry Pi ended up on the front page of Reddit today, and it’s a doozy. There are thousands of people taking part, and some Pi projects mentioned that we’d never even imagined people taking on. Some of them made our little hearts swell with pride. Teaching machines for schools in Ecuador, prosthetic knees in the USA, musical instruments controlled by eye movements for disabled people, solar flare detection, wood engraving, pocket-money analyser – there’s something here for… More

There’s a question we’ve been asked very frequently about the camera board. A number of you want to use it for night-time photography, and ask if we can remove the IR filter. Notably, London Zoo are planning to deploy the camera board and Pi in a number of camera traps in Africa, where they’ll be looking for nocturnal animals and for poachers. The problem is, we source the sensor/lens package as a sealed unit from Sunny, so we don’t have… More

New in the Swag Shop: big vinyl stickers, just the right size for hiding any logos you don’t like on the front of your laptop, and little vinyl stickers, just the right size to cover up the logo on the Windows key on your keyboard. These things are tough, and have what I understand is called “high-traffic glue” on them to make them stand up to your typing. There are some other new goodies available this week too: a logo… More

Update: Daniel’s blog post here provides some more info, including how to install the technology preview on Raspbian today. And Pekka’s blog post here has some very detailed technical information on the implementation of the Weston backend. If you’re familiar with the Raspberry Pi desktop experience, you’ll have noticed that windows on the desktop can be a bit slower to move around than you’re used to on your PC or laptop. This is because X, the windowing software (or composition… More