Not that sort of Java

Back when we moved into our offices, I tweeted about the fact that we were all feeling itchy, snappish and antsy (like some dwarves who didn’t make the Snow White cut), because we weren’t able to make proper coffee in the office. Things were so bad, we had resorted to instant.

We didn’t get around to getting a machine – we’ve been kind of busy. Instead, we were spending far too much money at the nice Italian cafe across the road. And then, to our great surprise, a lovely, shiny bean-to-cup espresso machine arrived on the doorstep. It was a gift from an American company called Zipwhip, who are in the cloud texting business. Better still (and yes, we were surprised to discover that there is something better than a free coffee machine), they’d hooked it up to a Pi and a homegrown circuit board they’re calling Textspresso, which turned it into a connected cloud texting device. The Zipwhip folk sent us instructions on setting it up so we could send a text message to a phone associated with the machine when we were on our way into the office in the morning, and it’d grind some beans and make a coffee just in time for our arrival. Cloud texting, you see. It’s the caffeinated wave of the future.

And they sent us this rather brilliant video.

Here’s the machine (it’s the same one from the video) in situ at Raspberry Towers – picture taken this morning. Note the glamorous view we have of the car park.

It sees a lot of use, and yes, we really do keep it that clean. (Gordon is not allowed to leave in the evenings until he has done some judicious sponging.)

We’ve been using Rob B’s phone to control the machine: it’s him we send texts to when we want a coffee, and the message is forwarded via the cloud to the Pi in the machine. The Pi then texts the person who’s ordered the coffee to let them know when their drink is ready. (Thanks to the cloud, it can text us even though it’s not a mobile phone.) This works brilliantly, but we have found that if any of Rob’s friends sends him a text with the string “coffee” in there (“Hey Rob! Fancy meeting up for a coffee later?”) the coffee machine springs into action, and is prone to widdling all over the floor if we’ve forgotten to stick a mug under the outlet. Friends of Rob: a plea. Use email if you want to invite him out.

Zipwhip have made exhaustive instructions for adapting your own coffee machine available, so you can get coffee on your own carpet. (Seriously. We really need to get more regimented about leaving mugs under the thing, guys.)

Thank you so much, Team Zipwhip. We’re overwhelmed by your generosity, and you read us just right: coffee is an instantaneous and powerful way into our hearts. We raise our mugs to you.

Speaking of mugs, you can buy them in the Swag Shop. Go on. You know you want to.

1 comment Tags: John Cass, Lilongwe, Malawi, Raspberry Jam, Scratch, Young Innovators 9 hours ago by liz

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We’re seeing Raspberry Jams pop up all over the world these days: Eben and I spent three days at the Jam in Tokyo last month (pictures and presentations from that will be coming soon), and an afternoon at the Silicon Valley Jam the week before that. We see video from a lot of these events, but this video, sent to me by John Cass from Young Innovators in Lilongwe, Malawi, is my favourite so far. It was recorded by a Malawi TV station, and ended up on national network TV. There were nearly 100 attendees, a whole lot of Scratch games programming, some brewing, an electric motorbike being tracked by GPS, music-making, and much more.

John and the Young Innovators team have been loaning Pis to interested people in Malawi, as well as donating them to schools and kids’ groups. A number of Pi-based projects are being developed by those people for the next Lilongwe Jam in September. He tells me that there’s a remote lock for a warehouse in the works, along with the development of an IT course for a refugee center, and an application for managing patients at a local clinic.

Young Innovators Malawi do some wonderful stuff; they are a non-profit, volunteer group running events and competitions to inspire young people all over Malawi to get involved with innovation and technology. If you’d like to support them, please visit their website, and consider making a donation. Your donations go towards funding Raspberry Pi kits, bundled with learning materials, which are given to kids and schools.

16 comments Tags: camera board, facial recognition, OpenCV, Pierre Raufast 1 day ago by liz

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I’ve been talking to Pierre Raufast for a little while now about his efforts to get OpenCV ported smoothly to the Raspberry Pi camera board (which is available from the usual suspects: head to the links under “Buy a Pi” at the top right). OpenCV is an open-source library for real-time image processing, and is used in applications like gesture mapping, motion tracking – and facial recognition.

You might recognise Pierre’s name from a project we featured here back in April. The Magic Mirror recognises people looking into it, and talks to them accordingly. Back then he was using a webcam; now he’s got his hands on a camera board. The Raspberry Pi camera board is a better fit for the device, with a much higher framerate and better resolution.

In most webcams, OpenCV works natively. But because the Pi camera board isn’t a USB device, some work needed to be done to get it up and running. Pierre has done a bang-up job, and has made a seven-part tutorial available to get you up to speed. When you’re done, you’ll be able to see results like this:

Thanks Pierre – we can’t wait to see what you do next!

46 comments Tags: Adafruit, privacy, Tor 2 days ago by liz

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Some housekeeping first. As you can see, I’m upright and typing again. Turned out that I had a really unusually nasty dose of ‘flu. It started as what I thought was a bad cold, but kept getting worse, until it got to a point when I couldn’t get my head off the pillow and thought I was dying. Then it got even worse, and I started wishing I was dying.

I’m much improved, but still a little wobbly. Doing anything (walking up the stairs, watering the garden) still leaves me feeling like I’ve just run a marathon, so I’ll be taking things slowly for a few days. On that note, if you want to email me this week, it’d be great if you could wait until next week if your mail isn’t blindingly urgent: I’ve got a backlog of hundreds and hundreds of mails to work through at the moment because I haven’t been able to check them while I’ve been off, and it’s going to take me a while to get through them all.

I’ll be working on a post about what we got up to with the amazing Pi community in Japan for later in the week, but for now, here’s something topical.

Our good friends at Adafruit have been working on a Tor proxy box based around a Pi, which directs your internet traffic through the Tor routing service. Every network packet you send is encrypted and decrypted multiple times, and each time this happens the packet is sent through a number of relays (like onion skins: Tor stands for The Onion Router), picked at random from the thousands that make up the Tor network, before reaching its intended destination. This makes it very hard for anyone to analyse your data to find out who you are, or where you are.

Tor routing is for anyone interested in confidentiality, internet freedom and privacy. It’s of enormous use for those who need to work on confidential business, or for those in places where internet traffic is monitored by governments or other bodies. It’s used to search for forbidden material like birth control, dissenting political voices or religious debate in places where a country is behind a firewall and traffic is strictly controlled (there are many users in mainland China); in the western world it’s used by many to protect personal data from marketers, and by those who worry their data is being snooped on. Activists and whistleblowers, for whom anonymity is important, use Tor. A healthy paranoia about your internet traffic is a good thing: just because you’ve got nothing to hide doesn’t mean that you’ve got nothing to fear. I would hate to be labelled a terrorist just because I express an interest in pressure cookers and book a lot of aeroplane tickets.

You can, of course, run a Tor proxy on any machine, but the particularly nice thing about Adafruit’s Onion Pi is its portability. This means that you’re not restricted to using it in one place; you can set it up in front of the router (it behaves as a WiFi hotspot) in the office you’re working from, in your hotel room or at your Mum’s house, connect to it from your phone or computer, and your IP address will be anonymised.

Be aware that using Tor will slow your browsing down (the packets of data are travelling by a longer and less direct route than you’re used to), and that it’s not a total guarantee of anonymity.

Adafruit have made a very easy to follow tutorial on making your own Onion Pi. You may well have all the parts you need (the only piece of kit I don’t already have kicking around the house is a WiFi adapter) at home; if you don’t, you can buy a box with everything you’ll need in it from them. A portion of every sale goes to the Tor Foundation.