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Guys I want to ask if possible to create a solar powered automatic bell system with smoke detection using raspberry pi? And I worries if the raspberry pi have real time clock? Because I need a RTC to execute the bell in exact alarm for certain interval I set.
This the statement I find in internet for more details but the author used an arduino.
The system uses the real time clock to determine
the time and the bell rings based on set up time. The LCD
in this system displays current time and displays fire if
the smoke detector detects a smoke. For different
sessions, the bell will ring different numbers of times.
The system is expected to continuously display the time
by using real time clock and monitor the situation of the
school during the day and night with power generated by
solar energy [9]. By using solar energy as a power source,
the system is uninterrupted during power supply failure
from the main energy department. In addition, the energy
can be used efficiently during day time and stored energy
in the battery can be utilized during night time. This
designed bell system integrated with smoke detector
integration is expected to safeguard the institution from
damages and losses particularly during an outbreak of
fire.
Your project is indeed feasible. The RPI check for the smoke detector value at a certain interval of time. If the value is higher than a certain threshold then you ring your bell.
The raspberry pi does not have a RTC included. You'll have to buy one online (a simple research on google should lead you to online shop like adafruit ...). But I don't understand why you would need to use a real time clock. If you want to use this system (which I don't recommend ; use a certified equipment for your personal security) you should check the data from the smoke/fire detector quite regularly but it doesn't have to be matching real time clock.
Alternatively, you could use RPI WiFi/Ethernet to request RTC from the internet.
If you are doing this project just for fun, use a smoke detector and a buzzer. Your RPI should be able to provide enough current to power both of these equipment. You could power your RPI with a small battery or a charger (check the correct voltage & current needed by the RPI).
You should find a lot of information/tutorials/code online for these type of little projects.
Most pc's had the nice option to power on a computer automatically when the power is applied (via the bios). With the surface pro 3 this is not an option (absent in the uefi boot menu).
If you are (planning on) using the Surface pro 3 tablet (or any uefi windows tablet?) you will run into this problem if you want to hide the power button of the tablet.
The surface pro 3 does activate when the power is connected when its sleeping. But for us the power could be disconnected for longer periods. The surface pro would go into hibernate mode or the battery would die, and in both of those cases you seem to need the power button to get it back to work.
There are 2 ways of going about this: changing the software, or changing the hardware. Personally (and as a software enthusiast) I wouldn't waste the time of rebuilding an entire kernel. I would actually go the hardware-modification route, even with limited experience (about 1 year).
But I'm going to make this sound easy. What you do, is, prop open the casing of the tablet so you can expose the motherboard and the power button.
Here are the materials you will need:
a needle-tip soldering iron, one of the smallest ones available.
good solder, ordered from online (Amazon) and not RadioShack brand (their solder beads up all the time and doesn't stick)
A >5v rated very very large capacitor (at least 3000uf to simulate holding the power button down for at least 3-5 seconds, get multiple/larger capacities just in case! 5500uf should be safe)
A 5v relay, to electronically toggle the power button (get some tiny solid-state ones on ebay)
Some patience
You will have to disassemble the power button and use your needle-tip to solder on manual leads (touching these leads should trigger the button)
Then, you will split a power V++ wire off the USB cable and attach the capacitor to it (the capacitor will send a 3-5 second pulse to the power button under DC power)
The negative side of the capacitor will connect to the coils on the relay (relay is a mechanical switch, to trip the power button in this case).
The NC (normally closed) switch side of the relay will connect the two leads of the power button.
I hope this helps you. The hardest part is soldering in the power button leads. Hopefully the button can be removed and soldered easily, without touching the ribbon cables. If you can't do the job, then use a DC motor to physically click the button. :) Good luck
I would like to know if there's any controller such as arduino or any other microcontroller that can be programmed to run VLC player embedded in its system. It is probably the best open source player. It would be nice if it could run on a standalone controller, and just plug in your usb to the controller and play videos.
The barebone mini systems are way too expensive around 200 to 400 dollars, and that would be an easy approach, but not cost effective.Thanks for reading.
Generally speaking, no, as most "microcontrollers" lack the memory (or external memory bus) and horsepower needed to do software video decoding.
That generally is a task which falls more to "system on a chip" (SOC) designs, which today are increasingly packaged with hundreds of megabytes of memory stacked on top of a several hundred MHz processor, which may have additional special function hardware acceleration. Things like the beaglebone family, raspberry pi, and recent set top boxes and smart phones, and of course pocket cameras would be examples.
Note that some of the SOC based boards are not really any more expensive than an Arduino, especially by the time you add I/O shields to the latter. That's because they are able to leverage modern high density integration and the economies of scale of the consumer-device chip marketplace, to inexpensively put a lot of functionality on one or two chips, which would be far, far more expensive to crudely duplicate using a lot of physically discrete parts in the manner of an Arduino + accessories solution. And an Arduino is so many orders of magnitude too slow that the first accessory you would have to add to it would be a stand-alone hardware video decoding IC.
I agree with Chris.
Microcontrollers doesn't have enough memory to decode videos. You need to select some microprocessor with video processing available. On the other side you can get some cheap processors with android capability.They are available for 35-40 $. And gives smooth HDMI output. (Not sure about Plug into USB)
The barebone mini systems are way too expensive around 200 to 400
dollars, and that would be an easy approach, but not cost effective.
Raspberry Pi, about $30 give or take. Beaglebone black $45, white $89. pcDuino Lite, $39, pcDuino Dev $59, I could do this all day...
As everyone has already said, you wont port such a heavily operating system dependent program to a microcontroller, for a number of reasons, memory, processor requirements, video, and so on.
if you could say take a stm32f4 or something on the high end of microcontrollers, and create some video player for specific format or formats, the man hours involved would take a fair number of sales to overcome the cost. Why spend a few months on a project when you can have a raspberry pi or beaglebone shipped in a couple of days? (or a Roku or Apple TV at a local store).
What techniques are used for the real-time simulation of fluids such as water, for example in videogames?
In particular, I am looking for a project-idea for an (unfortunately rather short) physics project at Uni, so the simpler the better (if there is any such thing as "simple" in fluid-simulations...)
AFAIK the most popular method to simulate fluids in real-time is the SPH method:
Smoothed-particle hydrodynamics - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
It's implemented in Bullet, PhysX, and Fluids:
Fluids v.3 is a large-scale, open source fluid simulator for the CPU and GPU using the smooth particle hydrodynamics method. Fluids is capable of efficiently simulating up to 8 million particles on the GPU (on 1500 MB of ram).
Some other helpful sources:
GPU Gems - Chapter 38. Fast Fluid Dynamics Simulation on the GPU
Open source 3D SPH solver - Math and Physics - GameDev.net
SPHYSICS Home Page - SPHYSICS
I'd like to start messing around programming and building something with an Arduino board, but I can't think of any great ideas on what to build. Do you have any suggestions?
I show kids, who have never programmed, or done any electronics before, to make a simple 'Phototrope', a light sensitive robot, in about a day. It costs under £30 (GBP) including Arduino, electronics and off-the-shelf mechanics. If folks really get into mobile robots, the initial project can grow and grow (which I feel is part of the fun).
There are international robot competitions which require relatively simple mechanics to get started, e.g. in the UK http://www.tic.ac.uk/micromouse/toh.asp
Ultimate performance require specially built machines (for lightness) , but folks would get creditable results with an Arduino Nano, the right electronics, and a couple of good motors.
A line following robot is the classic mobile robot project. The track can be as simple as electrical tape. Pololu have some fun videos about their near-Arduino 3PI robot. The sensors are about £1, and there are a bunch of simple motor+gearbox kits from lots of places for under £10. Add a few £ for motor control, and you have autonomous robot mechanics, in need of programming! Add an Infrared Remote receiver (about £1), and you can drive it around using your TV remote. Add a small solar cell, use an Arduino analogue input to measure voltage, and it can find the sun. With a bit more electronics, it can 'feed' itself. And so it gets more sophisticated. Each step might be no more than a few hours to a few days effort, and you'll find new problems to solve and learn from.
IMHO, the most interesting (low-cost) competitions are maze solving robots. The international competition rule require the robot to explore a walled maze, usually using Infrared sensors, and calculate their optimal route. The challenges include keeping track of current position to near-millimeter accuracy, dealing with real world's unpredictably noisy environment and optimising straight-line speed with shortest distance cornering.
All that in 16K of program, and 1K RAM, with real-time interrupt handling (as much as 100K interrupts/second for some motor systems), sensor sampling, motor speed control, and maze solving is an interesting programming challenge. (You might make it 'easy' with 32K of program, and 2K RAM :-)
I'm working on a 'constrained' robot challenge (based on Arduino) so that robot performance is mainly about programming rather than having a big budget.
Start small and build up to something more complex. Control servos. Blink LEDs. Debounce inputs. Read analog sensors. Display text on an LCD. Then put it together.
Despite the name, I like the "Evil Genius" book for PIC microcontrollers because of the small, easily digestible projects that tend to build on one another. It is, of course, aimed at PIC programmers rather than the Arduino, but the material covered will be useful no matter what you're developing on.
I know Arduino is trendy right now, but I also like the Teensy++ development board because of its low price-point ($24), breadboard-compatible PCB, relatively high pin count, Linux development environment, USB connectivity, and not needing a programmer. Worth considering for smaller projects.
If you come up with something cool, let me know. I need an excuse to do something fun :)
Bicycle-related ideas:
theft alarm (perhaps with radio link to a base station which is connected to a PC by Ethernet)
fancy trip computer (with reed switch or opto sensor on wheel)
integrate with a GPS telematics unit (trip logging) with Ethernet/USB download of logged data to PC. Also has an interesting PC programming component--integrate with Google Maps.
Other ideas:
Clock with automatic time sync from:
GPS receiver
FM radio signal with embedded RDS data with CT code
Digital radio (DAB+)
Mobile phone tower (would it require a subscription and SIM card for this receive-only operation?)
NTP server via:
Ethernet
WiFi
ZigBee (with a ZigBee coordinator that gets its time from e.g. Ethernet or GPS)
Mains electricity smart meter via ZigBee (I'm interested now that smart meters are being introduced in Victoria, Australia; not sure if the smart meters broadcast the time info though, and whether it requires authentication)
Metronome
Instrument tuner
This reverse-geocache puzzle box was an awesome Arduino project. You could take this to the next step, e.g. have a reverse-geocache box that gives out a clue only at a specific location, and then using physical clues found at that location coupled with the next clue from the box, determine where to go for the next step.
You could do one of the firefighting robot competitions. We built a robot in university for my bachelor's final project, but didn't have time to enter the competition. Plus the robot needed some polish anyway... :)
Video here.
Mind you, this was done with a Motorola HC12 and a C compiler, and most components outside the microcontroller board were made from scratch, so it took longer than it should. Should be much easier with prefab components.
Path finding/obstacle navigation is typically a good project to start with. If you want something practical, take a look at how iRobot vacuums the floor and come up with a better scheme.
Depends on your background and if you want practical or cool. On the practical side, a remote control could be a simple starting point. It's got buttons and lights but isn't too demanding.
For a cool project maybe a Simon-style memory game or anything with lights & noises (thinking theremin-style).
I don't have suggestions or perhaps something like a line follower robot. I could help you with some links for inspiration
Arduino tutorials
Top 40 Arduino Projects of the Web
20 Unbelievable Arduino Projects
I'm currently developing plans to automate my 30 year old model train layout.
A POV device could be fun to build (just google for POV Arduino). POV means persistence of vision.