Raspberry Pi

One of the features of our smart home is when the doorbell on our house is rung or a letter is posted, a snapshot is taken by a security camera pointed to our front door. The snapshot is then sent to a neural network to identify if it’s the post or not. If it is then house will announce this to us, which is handy to decide if it’s worth getting up from the sofa to pick up letters / answer the door. [Read More]

The new Raspberry Pi Zero W is the perfect pairing to go with the Xiaomi Mi Flora. The Flora is a bluetooth stick you push into the soil next to a plant and can be polled over Bluetooth LE for the sensor data - soil moisture, temperature, light and soil conductivity. Part list Raspberry Pi Zero W. I used Pimoroni (£9.60 + £2.50 postage) as they’re great and ship fast. You shouldn’t need the Adapters kit if you’ve the necessary adapters already, or you might get away with setting up the Pi headless without them anyway. [Read More]

Bluetooth doesn’t work out the box for Archlinux but thankfully a helpful user has created packages to support the Pi 3 which also work on the Zero W (see forum post). There’s a couple of caveats to getting them working I’ll step through. First install bluez and bluez-utils older than 5.44 - you must get them from an archive. The reason being hcitool is required and it’s been dropped from bluez 5. [Read More]