Hasta La Gadget!

Phil Harlow wanted an easy way for him and his roommates to split the bill for their kegerator’s beer keg refills. So they all decided that he’ll just pay for it. Just kidding. Phil is working on a facial recognition system for their kegerator that will keep a tab for them.

Phil’s setup is powered by a Raspberry Pi. It uses two flow sensors to detect if the tap is turned on, at which point a camera will activate to examine the user’s face. A touchscreen monitor displays relevant details, including the user’s name, the type and amount of beer poured and its equivalent cost. Phil and his buddies can also scroll through the kegerator’s history to see their tabs.

Now all it needs is a towel, some interesting stories and a plate of nuts. Head to Phil’s blog for more on his hack.

[via Hack A Day]

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I was going to talk about a pixel art LED display that’s currently raising funds on Kickstarter when I remembered that I already saw something much better: Al Linke’s PIXEL. It turns out he’s also raising funds on Kickstarter for PIXEL V2, an improved version of his display.

Like the original display, PIXEL V2 has 1024 LEDs arranged in a 32×32 matrix. After all, it’s designed to display low-res images and animations so increasing the displays resolution wasn’t necessary. What makes PIXEL V2 much better than its predecessor is that it’s more versatile and customizable, both in terms of software and hardware. For starters, you can now control it with an OS X computer and a Raspberry Pi via USB, in addition to the Android and Windows USB and Bluetooth connectivity that was also present in the original. Unfortunately, it still has no support for iOS though.

Aside from directly sending images to the display via a PC or an Android device, you can also store images on PIXEL V2′s onboard SD card in stand alone mode, after which it will keep displaying images and even animated gifs even if it’s not connected to any computer or mobile device. Another neat feature of PIXEL V2  are its mixed media overlays. As shown in the image below, the overlays allow you to display a drawing on top of the LED display.

PIXEL V2 comes with over 150 samples of pixel art, but as always you can send other images to the display. As shown in the video below, you can even make apps for PIXEL V2. Turn it into a message board, make it display the weather and more. It also has five sensor inputs and optional alcohol and proximity sensors for even more creative applications, although these sensors require an Android device to work.

Pledge at least $260 (USD) on Kickstarter to get a fully assembled PIXEL V2 display. Unassembled kits and partial parts are also available at lower pledges.

We already saw a very cheap way to emulate the NVIDIA Shield’s game streaming function using a smartphone and VNC. But if you want an even cheaper way – assuming you don’t already have a smartphone – check out Limelight Pi, an open source program that lets you stream Steam games to a Raspberry Pi.

Made by GitHub member irtimmer, Limelight Pi uses NVIDIA’s GameStream technology to stream your Steam games. Thus, you’ll still need an NVIDIA GTX 600/700 series GPU, NVIDIA’s GeForce Experience program and either a high-end wireless router or an Ethernet connection. Here’s a demo by YouTuber leCauchemarXY. The screen on the left is the one connected to the Raspberry Pi.

You can download Limelight Pi from irtimmer’s Github page. Limelight Pi is actually a fork of irtimmer’s Limelight, which works on Windows, OS X and Linux computers. So if you’d rather stream to a desktop computer, get Limelight instead of Limelight Pi.

[via Raspberry PiPod]