Hasta La Gadget!

Fast food pizza is the lazy man’s favorite meal, next to the Anything Edible Within Arm’s Reach value meal. I loooove that one. But ordering pizza is still quite the hurdle for the indolent. Thankfully iStrategyLabs is here to solve that problem with the PiePal, a device that orders pizza in just a few seconds.

Before you sloths utter an unintelligible moan that can only mean that you’re beside yourself with joy, there are a few caveats with the PiePal. First of all, it can only order one type of pizza and only from Dominos. Second, you have to have a user account on Domino’s online delivery website. That’s because the PiePal is actually a Raspberry Pi that’s running an automated pizza ordering software. You’ll need to enter your Wi-Fi network’s name and password, Domino’s account details and the specific pizza you want into the program. You can do it; it’ll let you be lazy in the long run.

Also, I lied about the one button thing. You actually have to turn a dial before you can press the button to order. I know, it’s hard, but the dial lets you select the number of pizzas you want to order. Then press the big button on the PiePal to place your order.

If you’re interested in owning a PiePal, get off your butt for a second and sign up on the PiePal website to become a “beta taster.” Mmmm, beta.

[via iStrategyLabs via CNET]

Assuming you happen to be a Raspberry Pi owner, here is some bit of news that you might be interested in. After all, we have already seen a fair amount of creative uses of the Raspberry Pi in various situations, and for those of you who have always had the mind to make use of the device’s camera board when it comes to low light or night time photography, then it goes without saying that you will need to be involved in a fair amount of delicate tinkering, considering how the unit’s IR (infrared) filter was firmly attached.

Until now, that is. The good people over at Raspberry Pi have announced that they will debut the Pi NoIR, an infrared camera board which was specially designed with low light situations in mind. The NoIR bit stands for “no infrared,” which happens to be a reference to the nonexistent IR filter. In the past , the supplier of the current camera package did not make available an infrared option, but a fair number of users, wildlife photographers included, have already put in their respective requests for the ability to make use of their Raspberry Pis in a wider array of situations, hence the move to come up with the Raspberry Pi NoIR. Slated for a November launch, we have yet to hear of a concrete release date, so stay tuned! [Press Release]

Raspberry Pi NoIR, An Infrared Camera original content from Ubergizmo.

The Raspberry Pi microcomputer, which costs as little as $25/$35 and has helped fledge many a DIY hardware project, has racked up worldwide sales of 1.75 million, its U.K.-based creator, The Raspberry Pi Foundation, said today. The first Pis went on sale in March 2012, with its U.K. makers imagining they might sell a thousand in the first year (in the event they sold circa one million — and are now well on their way to two million).

Another U.K.-specific milestone for the device is that one million Pis have been produced since the Foundation shifted the bulk of production to a factory based in the U.K. (Sony’s Pencoed, Wales facility). So that’s one million U.K.-made Pis.

Initially, as with scores of inexpensive electronic devices before it, Pi was made in China. But the Foundation, itself a U.K. startup, was keen to support a production facility closer to home — to make it easier to visit and oversee elements of Pi production, but also to support local manufacturing. And so Sony was brought on board and the Pencoed factory turned out its millionth Pi today.

The rest of the 1.75 million Pis produced to-date were built in China. The Foundation’s primary Pi distributor, Premier Farnell/element 14, shifted all its production to Wales back in March but a small portion of non-U.K. Pi production remains.

As well as keeping the maker community busy by powering DIY hardware projects like this solar-powered FTP server, the Pi has been helping schoolkids cut their teeth on coding projects. At the start of this year, Google put up $1 million to fund 15,000 Pis for U.K. schoolkids, for example. Further afield, Pi has been used as a low-cost component to kit out school computing labs in Africa.

Back in April, the Pi Foundation revealed details of the countries where the — at the time — 1.2 million Pis had been shipped to. The vast majority (98%) were being sold in Western nations such as the U.K. and the U.S. Helping Pi spread further around the world to reach more developing nations is one of the Foundation’s challenges this year, Pi founder Eben Upton said then.

Discussing what it’s been doing to improve Pi distribution globally since then, Upton said Pi distributor RS Components now stocks units locally in South Africa — and can then ship directly to a number of countries in Southern Africa. “This has important implications for delivered cost, and also for reliability of delivery — it can be challenging to ship stuff into Africa reliably from Europe,” he told TechCrunch.

“We’re continuing to work to understand how to get units into South American markets without incurring very import high tariffs. Nothing to announce yet, but it’s high on our radar,” he added.

Upton also revealed that Pi shipments are growing in Asian markets.  ”Looking at the per-country stats, while the U.S. remains our largest market, and the U.K. our largest per-capita market, what’s really striking is that Asian markets, notably Japan, Korea and the Philippines, are consistently up month on month,” he said.

Today’s millionth-made British Pi (rightly) isn’t going to stray far. “Sony have made us a gold-plated case to keep it in, and we’ll be displaying it proudly here at Pi Towers [in Cambridge, U.K.],” the Foundation said today.

The Raspberry Pi, when it first hit the market, definitely made a case for itself as being an inexpensive piece of computing that hobbyists would definitely find it to be fun tinkering around with. After all, $35 will not net you much these days, but with the Raspberry Pi, you end up with a processor, memory, input and output, and a memory card slot, now how about that? Here we are with DukePad, touted to be a rather interesting invention in the form of a Raspberry Pi-powered tablet.

The DukePad would obviously rely on the Raspberry Pi as its “brains”, where the instructions within would comprise of a list of hardware that is required before forging ahead, among them include designs for a laser-cut case, in addition to steps when it comes to setting up a software environment with the assistance of Raspbian Linux and Java. The hardware parts required will easily pass the $350 mark, so it is more of a labor of love as well as curiosity than trying to own a cheap tablet.

Instead, this sort of project is for folks who like the idea of building something with their own hands, and having more control over the finished product than you would if you bought a tablet running Android, iOS, or another existing operating system.

DukePad Is Powered By The Raspberry Pi original content from Ubergizmo.

The folks at RoboBand have created a robotic band that plays the soundtracks to famous Nintendo games using a Raspberry Pi, a Yamaha Disklavier, and a robotic drum kit. The system took the audio output from the NES, converted it to MIDI, which in turn either controlled the solenoids on the drum machine or the piano keys. The result is a sometimes cacophonous, sometimes sublime rendition of some NES classics including the Legend of Zelda, Duck Hunt, and the Mario series.

To their credit, the band admits that things weren’t perfect. “In full disclosure, there is normally a half-second audio delay that was removed in editing, but it’s still very playable live,” they wrote on YouTube. Given that most sprite-intensive NES games ended up with more than a second lag, it’s a pretty impressive feat regardless.

Personally I’d love to see some Metroid played this way. It would be like watching The Matrix at one of those silent movie theaters with a dude up front playing the organ.

via BoingBoing