Hasta La Gadget!

If you prefer robot bartenders to lack limbs that could be used against you in the impending robopocalypse, Bartendro might be your kind of bot. After two years of building and tweaking, the folks at Party Robotics have finally polished their Raspberry Pi-powered cocktail-making rig and have posted it to Kickstarter. Born from a need to re-create mixed drinks in perfect proportion, Bartendro uses food-grade tubing, pumps and custom-built electronics to pipe liquids out with a measurement accuracy of a milliliter. According to the projects’ site, however, it can’t quite handle carbonated beverages in its current state. By using a device connected to the contraption’s own WiFi network, thirsty folks will be able to select drinks from a web-based interface. Mixologists, on the other hand, can leverage the control panel to customize cocktail recipes, manage dispensers and even read reports of what drinks were made and how much of which ingredients were used.

Both the hardware and the software that make up Bartendro are open source, and the team behind it even wants to create an online drink compendium that’s free as in freedom and beer. The hope is that intrepid enthusiasts can hack together mods ranging from breathalyzers to a stirring or shaking mechanism. Early supporters can snatch a ShotBot with one dispenser for $249, a Bartendro with three for $375, a model toting seven for $1,199 and a fourth version carrying a whopping 15 for $2,499. However, crafty DIYers can roll their own system by pledging coin for individual dispensers and the Linux boxes that power them. The group has currently raised over $20,000, but it’s aiming for $135,000 to push the bot into production. Click the bordering source link if you’re inclined to chip in or hit the jump for Party Robotic’s pitch video.

Filed under: Robots

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Via: CNET

Source: Kickstarter

After a year of effort the Raspbmc team announced it has reached the 1.0 milestone. This means the team is confident they’ve delivered a stable distro to run the port of XBMC specifically designed to run on the Raspberry Pi, created by TeamXBMC, and the image is ready to be downloaded for free and copied to your ready and able SD card. If you were already enjoying the fruits of the early builds of Raspbmc, you’ll need to do a complete re-install but that shouldn’t be too much trouble since you probably store your content on a network drive or external USB.

Raspbmc 1.0 is based on the recently finished XMBC 12 Final and supports DTS decoding in software. This is in addition to many other codecs supported in software and you can purchase licenses from the Raspberry Pi Store for MPEG-2 and VC-1 hardware decoding for just a few bucks. A good move, since hardware decoding of today’s most popular video codecs is almost certainly a requirement for any proper XBMC setup. Now, if the Raspbmc team would release their own custom case for the RPi then everyone would know what’s going on just by looking under your TV.

Filed under: Home Entertainment, HD

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Source: Raspbmc.com

The budget board makers over at the Raspberry Pi Foundation are clearly having a busy week, first launching the Model A in Europe, and now reporting that development of the camera add-on for the miniature computers has been completed. Well, the hardware has been finalized, at least, although it hasn’t been “tuned” quite yet (picture quality still needs improvement), and the drivers aren’t fully ready. The camera PCB measures around 25 x 20 x 9mm, and hosts a 5-megapixel, fixed-focus sensor that can shoot 2592 x 1944 stills and 1080p video at 30 fps. Aligning with the low cost of the main boards, it’ll set you back $25, but won’t be available for “at least a month.” Don’t just sit there twiddling your thumbs, though. Start brainstorming all the cool projects you can work on once you put an eye on that Pi.

Filed under: Desktops, Cameras, Misc, Peripherals

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Via: Wired

Source: Raspberry Pi

It’s not every day your class gets a visit from a tech bigwig like Eric Schmidt. Google’s executive chairman paid a visit to a UK school, alongside Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton. The duo were there to talk code, an appearance that coincided with the announcement that a grant from Google Giving will be bringing 15,000 Raspberry Pi Model Bs to kids in that country. The companies will be working alongside six educational partners to decide precisely whose hands those little computers will end up in. More info on the program can be found in the source link.

Filed under: Google

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Source: Raspberry Pi

If you were hoping for a full-fledged Raspberry Pi sequel this year, you’ll have to keep waiting. Designer Eben Upton tells ZDNet that, while there should eventually be a replacement, he doesn’t expect one in 2013. Both software tweaks and upgrades like the Model B are reportedly doing the job — and it wouldn’t be right to “orphan” the 700,000 existing owners with a new platform, Upton says. He isn’t worried about the Cubieboard and other current rivals, as they have yet to be as fast as their raw numbers suggest. We won’t hide our disappointment at missing out on a quick revamp, but we know what they say about things that aren’t broken.

Filed under: Misc

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Source: ZDNet