One of China’s biggest tech hubs celebrates makers and making, with help from Raspberry Pi. This #MagPiMonday, we take a trip to Maker Faire Shenzhen.
At the end of 2023, the Raspberry Pi community team and Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton attended one last big event before Christmas: Maker Faire Shenzen. Joining them was Seeed Studios, Raspberry Pi Approved Reseller, showing off their wares and hunting down cool Raspberry Pi projects in the process. It was a busy event full of talks and cool stalls.
Some of the cool projects that Seeed Studios found at Maker Faire Shenzhen:
Robot dogs by Yang Li
“I am a chip design engineer,” says Yang, “and playing with Raspberry Pi and building robots has been a long-term hobby of mine. When I first saw a video of Boston Dynamics’ robot dog, it impressed me. Before this I had tried building a robot dog using 996 servos, but they were not responsive and torquey enough for my requirements. However, when MIT released the design scheme for the Cheetah mini robot dog’s geared-down motors, smaller and more affordable FOC motors with gears quickly became available. This made it more feasible for me to build this robot dog.”
Sound-tracking GoPro stabilizer by Weijie Yu
After looking at functions in a modern vlogging camera, Weijie came up with the idea of making use of the three-axis movement of the lens to track the speaker instead of just being used for face tracking, which can be a bit jittery.
“First of all, there are four MEMS microphones on the ReSpeaker mic array that pick up sound from different angles, convert them into multi-dimensional audio signals, and transmit them to Raspberry Pi through the USB cable,” Weijie says. “Then, Raspberry Pi executes the sound source tracking algorithm, an introlab ODAS, to process the raw audio signals, calculating the elevation, azimuth, and active level of several potential sound sources.”
Raspberry Pi Retro Computer by ChangLiang Li
“The project was inspired by the Commodore HX-64, a non-existent handheld computer that can only be found in 3D renderings on the web. I decided I had to make it,” says ChangLiang. “I spent a week doing 3D modelling, repeatedly adjusting the slot position, and I felt cool being able to change the tape. I used a 3D printer to create the desired look, and despite a lot of polishing the shell is still not very smooth. Raspberry Pi CM4 has a strong ability to adapt, so even if my PCB design is not perfect, it still works very well… I even designed a cartridge in the shape of a separate tape cartridge with an SD card inside, just to be retro. I think it would be cool to put different operating systems into different tapes.”
