Archive for November 2013
Open-source Raspberry Pi-powered PetBot looks after your pets
Pets are great company to have, but they need looking after when you are away. That’s what the Raspberry Pi - powered open-source PetBot aims to do, never leaving your precious pooch alone.
While at work, on your commute or away for the weekend, the PetBot allows you to interact with your furry friend remotely using a remote controlled webcam, image recognition and treat dispenser.
The PetBot stands about the height of about six books, and is looking for $20,000 CAD in funding on Kickstarter, with a $150 CAD (£90) pledge securing a steel PetBot.
Open source and Pi powered
As the hardware is open source, the manufacturers will make everything you need to build your own PetBot freely available, including the detailed hardware designs, software source code, assembly instructions, and 3D printing schematics.The front-facing webcam uses image recognition to detect when your pet happens to be standing in front of the PetBot and will ping your phone. You can then control the movable camera via a phone app or the PetBot website to bring your animal friend into view.
From there you can interact with your pet, tell it to sit, play dead, reassure it that you haven’t left it forever, and then give it a treat to sustain it until your return.
It even has two separate treat dispensers within the box, which means two different sizes and types of treats can be fired out in response to your pet’s whining.
Why PetBot ?
People love their pets and will do almost anything for them, including spending large sums of money on fancy pet food and trips to the vet, which makes the $150 CAD expense of the PetBot seem a veritable bargain.It also means you should be able to leave your pet alone for longer periods without it starving, and bridges the connection gap between owner and furry friend.
For those that are looking for a way to keep in contact with their pets when out and about, the PetBot looks like the ideal hackable gadget.
Jacob Cook has an ambitious plan to replace Google -- with Raspberry Pi servers running his arkOS.
Cook, arkOS' project leader, has started a crowdfunding campaign to raise money so that he can focus on arkOS full time. He has also created a legal entity, the CitizenWeb Project, to be the organization responsible for the project.
What is arkOS?
arkOS is an open-source platform for securely self-hosting your online life. It is designed to help its users take control of their personal data, and to make running a server as easy as using a desktop computer. arkOS designed to run on the Raspberry Pi hardware , a full-blown computer small enough to hold in your hand.( (Eventually it will be able to run on other platforms, such as the BeagleBoard, or even full-size PCs.) and using open-source Genesis application, which provides a web-based interface for controlling the different services running on your server.
Genesis is an application that allows you to add, remove, modify and customize the different facets of your arkOS node. You can easily install plugins and server apps, upload files, manage your cloud, update your system and much more. Genesis can even back up your information and store it in case you make a mistake.
arkOS is far more than just an operating system. It will have several different components that come together to make a seamless self-hosting experience possible, no matter what device you are using it on. Each of these components will work with each other out-of-the-box, allowing you to host your websites, email, social networking accounts, cloud services, and many other things from your arkOS node.
The arkOS project, when it’s complete, will provide users with a small device they could plug into an Ethernet port at home in order to host their own cloud services. There are commercial alternatives, like PogoPlug, but PogoPlug only lets you host your own files — it doesn’t provide a comprehensive suite of Internet services, like website hosting, chat, email, and so forth. ArkOS will provide those services, with customizable levels of security so you can control who gets to access each one.
Here is the video introduce about arkOS:
Other secure open-source operating systems exist as well, most notably Tails, which gives you a secure desktop environment to do your business. (It, too, is based on a version of Linux, and is pre-configured to use a range of secure applications, and relies on the Tor network for secure browsing.) But Tails is a desktop operating system, while arkOS is for servers.
“If you host your data with arkOS then access it on your other computers with Tails, it’s a winning combination,” Cook said.
Cook hopes to have the framework stable enough to use by March, 2014, and will continue adding features for the next year.
About Jacob Cook
He is 23-year-old software developer and student based out of Montréal, Québec, Canada. Cook is arkOS' project leader and main developer.