Raspberry Pi adds wheels, night-vision camera to become a spy drone

Early adopters of the Raspberry Pi are continuing to do interesting things with the little computer.

Aerospace engineer algorhythmic has put together a remote controlled, roving surveillance vehicle with a night-vision camera, powered by the Raspberry Pi mini computer.

When you have a PC that’s about the size of a deck of cards, it’s pretty easy to cram it into interesting places like a DSLR camera battery grip. And when the computer only costs about $35, there’s not much reason not to try new and interesting things. What’s the worst that could happen? You break it and you’re out a few bucks?

The surveillance drone hack involves attaching a PlayStation 3 Eye camera and a WiFi module to the Raspberry Pi, hooking it up to a remote control car, and configuring the system to stream video from the camera over the internet.

There’s also an Arduino component which is used to control a motor that makes the camera moveable. Oh yeah… the car also has an attached laser.

Algorhythmic configured the whole system so he can control it using a PlayStation controller. You can read more details and find some of the code involved in his project at Aon Squared.

via Raspberry Pi