pinski1 / Crusher

A Raspberry Pi powered can crush counter.

#Crusher A Raspberry Pi powered can crusher counter.

I made this project for the can crusher in Cambridge Makespace's Cakespace (the kitchen). I wanted to log how many cans were crushed and when which would also give an idea of how many were consumed.

##Hardware

To interact with the real world we need a few physical parts connected together.

###Parts

I largely bought these parts from Pimoroni but feel free to use a local supplier if you're not in the UK.

• Raspberry Pi A+ in Coupé Royale Pibow (buy here)
• SD Card ( I used a SanDisk Ultra 16Gb)
• Raspberry Pi PSU (buy here)
• Raspberry Pi WiFi dongle (buy here)
• Display-o-Tron 3000 HAT(buy here)
• Hall Effect sensor breakout (try eBay)

###Connections

The next step after gathering the parts is to start putting them together!

1. Connect wires of suitable length between the Hall Effect sensor breakout and the Display-O-Tron HAT
2. Connect R to +3V3
3. Connect Y to GPIO 5
4. Connect G to GND
5. Fit the Display-O-Tron HAT to the Raspberry Pi A+ in Coupé Royale Pibow
6. Insert the Raspberry Pi WiFi dongle into the Raspberry Pi A+'s lone USB port
7. Plug in the Raspberry Pi PSU into a wall socket but also the Raspberry Pi

Done!

##Software

I'm going to assume you have have some way to get a terminal on the Raspberry Pi A+. It may be worth initially setting up the SD card on a Model B for the built in Ethernet port.

###WiFi set up

I largely used this guide to set up the Raspberry Pi WiFi dongle.

1. Type sudo iwlist wlan0 scan into your terminal to get the SSIDs of your WiFi AP.
2. With the SSID type sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf into your terminal.
3. then enter the following block:

network={
    ssid="The_ESSID_from_earlier"
    psk="Your_wifi_password"
}

4. Press 'Ctrl+x' then 'Y' to save the file
5. Try restarting the WiFi interface by entering sudo ifdown wlan0 and then sudo ifup wlan0
6. If that doesn't work try restarting the Raspberry Pi with sudo shutdown -r now

###Required Modules

####SQLite3

Get & install SQLite3 with sudo apt-get install sqlite3

####DOTHat

Get & install Pimoroni DOTHAT

Get & install the Display-O-Tron HAT with curl get.pimoroni.com/dot3k | bash

####GPIO

Get & install RPi.GPIO with sudo apt-get install python-dev python-rpi.gpio

###Starting Script on Start up

To get the script to start on start up:

1. Enter sudo cp crusher.py /etc/init.d/crusher into your terminal to copy the script to the init.d folder
2. Type chmod 777 crusher into your terminal to make the script executable
3. Then type sudo update-rc.d crusher defaults into your terminal to add/update the boot service

Now the script should start when the Raspberry Pi powers up. It can be started with /etc/init.d/crusher start, stopped with /etc/init.d/crusher stop, and restarted with /etc/init.d/crusher restart.

#To Do

Because projects aren't finished, they're just abandoned!

• Intranet page
• Tweet
• Log to cloud
• Update Makespace wiki
• Custom Can crushing animation (Thanks Pimoroni!)
• Audio fanfare!
• Enhanced congratulation messages
• Database error checking/backing up