Whether or not autonomous vehicles ever work out, the effort put into using small cameras and machine-learning algorithms to detect cars could pay off big for an unexpected group: cyclists.

Velo AI is a firm cofounded by Clark Haynes and Micol Marchetti-Bowick, both PhDs with backgrounds in robotics, movement prediction, and Uber’s (since sold-off) autonomous vehicle work. Copilot, which started as a “pandemic passion project” for Haynes, is essentially car-focused artificial intelligence and machine learning stuffed into a Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 and boxed up in a bike-friendly size and shape.

While car-detecting devices exist for bikes, including the Garmin Varia, they’re largely radar-based. That means they can’t distinguish between vehicles of different sizes and only know that something is approaching you, not, for example, how much space it will allow when passing.

Copilot purports to do a lot more:

• Identify cars, bikes, and pedestrians
• Alert riders audibly about cars “Following,” “Approaching,” and “Overtaking”
• Issue visual warning to drivers who are approaching too close or too fast
• Send visual notifications and a simplified rear road view to an optional paired smartphone
• Record 1080p video and tag “close calls” and “incidents” from your phone

At 330 grams, with five hours of optimal battery life (and USB-C recharging), it’s not for the aero-obsessed rider or super-long-distance rider. And at $400, it might not speak to the most casual and infrequent cyclist. But it’s an intriguing piece of kit, especially for those who already have, or considered, a Garmin or similar action camera for watching their back. What if a camera could do more than just show you the car after you’re already endangered by it?

The Velo team detailed some of their building process for the official Raspberry Pi blog. The Compute Module 4 powers the core system and lights, while a custom Hailo AI co-processor helps with the neural networks and computer vision. An Arducam camera provides the vision and recording.

Beyond individual safety, the Velo AI team hopes that data from Copilots can feed into larger-scale road safety improvements. The team told the Pi blog that they’re starting a partnership with Pittsburgh, seeding Copilots to regular bike commuters and analyzing the aggregate data for potential infrastructure upgrades.

The Copilot is available for sale now and shipping, according to Velo AI. A December 2023 pre-order sold out.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=2009851

Nearly everything on the Raspberry Pi 5 has improved over the 4 model, particularly the way you can buy it. In a first for the single-board company, the 5 is available for preorder today from approved resellers before it’s generally available by the end of October.

Perhaps most importantly, the 5 is being prioritized for individual buyers rather than commercial partners.

“We’re incredibly grateful to the community of makers and hackers who make Raspberry Pi what it is; you’ve been extraordinarily patient throughout the supply chain issues that have made our work so challenging over the last couple of years,” writes Raspberry Pi founder and CEO Eben Upton. “We’d like to thank you: we’re going to ringfence all of the Raspberry Pi 5s we sell until at least the end of the year for single-unit sales to individuals, so you get the first bite of the cherry.”

Print subscribers to The MagPi and HackSpace magazines get “Priority Boarding” for Pi 5 purchases, including those who subscribe now. Raspberry Pi says it has reserved “a massive stock” of 5 units for subscribers, shipping them at launch to those with a code.

The Pi 5 has a number of improvements beyond the base AP and GPU, though those aren’t small jumps, either. The company says its new 16-nanometer BCM2712, a 2.4 GHz quad-core 64-bit CPU, is two to three times faster than the BCM2711 in the Pi 4. The new core—three generations beyond the Pi 4’s A72—a smaller process, and a higher clock speed make for a faster Pi 5 that eats less power, Upton writes. The GPU is a Broadcom VideoCore VII, capable of driving dual 4K/60 Hz HDMI displays, and it comes with open source Mesa drivers.

There’s also a new chip on the Pi 5, built by Pi, to take away I/O functions from the AP. The RP1 will handle two USB 3.0 and two 2.0 interfaces, a Gigabit Ethernet controller, camera and display interfaces, and GPIO, with all of it connected back to the AP by PCI Express. Many Pi users face frustrations with storage and data connections before they hit the limits of the board’s chips; this could open the Pi 5 to more general-purpose computing and other interesting tasks than its predecessors. Given that Pi has spent $15 million developing the RP chip platform, it really should.

There is one notable change on the peripheral side, however: the Pi 5 will lower power output to USB peripherals down to 600 mA under heavy workloads when using a typical 15-Watt USB-C connector, lower than the 1.2-Amp limit on the Pi 4. If you want to keep high-power drives attached, a $12 USB-C power adapter supports a 25 W mode and should open up things a bit for overclockers.

Among the other changes, the Pi 5 loses a composite video and analog audio jack, adds two FPC connectors, and moves the Ethernet jack back to the bottom-right board corner. Pi also added two mounting holes for heat sinks to the board. There’s also a new case that adds a low-noise fan, offers an optional active cooler for heavy workloads, and makes it possible to add the board with the micro SD card still inserted. That last bit will likely prevent a handful of first-time user disasters, we’d reckon.

The Pi 5 is due to ship by the end of October. Raspberry Pi OS should arrive in mid-October and will be the only first-party OS for the board upon launch.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1971770

Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton has been saying for months that 2023 would be a “recovery year” for Raspberry Pi supply—the single-board computer, once known for its easy availability and affordability, has been hit with supply shortages for years. Hundreds of thousands of Pi boards were still being manufactured every month, but many were going to commercial buyers rather than retailers and end users.

More recently, those manufacturing numbers have climbed from 400,000 monthly units to 600,000 to 800,000 to 1 million, a level that Upton says can be sustained “for as long as is necessary to clear our remaining customer backlogs and return to free availability.”

We’re now seeing very early signs that supply is returning to normal, at least for some Pi models. UK-based Pi reseller Pimoroni announced today that it was lifting some purchase limitations on 2GB and 4GB Raspberry Pi 4 boards and Pi Zero W boards (not, apparently, the more recent Pi Zero 2 W). The rpilocator stock tracker account has also noted that its number of automated stock alerts has decreased recently “because Pis are staying in stock longer,” noting that Pimoroni and The Pi Hut had (and still have) multiple Pi 4 variants in stock.

Even as stock returns to normal, we’ll still be dealing with the aftereffects of the shortage for some time to come; the “temporary” price increase for the 2GB Pi 4 board still hasn’t been reverted, and Upton’s past comments have implied that the company has put off the development of the Pi 5 to allow stock of current models to return to normal (the Pi 4 was introduced just over four years ago). Other retailers still have purchasing restrictions in place. And some models and retailers will clearly recover more quickly than others.

As hobbyists wait for Pi supplies to return to normal, they’ve turned to all kinds of other hardware to do the same kinds of work. Discarded corporate thin client PCs and old phones can both handle some of the lightweight tasks at which Pis commonly excel.

But those alternate devices don’t work with the hardware and software projects made specifically for the Pi, including everything from NES-style retro-themed game console cases to Game Boy and BlackBerry-themed portable enclosures.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1958301

There will be a 1 million unit stock of Raspberry Pi products available in the month of July and every month onward until consumer backlogs are cleared, Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton told hobbyists in a recent community newsletter.

As reported by Tom’s Hardware on Thursday, the newsletter, said to be an “update from Eben” (screenshot via Tom’s Hardware here), promises to assuage customer demand after small businesses were favored over individual consumers during the pandemic-fueled silicon shortage.

Upton’s message reportedly reads:

We expect to sell over 600,000 units in May, 800,000 units in June, and from July onward, we are able to sustain million-unit months for as long as is necessary to clear our remaining customer backlogs and return to free availability.

This is despite the approximately 800,000 units shipped in Q1, the company’s “worst quarter since 2015,” according to the newsletter.

Stock is apparently being resurrected with the help of Sony, which is stockpiling the “non-silicon elements of” Raspberry Pi’s bill of materials, Upton said. Sony has sold Raspberry Pi image sensors since 2016 and bought a minority stake in the company in April. Raspberry Pi now has an 11-year manufacturing contract with Sony, and in a May interview with Jeff Geerling, Upton said that Sony now manufactures “every core Raspberry Pi product.”

Critically, Q2 2023 has brought “rapid recovery in the silicon supply.” Now, Upton is feeling rather optimistic and predicted that more Raspberry Pi single-board computers and modules will sell this year than ever.

“It’s been a painful two years since shortages kicked in in 2021, but we’re confident that the shortages are behind us,” the CEO said.

Stock check

Before you get too excited about finishing that project you haven’t had the supplies to complete, let’s take a quick look at what stock looks like now, compared to what Upton most recently promised.

In the aforementioned interview with Geerling a couple weeks ago, Upton said that Zero and Zero 2 stock would start returning and also said there would be “substantial” recovery for the 3, 3B+, and 4.

As of this writing, the Zero, Zero 2 W, 3, and 3B+ are out of stock at Raspberry Pi’s listed authorized resellers. The 4 is available, though, as is the 3A+. Of course, as much as the stock has fluctuated over the past months, it’s possible that it all changes by the time this article is published.

Meanwhile, accessory availability is hit or miss, too, with the Compute Module 4, for example, unavailable at Pi resellers as of this writing.

Trying to win back hobbyists

Replenishing available Raspberry Pi units isn’t just about making money (although we’re sure that’s a huge driver as well) but also about ensuring hobbyists don’t lose their appetite for Pi.

Upton admitted to neglecting maker demand when forced to choose between supplying businesses or individuals. That choice was “the single hardest decision I’ve had to make in my business career,” Upton told Geerling in May. In hindsight, the exec would have stocked up on BCM2835 chips to help keep shelves full. But Raspberry Pi didn’t and eventually fell behind on orders, and the perception of a shortage led to people stockpiling Pis, hurting availability more, according to the CEO.

Meanwhile, supply problems in 2021 led to the Pi 4 returning to higher 2020-level pricing, despite the company originally calling the 2GB Pi 4 price cut “permanent.” The price going back up from $35 to $45 is supposed to be temporary, but as of this writing, official Pi resellers are still charging $45 for that model. $5 price bumps for Pi Zero models and Compute Modules are also still in effect.

Unreliable stock and higher prices are a lot to ask customers to stomach, especially creative ones who can scrounge up alternatives. Restoring Pi availability will be critical to ensuring DIYers remain hungry for Pi in the future.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1943884

Having to make the pandemic-pressure choice to either disappoint hobbyists and educators or let small businesses built on his company’s platform falter was “the single hardest decision I’ve had to make in my business career,” Raspberry Pi co-founder and CEO Eben Upton says in a new video interview.

Jeff Geerling, having flown to Raspberry Pi’s headquarters in Cambridge, England, with his supporters’ backing, digs in on Upton’s “Supply chain update” from December 2022. Upton said then that by the third quarter of 2023, “hundreds of thousands” of mainstream Pi units should be available, with Zero units, then 3 and 3B models, then 4.

Upton told Geerling that “we are where we said we’d be in December,” with a “lousy first quarter” of 750,000-800,000 units produced due to shifting production for the Christmas period. But now real progress on backlog-filling and availability is being made. Upton expects to move 2 million Pis in the second quarter, then “unconstrained” third and fourth quarters of 2023.

The Pi 3A+ has been continuously in stock for months, Upton told Geerling—we’ll give the definition of “continuously” a bit of slack. The Zero and Zero 2 models should start coming back, Upton said, and buyers should start to see a “substantial recovery” of the 3, 3B+, and 4 models toward the end of this second quarter.

It’s a notable turnaround from seven months ago, when Upton, in a different interview with Geerling, said that Pis were subject to the same supply constraints as other device-makers and that most units had to be sold to the businesses with standing orders for them.

Looking back on the last three years, Upton said that, had he the foresight to see the things that nobody else saw coming, he might have stockpiled the BCM2835 chips that many Pi models rely upon. Falling slightly behind on orders, Upton said, has a compounding effect; once there’s a perception of shortage, buyers can engage in stockpiling behaviors, and the shortage cycle continues.

That’s what led Upton and Pi leaders to have to prioritize their business customers during the height of the pandemic, which are generally, he said, “mom and pop shops” of 5–10 employees, building devices with a Pi at their center. “I think a lot of people recognize that we did the right thing or are prepared to give us the benefit of the doubt,” Upton told Geerling. “We made a judgment call. I’m looking forward to not having to make that judgment call anymore.”

Geerling’s full interview with Upton has a lot more to offer, including talk about the Pi’s future plans, RISC-V and ARM discussion, Sony’s investment, and Geerling prodding Upton to react to the idea of a Pi having enough PCI Express bus capacity to support an RTX 3070.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1940153

David Hamp-Gonsalves had two things quite a few people have these days: old phones lying around and a slowly building desire to get another Raspberry Pi for a quirky personal project.

The project this time was a personal music streaming server (detailed in full on GitHub). While Pi inventories are slowly improving, they’re still not quite what they were, as a glance at rpilocator shows. What is far more readily available is the old Samsung Galaxy S7 phone in your drawer. Hamp-Gonsalves had one with a broken charging port, and a friend had another one with a bad battery, and one transplant later, he had a test model.

You can read David’s full post for the details (which we first saw at Hackaday). The gist is that he tried three solutions, with varying degrees of fiddling and success, to get the Navidrome personal music service running:

• Running an Android terminal emulator, Termux, and discovering Android would frequently auto-kill it for memory
• Using PostmarketOS, an actual Linux distribution for phones, the same one used on some PinePhones, but support for the S7 had fallen off considerably
• Using LineageOS, the open source Android-based system, which worked after some package building, SSH, DDNS, and transcoding work

This kind of project could be far more commonplace, and it should be far easier to pull off, too. Selling, trading in, or properly recycling your old phone involves inherent friction, some of it more unreasonable than it should be. Those factors, plus the human tendency to hoard old devices, lead to junk drawers of sadness. With effort, though, a device with 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, an SD card slot, Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, and an SoC found new life as a streaming server.

Seeing a reborn Galaxy S7 reminds me of Samsung’s short-lived, little-considered Galaxy Upcycling program. The company, having partnered with iFixit (where I previously worked and wrote about this), intended to provide unlocked bootloaders and software projects to help people turn their older Galaxy phones into home-automation tools, retro game consoles, or even straight-up Linux desktops—the typical assortment of “old computer, what now” projects. It was novel for an Android phone maker to proactively offer unlocked and repurpose-ready devices rather than watching as the community bypasses its security and updates its old phones, as LineageOS has done for Hamp-Gonsalves’ S7.

Software-unlocking and root access are important, but so is battery control. I’ve spent close to a decade repurposing dozens of old devices and looking at hundreds more projects. At the moment, I would love to turn an old iPad into a wall-mounted Home Assistant smart home control. But nearly every online discussion of these projects can be derailed by contemplating what you’ll do about the battery inside.

Some batteries are smart and won’t keep trickle-charging when they’re full, switching instead to run themselves fully from a power source. Some batteries are just a cathode, an anode, and a very dumb controller and will allow you to keep applying high-charge pressure to them until their already-old selves swell, push on their already-tight spaces, and either become spicy pillows or, well, catch fire. In every discussion, you’ll find someone who kept an old Android tablet plugged in for years and had no issues, alongside cautionary tales from people talking about why their desk has a rectangular heat mark in it. If battery firmware could be updated or phone makers always offered a kiosk-like cable-only mode, this kind of dire guesswork could be avoided.

Not every phone can do what a Raspberry Pi can do, to be sure, and niche phones are sure to have far less interest from developers. But it would be nice if more small, useful projects could find a home inside a small, useful device that has already been manufactured and is worth a lot more working than as shredded bulk.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1935208

Raspberry Pis will soon have many more camera-based projects available to them, as the newest Camera Module from the single-board computer maker allows for autofocus, high dynamic range, lower-light photos, and more.

The Camera Module 3, starting at $25, lets you take “crisp images of objects from around 5cm out to infinity,” Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton wrote in a blog post announcement. Standard field-of-view (FoV) camera modules cost $25, while wider-FoV models are $35 for the “more complex and expensive optical stack.”

The sensor comes from Sony and uses a back-illuminated IMX708 that provides a 12-megapixel resolution, larger (1.40μm) pixels, and support for HDR. Among other improvements from the Camera Module 2 released in 2016, this model allows for finer image details, 16:9 HD video, and better low-light sensitivity. The standard models capture a 66-degree field of view, similar to the previous module’s 62. The wide-FoV models capture 102 degrees at a slightly lower angular resolution but allow for new uses, including digital panning.

But autofocus is the truly big improvement in the Camera Module 3. The lens assembly has been mounted on a voice-coil actuator, and autofocus relies on either the sensor’s detection or the Pi’s algorithm. Raspberry Pi showed off the autofocus features in a video demonstration.

In addition to a new small-lens module, Raspberry Pi also launched a new variant of its $50 High Quality Camera mounting system, which lets users attach high-quality standard lenses to the Pi. The 2020 version allows for C/CS-mount lenses, while the new option allows for M12.

There’s more to read about the Camera Module 3, including its HDR prowess, in Pi’s blog post. The module works with any Pi model with a CSI connector, minus the Raspberry Pi 400 and the launch version of the Pi Zero. It’s supported by the modern, open source libcamera and Picamera2 beta libraries, not the older closed source version of libcamera. And if you don’t have a Raspberry Pi available for a camera project, there should be more (of some models) coming soon.

Listing image by Raspberry Pi

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1908603

Few who have tried to buy a Raspberry Pi in the last year may be shocked, but Raspberry Pi’s CEO has an update on the next Raspberry Pi model: it’s not arriving next year.

In an interview with ExplainingComputers, Eben Upton reviews the supply pressures that have impacted the single-board computers’ availability. Eighteen months into “restrained availability” of the device, Upton says the company is positioned to set aside hundreds of thousands of units for retail customers. He notes that the companies primarily taking up the existing supply of Pi units are not gigantic companies but “mom-and-pop operations” that have based their hardware products on the Pi platform and buy a few hundred Pis for their needs.

“We don’t want people to get on a waiting list,” Upton tells ExplainingComputuers. “We want people to wake up in the morning, want a Raspberry Pi, then get one at 9 am the next morning.”

Into the near future, however, that next-day Pi is likely to be a Pi 3A+, a Pi Zero 2 W, or, later and with some luck, a Pi 4. The Pi 5 is not in the cards any time soon.

“Don’t expect a Pi 5 next year… next year is a recovery year,” Upton said. “On the one hand, it’s kind of slowed us down. On the other hand, it slowed everything down. So there’s merit, I think, in spending a year before we look at introducing anything… spending a year recovering from what just happened to all of us.”

Introducing a Raspberry Pi 5 that couldn’t “ramp properly” to demand, or ate into the supply of other Pi devices, would be “a disaster,” Upton said. Not all shortages are chip-related, Upton notes. “Some of them are about packaging, some are about test capacity, some are about substrates.” Those processed, too, could be cannibalized by an all-new product, Upton said. “We’re going to be very ginger about how we look to move forward.”

You can hear Upton’s take on RISC-V possibilities, Pi pricing, industrial applications, and more at ExplainingComputers’ video interview.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1906054

A number of device and accessory brands—including Adafruit, Framework Computer, Noctua, and Raspberry Pi—have started sharing free official 3D-printable models of parts, accessories, and mods on Printables, kicking off what the site hopes is a general trend toward repair-friendly parts and community mods.

Prusa Research, which shifted its PrusaPrinters site to Printables.com in March, writes that it had been “talking with a couple of giants in their respective industries” before launching a new section of the site, Brands. Giving customers the option of locally printing certain parts reduces inventory and shipping needs. By doing so, the company writes, that “makes it easier for brands to support the right-to-repair initiative”—and create some cool mods.

“We hope that in a few years, it will be the norm to release 3D-printable models to accompany the brand’s products,” writes Mikolas Zuza, marketing specialist at Prusa Research.

At the moment, there are nine brands on the Brands page, including Prusa Research itself. Adafruit’s page has several utility pieces for DIY projects and cases and expansions for their products, like the NeoPixel. Framework Computer has posted just one official model, its 3D-printable mainboard case (the one Lenovo initially got patent-snippy about), but has highlighted community models, including an “Improved” SD expansion card. If you’re deep down a PC-cooling rabbit hole, Noctua and Cooler Master have lots of brackets, clips, ducts, spacers, and other models.

Many of the 3D models existed previously on these companies’ own sites, but a central, searchable site should help with discovery and spread.

Brand profiles on Printables have a small blue “Verified” badge, a familiar icon to anyone watching recent Twitter news. Besides brands, “well-known designers in the 3D printing community” can also be verified on Printables (though details are not provided).

It remains to be seen whether other brands will coalesce on Printables, a site that, while relatively open and collaborative, exists under the purview of one particular 3D-printing company. It’s at least a place to start looking if you’re wondering whether a small resin object might serve you better than another new product.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1905825

On Wednesday, a designer and engineer named Arvind Sanjeev revealed his process for creating Ghostwriter, a one-of-a-kind repurposed Brother typewriter that uses AI to chat with a person typing on the keyboard. The “ghost” inside the machine comes from OpenAI’s GPT-3, a large language model that powers ChatGPT. The effect resembles a phantom conversing through the machine.

To create Ghostwriter, Sanjeev took apart an electric Brother AX-325 typewriter from the 1990s and reverse-engineered its keyboard signals, then fed them through an Arduino, a low-cost microcontroller that is popular with hobbyists. The Arduino then sends signals to a Raspberry Pi that acts as a network interface to OpenAI’s GPT-3 API.

When GPT-3 responds, Ghostwriter noisily types the AI model’s output onto paper automatically.

GPT-3 is an AI large language model trained on millions of books and websites that statistically predicts which word is most likely to occur after being fed a prompt, which includes text typed by the user on Ghostwriter’s keyboard. Depending on the input, GPT-3 can function like a chatbot or complete whatever text you feed it, including assisting with writing tasks or composing poetry.

While experimenting with the machine, Sanjeev realized he needed a way to control the creative “temperature” and response length of GPT-3, so he added two knobs and an OLED status screen just above the keyboard. Sanjeev also gave the machine a dramatic new gray, cream, and orange custom paint job.

Sanjeev first teased Ghostwriter on December 1, but it’s been months in the making. “The idea for Ghostwriter came in early 2021, inspired by Rob Sloan’s Sci Fi writer,” Sanjeev wrote on Twitter, “but it was difficult to squeeze time from my full time role at @Lumen_world, so I have been slowly spending my weekends working on this.”

Part art project, part artisanal hack, Sanjeev wants Ghostwriter to make a statement about the relationship between humans and AI.

“I wanted to create a mindful intervention that allows you to take a moment to breathe and reflect on the new creative relationship we are forming with machines,” Sanjeev wrote. “The calm meditative interface of a vintage typewriter takes away all the digital distractions and takes us on an emotional journey through paper and ink.”

For more information on how Sanjeev created Ghostwriter, check out his full development thread on Twitter, which includes videos that detail the construction process.

https://arstechnica.com/?p=1904475