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great product good to know it's getting even better, raspberry PI is great i used it on my first miners :)

I have an engineering friend used a facial recognition system with some tweaks. Apparently you can download pre-existing code for the Raspberry Pi.

So what did my friend do with it? He painted a bad guy blue!!!! You see he, had a string of vandalisms that were specifically directed at him like wires and water lines cut. My friend decided to repurpose an air operated potato cannon to paint the perp blue. He was afraid that he would get into trouble if he painted a dog, cat, mailman, or child. So he used the raspberry Pi equipped with a camera and facial recognition software to prevent mistakes.

He set up a bait (cheap lawn ornament) that he rigged the ornament so it was difficult to remove and ran a trigger wire. The raspberry Pi prevented false firing. The potato cannon was filled with blue dye that you use in your washing machine to permanently dye clothes. The dye was mixed with shampoo and other ingredients. The cannon was hidden in a rosebush. One day he saw that he had a blue lawn and ran to check out the video record. He was definitely successful painting the bad guy blue. He also got video footage of the bad guy getting into the his car and driving away along with the license plate. The cops were called and the bad guy picked up.

Turns out that the reason was the bad guy had beef with the previous owner and didn't realize that they had moved and a very smart engineer moved in. Hahahahaha... He never pressed charges as the bad guy was a really bad guy that was wanted by the police and apparently discovered other things he was doing that put him away for a very long time.

@themarkymark, I Resteemed your article!

This is freaking legendary!! I love it.

I use a lot of Pi's, one project I always wanted to do is have a driveway camera that identifies when UPS/Fedex come and when certain friends show up. Training it on FedEx/UPS and different color vehicle types. Never had the time to work on it, but would be a fun project. Raspberry Pi's are really fun.

My friend also did something similar. He created license plate recognition. The software looks for motion, then looks for shapes that resembles license plates. After that, the software adjusts the plate image to correct for off angle image. Next he uses character recognition software to read the plate. The software finally draws a box around the plate and writes the plate number on the image of the vehicle.

My friend took it a step further and set his raspberry pi to text every time it detected a plate with the image of the vehicle and the plate number.

He had to shut the texting down because he was getting too many texts even though he lived on a cul de sac.

Speaking of blue, Bluetooth also got upped from 4.1 to 4.2:

IoT Capabilities:
Low-power IP (IPv6/6LoWPAN)
Bluetooth Smart Internet Gateways (GATT)
With BLE 4.2 Bluetooth Smart sensors can transmit data over the internet.

Security:
LE Privacy 1.2
LE Secure Connections
With new, more power efficient and highly secure features, BLE 4.2 provides additional benefits allowing only trusted owners to track device location and confidently pair devices.

Speed:
250% Faster
10x More Capacity
Compared to previous versions, BLE 4.2 enables 250% faster and more reliable over-the-air data transmission and 10x more packet capacity.
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Bus speed does kill it for the PI unfortunately I prefer spending a bit more on a mini pc as once you start including all the little things you need with the PI such as charger and SD card it's almost the same in price, and it packs a lot more punch and can natively support windows, although I do love the PI I need a bit more performance and less lag as I mainly use it as a media centre.

I find it puzzling that they haven't taken measures to improve the bus system.

After all - its clearly the weak link in this design - even without the added features.

Yep, eth and usb share the same bus... but it works for a slow(ish) NAS and ofc tons of other purposes.

The quintessential element of the "running a full node" starter pack.

Good to know it's getting better. great product RaspberryPi

I'm still loving that price point.

Raspberry should create the own cryptocurrency that you can only mine on this device. :)

Very good to know! Thanks for sharing, definitely know a few people who will love to hear about this! Love that way you put “worth the extra $0.00” lol