The Business Owners Pocket PI

A lifelong biblioholic, and advocate for all-things geekathon. All the projects were entered into one of four categories — Artistic, Educational, Enclosure, and Utility — and are now competing for five prize packs, including a Printrbot Jr. The Pi is the brain behind multiple home security systems; it is responsible for collecting and displaying data; the Pi has been used as an educational tool for music, mathematics, and geography, among other subjects; artists are building interactive and crowd-sourced installations; enclosures for the Pi range from simple to complex, with all-in-ones emerging as a sub-genre all their own; the Pi can control and automate various systems around the home or office.

Judges are now reviewing these projects based on their documentation, project success, and unique application. The winners will be announced on or before April 25th. Good luck to all participating makers, and click the button below to view all the projects and their descriptions. Links to each entry can be found after their description if you want to read up more on a specific project. The Winners have been announced — click here to see the winners!

Please check your email. You will also be receiving the weekly Make: Newsletter to keep you inspired with new projects and more product reviews. Thanks for your submission. Our editors will review your materials and follow up with you via email as soon as possible. In the meantime, keep making stuff! Subscribe to Make Magazine Today! By Nick Normal Nick Normal. For my first project i wanted to make a battery powered wireless internet radio stream player.

Something that could connect to the internet and flip though a list of radio streams. I had never used Linux before but am a. NET developer with Googling skills. Turned out I found a way to get it to work.

I now have a flawless radio player for my office. I can even change stations and volume from my phone. Project Link Color My Desk is a publicly controllable string of lights illuminating my daily workspace. Well then, take a minute to set the color of my desk on a day of your choosing at http: Data leaves the killawatt via an XBee transmitter with a data stream signal going to a XBee receiver which is connected to the Raspberry Pi.

The Pi collects this data, and my webserver picks up the data from the Pi and displays the power output. The matrix is driven by a Raspberry Pi. The project is coded entirely in Python. Also been used as a clock. I also have it setup to be used in my wedding this summer. Guests will scan their table cards via bar-code scanner and the Pi will display the appropriate table number.

Project Link I spent quite a bit of time debating on the best case to use for my first Raspberry Pi, and after looking around for a bit, I stumbled across across this N So after much planning, cutting, fixing, and reformatting, I have a beautiful Raspbmc pi tucked inside. Project Link I have bought this incredible little board and it worked grate looked grate but it was missing something.

It was missing a case. I order to be practical not to short things out or just to be creative and make something beautiful. So I have made the following sort of a box using clear Plexiglas and some screws. The main idea is the box to be so cheap and accessible as the board itself. Project Link We designed an in-garden device to live by your plants. It is solar-powered, with a moisture sensor, connection to a drip irrigation system, and XBee. Soil moisture readings are sent to a Pi. The Pi is a webserver.

You can set up automatic watering, or a one-time watering for today. Your instructions are sent to the garden devices. They use internal servos to control flow through the drip irrigation system. RPi gets the temp.

It hits Twitter for news feeds that I like. The RPi runs on WiFi, which can be a little trouble, but it ran for 22 days straight. I can provide much more information, if needed. The inability to work on new projects and complete existing ones, because the company is defending itself against a third party action, can seriously hurt the health of a business. Failure to fulfill existing contracts on time can damage reputations and hinder future business.

Larger business may be able to cope better, sometimes employing individuals within their organizations to deal with these aspects allowing them to bear higher excess levels. If you were to purchase a new laptop then there would be many things about the product which would affect your buying decision — processing speed, size, battery life and operating system, and so on. It is the same with PI insurance, and it needs to be considered as a product with value, and not an unwelcome intangible cost. Or perhaps you can buy something more comprehensive. Over the last few years the products have developed even further, offering highly valuable breach of contract cover.

In my opinion you should always look to purchase the best insurance product you can afford, as it should not be seen as an unwelcome cost on your balance sheet. Insurance should be appreciated as the product enabling you to run your business with peace of mind. Examples include surveying, accountancy and legal professions, but there are many more than that. Firstly you need to understand the difference between geographical and jurisdictional limits on an insurance policy. Geographical limits concern the physical location where the advice was given, or the service provided.

Jurisdictional limits concern under which law claims can be brought against your business. Legal action in the USA and Canada has been notoriously expensive for decades, with higher costs, punitive damages and the prevalence of class actions. This means insurance policies with a worldwide jurisdiction are usually more difficult to obtain. When you do manage to find one they tend to be far more expensive, with more restrictive terms, lower limits of indemnity and higher levels of excess.

First consider where you operate and where your customers are based. A fundamental issue concerns what level of exposure your business faces. There are many factors to consider, some of which are below. What would be the worst-case scenario, what impact would that have on the business and how likely is it to occur? Larger organizations may be able to absorb higher losses, whereas one significant incident could put a smaller inadequately protected firm out of business.

You need to look at the size and type of contracts the business is involved in. Be aware that it is not just your element of the contract you have to consider, but that of the whole project. The industry you operate in also has to be considered. The more specialized the area, the higher the likely litigation costs if something goes wrong. How likely is the business to be subject to a legal action from a customer, or other third party?

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Do you have an exposure to repeat claims, or could you have if the environment you operate in changes? For example since the economic downturn with falling house prices, the surveying industry has experienced a glut of claims. These have been for inadequate property valuations from lenders against surveyors. The business should also seek to avoid high excess levels, maybe getting the excess aggregated if possible once the amount paid under the excess for a series of incidents reaches a set figure the excess effectively drops to nil for the remainder of that policy period.

You should consider all of the aspects above to analyzing the potential severity and frequency of incidents, then look at what options are available to you, and what you can afford. There are countless other factors which should be considered, however the last area I would recommend thinking about concerns ethics. It would feel an unfair situation, so why should your customers be any different? Why would it be acceptable for your business to cause another to go to the wall?

If you are properly insured, in the event of litigation, there is something that can respond and recompense the aggrieved party. There is something in place to prevent a fellow business from financial difficulty, or even bankruptcy. So, why be the man of straw to your customers? Would it be acceptable for your business to cause another to go to the wall?

If you are properly insured, in the event of litigation, your policy will respond and recompense the aggrieved party, perhaps preventing a fellow business from financial difficulty, or even bankruptcy. He writes about the technology that IT decision makers need to know about, and the latest happenings in the European tech scene. How self-driving tractors, AI, and precision agriculture will save us from the impending food crisis. How IoT, robotics, and AI are tackling one of the biggest problems of the century. How digital farming is revolutionizing the future of food.

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Is the technology actually viable?