Good Things Come in Small Packages–Rasberry Pi
Picture a credit card. Now picture a computer slightly larger than a credit card. Incredible as it may seem, you’ve just pictured Raspberry Pi.
This little technological wonder plugs into a computer monitor—or even a TV. Raspberry Pi can do anything your desktop computer or laptop can do. Search the internet; stream a video, play a game, or just tackle the basics—word processing and data analysis. You name it, you can do it. Just pop this little gadget into your pocket, and you’re ready to go—provided, of course, you have access to a monitor or TV.
But that’s not all. The Raspberry Pi Camera Module is an addon. It, too, is small but powerful. Just attach it to Raspberry Pi and you’re in business.
When UMass Boston biology professor Brook Moyers contacted the IT service desk and met up with Jamie Soule, manager of IT Operations and Telecom, with a request for data cables to be installed in her plant growth chambers, Soule asked for what purpose? Purpose would determine the kind of solution Soule and the campus network and security engineers would devise for Moyers.
The solution was simple. Moyers wanted to monitor plant growth in several of her growth chambers using Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi camera add-on. “The problem was that Raspberry Pi needs to be powered and connected to the internet, both of which can be done with a single Ethernet connection using power over the Ethernet,” Moyers says. “But there were only so many Ethernet cables in the plant growth facility, and each Pi needs a dedicated cable.”
Soule’s solution was simpler still: relocate surrounding and unused Ethernet cables and ports into a single wall jack in the plant growth facility. This would eliminate the need for installing a web of cables across multiple spaces in the Integrated Sciences Complex and ensure that the system could be deployed flexibly across multiple plant growth chambers. This cleared the way for Moyers to install Raspberry Pi and the Raspberry Pi camera add-on. To conduct their plant research, Moyers and her students needed multiple Raspberry Pi computers and camera add-ons.
“I’m interested in understanding why individuals of the same species look different,” says Moyers. “We can ask that about humans, breeds of dogs … Why does a Great Dane look different than a Chihuahua? I ask that question about plants. To do that, I look at the plants themselves. If I wanted to, and if I had the time, I could go to the growth chamber every day and take photographs. Or, I could program the Raspberry Pi camera to take those photographs for me every day, every five minutes if need be.”
Last summer, Moyers collaborated with biology professor Adán Colón-Carmona in an effort to understand how to fight a toxic contaminant called phenanthrene. “We studied the plant Arabidopsis thaliana, the plant that we know the most about genetically,” says Moyers. “It’s used as a model of how a plant works. We’re interested in growth and how that growth can be changed. Our ultimate goal is to learn how to pull toxins like phenanthrene out of the soil.” To do this, Moyers and Colón-Carmona used the Raspberry Pi camera to monitor the plant growth at different stages.
Moyers is pleased with her collaboration with the IT network and security engineers and Soule’s solution to her cable and access challenge. “It was nice working with Jamie and his team,” she says. “They were enormously knowledgeable and helpful.” Moyers also credited Jeff Dusenberry, director of Research Computing, for helping to keep the project running smoothly. All in all, she says, “IT was very responsive to my needs.”