Author: Stephen Thompson
When confronted with the need to avoid children blowing out candles on an actual cake, the obvious solution was to build a virtual cake, with on screen candles controlled by a set of wind turbines. Here it is, as featured in the MagPi, the future of cake.
The project utilises a Raspberry Pi, an analogue to digital converter(ADC) like this one from BC-Robotics, and a set of DC turbines, like these from Sntieecr.
The software here consists of a Python library (main.py) to query the voltages on the ADC in response to POST requests from a javascript front end (static/happybirthday.js). We use Flask to create a web application overlaying various animations to give the appearance that blowing on the wind turbines blows out the on screen candles, shown above rendered with Minecraft.
