Another one from Richard Hayler. This time, he’s using Python on the Raspberry Pi to detect changes in the Astro Pi’s accelerometer and then translate that into commands he sends over bluetooth to a Sphero. The Sphero is a cute little ball-shaped robot with internal lighting that moves at great speed across the floor. You can read more about Richard’s experiment and see his code here and you can find out more about the Sphero from their website. You can see the whole thing in action in the video below:
Can you do this with other distributions of linux?
On the Raspberry Pi? I don’t know. Richard’s done it on Raspbian as far as I can tell. I’m not sure on the state of the GPIO libraries on other distros.