I’m trying something new out – a sort-of digest of Pi-related things I’ve found this week. Let me know what you think of the idea of these combined posts in the comments! 🙂

Air quality lamp

Guillaume Slizewicz has created a Raspberry Pi Zero W-driven lamp that lets you know about air quality. Called Canari, it turns air pollution data from APIs into light patterns. The two APIs are from smartcitizen.me and sensor.community. You can read more here and see a video on Vimeo or watch it below.

Pico VGA Library

Miroslav Nemecek has been busy developing a VGA library for the Raspberry Pi Pico. Able to output from the Pico to a VGA monitor in either PAL or NTSC, the library has been developed with gaming applications and technical demos in mind. Details of the wiring involved and the way you compile the library (Windows only, sorry) are available here, along with LOTS of lovely documentation. You can see a demo in the video below:

Apple eMate – a portable Raspberry Pi

“Billy the Kid” has taken an old Apple eMate 300 and converted it to house and use a Raspberry Pi 4 8GB model. This rare machine was launched in 1997 by Apple and had a screen and keyboard. This is a great project to make a Pi portable, although the procedure is long, complicated and definitely not something you want to mess up – Billy has estimated the cost at over $400. You can see the build over on YouTube or below (you might want to turn your volume down a bit as I almost jumped out of my chair when it started!):

Bop that Minecraft!

Seth Altobelli decided to make Minecraft just that little bit more difficult to control by using a Raspberry Pi Pico as the control board for a Bop It toy. You steer using an accelerometer that he added and the you hit one of the buttons to move. The other buttons are used for other commands and for jumping. He doesn’t go into the coding too much, but I assume he’s using the Pico to translate between the Bop It’s controls and a HID input. It makes Minecraft much easier incredibly difficult to control, but it’s certainly a cool project! You can see details of the “Technoblade” build and a long demo over on YouTube or watching the video below: