Gareth Brown from Safe Fire Direct has written an account of his project which involved taking apart a cheap smoke alarm and installing a radio link between it and a Raspberry Pi. The Pi then sends an email and text message when the alarm is activated.
Mark Williams has written a tutorial using C and WiringPi that shows you how to connect up a 16×2 LCD screen to the Pi. It’s a great from-first-principles blog post. Read it here
Matt, over at Raspberry Pi Spy, has decided to give Minecraft on the Pi a go. You can follow his installation procedure here on the blog.
EFYTimes.com has brought together a list of 50 Free eBooks on the subject of Python.
In advance of changes to the UK education curriculum, BBC Daily Politics has interviewed a small panel, including the Foundation’s Clive Beale, about the future of kids and programming. It’s a good watch, especially for parents and teachers.
Les Pounder has been working on a Raspberry Pi-driven fortune teller amusement machine. Here’s his latest video showing it in action.
Here’s what he says about it:
We use PiFace to control 12v electronics, and Python to control the program. The basic flow is Audio is played to attract the customer to use the game. Customer inserts money, which breaks the attract audio, and launches a randomly selected fortune reading, which is stored as an audio file on the Pi. Once the fortune reading is complete, the relays on PiFace are triggered, and this starts 2 12v arcade cabinet devices, a card dispenser, which issues a fortune card, and finally a ticket dispenser, which issues tickets for use in the gift shop. Once this is complete, the code reverts back to attracting customers.
