Motion-triggered music player with a Raspberry Pi

Here’s a nice Instructable tutorial from . She uses an infra-red sensor that detects when the beam is broken and then plays music. The sensor is set-up across a doorway so that when someone comes through the door, omxplayer is triggered and sound comes out. It’s interesting because the normal way of doing this sort of thing is to use a PIR sensor. Read the Instructable here.

Artificial Killing Machine – an important Raspberry Pi project

In these days of drone warfare, the targets of our modern weaponry can sometimes be made nameless by the remoteness of the operator. This remoteness is the target of the latest work by artist Jonathan Fletcher Moore, based in Los Angeles, California. The piece is called “Artificial Killing Machine”.

A Raspberry Pi is used to mine the API of a public database of US military drone strikes. Based on the data it finds there, it triggers the firing of downwards-facing cap guns. Until you see it in action, as you can in the video below, you can’t understand how chilling it is.

The data is also printed out on receipt paper, further hammering home how cheap life becomes when it is reduced to a simple statistic. Read a lot more about the piece here.

Simon Says game made with a Raspberry Pi and a Pimoroni ExplorerHAT

Richard Hayler has produced a Simon Says game by wiring up some LEDs onto the breadboard of an ExplorerHAT and then writing the necessary Python code. The LEDs light up in a sequence which you then match by pressing the ExplorerHAT buttons. It’s a very nifty piece of code, although he does admit it’s a bit rough and ready, but it’s a great example of what to do with this great board. Read all about it here.

Get to know the two Raspberry Pi cameras with these three tutorials

Les Pounder has posted a new set of tutorials on the Element 14 website that take you through using both the normal Pi Camera Module and the PiNoIR infra-red camera. The three tutorials are: Taking a picture, Creating a time-lapse and Recording in slow-motion. So, if you’ve got a camera module and you don’t know where to begin, this is a great post to start with. Read it here.