Recently at Moogfest, which is a music and technology festival set in North Carolina, artists Kyle McDonald and Surya Mattu exhibited an installation piece known as the WiFI Whisperer. The Whisperer was connected to the festival’s wifi network and sniffed out data contained on the mobile phones and devices that were also connected to the network. As people walked by, their devices would be monitored and accessed and the resultant data displayed on monitors. The Whisperer also ‘whispered’ the information out of attached speakers. The whole set-up used eight Raspberry Pis. You can read more from McDonald in this Wired article, along with suggested ways of preventing this kind of thing from happening.
Robot face conversation using Sonic Pi on a Raspberry Pi
Robin Newman, who managed to do far more with Sonic Pi than I ever could, has done it again. This time, he’s programmed Sonic Pi with some voice samples which sends commands, via a (pretty darned excellent) PiCon Zero controller board, to two 4tronix McRoboFaces (yet to be put on sale, but I’m sure it’s only a matter of time!). This makes them have a conversation and even involves the telling of a (cracker-worthy) joke. Here’s Robin to tell you all about it:
Giveaway to celebrate my Raspberry Pi Birthday
Or should that be Pirthday? Hmmm… Could be “a thing”… Maybe not…
Four years ago today, I received my first Raspberry Pi!
It’s been quite a journey since then. I started work on my first project in the first couple of months – the Picorder. Three years later, I was still working on it. My first exposure to the Raspberry Pi community was the Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam, run by all-round brilliant person Peter Onion. There, I met a lot of people who I’m still proud to call ‘friend’. The community has been, and continues to be, a lifeline for me. The folks at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, likewise, have been fantastic and I even worked there for a few days on the Jam section of their website. More friendships formed. Probably the biggest thing to happen to me is that I re-started the Cambridge Raspberry Jam and then later, with my friend Tim Richardson we expanded it to what it is today – an event regularly attracting around 200 people. Add to that our involvement with the Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend and, of course, Pi Wars, it’s certainly kept me busy for four years!
To celebrate the occasion, I’m running a competition. The winner of the competition will receive a Raspberry Pi 3 plus a RasPiO Analog Zero board that allows you to read up to 8 analog inputs and gives you a small prototyping area. It’s a kit but it will be all soldered up for you (if you choose).
To enter the competition, visit this page and fill in the form. Entry closes on the 30th June sometime after noon. If you win, I’ll contact you after that date to arrange for delivery. If you’d like, you can have it delivered to someone other than yourself! I won’t use the captured data for anything else, so don’t worry about spammage. 🙂
Birmingham Eagle Labs Raspberry Jam – 13th August
Chris Penn is organising a Raspberry Jam at the Birmingham Eagle Labs on 13th August. Running from 11am to 2pm, the event will feature show and tell, workshops and talks. The Labs is in the Innovation Birmingham Campus on Holt Street and you can get free tickets to it here.
Draw spider charts on your Raspberry Pi with Python
Albert has taken inspiration from a tweet by Sway Grantham in which she wanted to create spider charts (radar charts) automatically. So, Albert worked out a CSV file format that worked, created a blank chart and wrote a script to read in the CSV, producing the custom chart. Read how he did it here.
For when you absolutely have to have EVERYTHING controlled by a Raspberry Pi
Matt Mahdavi took a Raspberry Pi A+ and installed the Kodi operating system onto it. He then also installed WebIOPi (an Internet of Things framework) to allow him to control a variety of household devices. These include lights, the TV itself and his central heating via a relay board. He’s also running Motion which monitors an attached webcam and Shairport for Airplay. He’s mounted the whole shebang onto an old floorboard. It’s pretty nifty and you can see the whole project in the video above (apologies for the poor sound quality!)