Picademy comes to Birmingham

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s free CPD for educators is coming to Birmingham. The sessions, which will be led by Martin O’Hanlon, will be held at the latest Google Digital Garage which is located inside Birmingham Library. The following dates are available:

  • 27th – 28th August
  • 1st – 2nd October
  • 2nd – 3rd November
  • 7th – 8th December

and you can apply by filling in the application form.

Replacing a Chevy head unit with a Raspberry Pi

Daniel Stinebaugh wanted to replace his Chevy’s failing head unit with a Raspberry Pi. So, he ripped the old one out and fitted the Pi and a wireless router in it’s place. The Pi runs Volumio and he’s also using the DAC+ HAT from HiFiBerry to route the signal to an amplifier. Read more about the project here. He’s been left with a system which is, in his opinion, vastly superior to any head unit out there with a lot of flexibility and gorgeous sound.

Internet-of-Things temperature reading with the Raspberry Pi

Jeremy Morgan has written an excellent, comprehensive tutorial on reading data from a waterproof 1-wire temperature sensor and then outputting it to screen. He has then expanded on this to push the data up to online service Firebase. Read the tutorial here.

We use an identical method to grab data from a temperature sensor with the second CamJam EduKit. So, if you’d like to get into reading sensors, take a look at the kit, available from The Pi Hut, here.

3D printed portable Raspberry Pi games console

I’ve featured a few of these before, but this one looks particularly nice. Rasmus Hauschild is 14 years old and from Denmark. He has created a portable retro games console with the Pi and some nifty 3D printing. He has posted up the 3D files and various scripts onto Thingiverse. Bear in mind that this isn’t an Instructable – it has a list of items that you’ll need to get to replicate the project, but no instructions on how to do it. However, if you do a Google around, you’ll soon find that instructions are out there. Take a look at the ‘thing’ here.

Raspberry Pi robot kit GoPiGo gets a node.js library

Good news from Dexter Industries today. Together with ‘a few key contributors’ their GoPiGo robotics kit is now controllable via programming language node.js. If you have one of their kits, or you just want to look at how node.js can be used in robotics, take a look at this GitHub repository which contains all the instructions you need to get going. More information about their efforts to get the kit compatible with more languages is available here.

DIY laser harp powered by a Raspberry Pi and RasPiO Duino

Not much detail on this, but it’s way too cool not to share. David Pride announced on Twitter that he has created a DIY laser harp. He uses a 50mW laser with a stepper motor to create beams of light and then LDR sensors detect beam breaks and the Pi plays a corresponding midi note. The whole thing is tied in to a RasPiO Duino board. You already know I hold the board in very high esteem, but this is the first time we’ve seen something this big and fantastical! Hopefully he’ll provide more details in a future blog. Here it is in action. Leave him a comment on the YouTube video if you like it!