Art, Competitions, Robotics

Pi Wars programme cover design competition

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Logo v2 RGB sm

On the day of Pi Wars, we hand out programmes to every competitor and every spectator. These programmes contain details about the competition and also about our sponsors. Here is what the programme looked like last year:

Page 01 - front cover

This year, we are running a competition to design the front cover. The competition is open to anyone 18 years old and under. As well as your design, the cover will feature our Pi Wars logo banner and also the date (or at least the year) of the competition. We are not sure what the prize will be just yet but it will be Raspberry Pi-related and, of course, you get the satisfaction of seeing your design on the front of all the programmes! The competition will be judged by members of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Entries must be received by noon on 1st October (to give us time to judge the competition and to integrate the design into the programme before it is printed). More details, and information on how to send us your design is available on the website.

We hope we get some great entries!

Art, Video

Digital Zoetrope controlled by a Raspberry Pi

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Brian Corteil has been working on his digital zoetrope for most of this year. At the recent Newcastle Maker Faire he showed off his creation. Later on, his brought it along to CamJam and showed the Raspberry Pi community what he’d been up to. The zoetrope uses 12 small Adafruit OLED displays connected to a single Raspberry Pi via SPI. By positioning yourself correctly at the edge of the zoetrope and giving it a swish with your hand (it doesn’t have motors, thus maintaining that true, historic zoetrope feel) the static images that pass by your eyes appear to be animated, thanks to “persistence of vision“. My description is hardly adequate for this project, so I hope that some of you will come along to the next CamJam to see it in action! You can read more about how Brian put together the zoetrope here.

Accessories, Making, Sport

Monitoring cricket scores with the Raspberry Pi

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Rohit Gupta wanted to monitor cricket scores while he was working in his office. The trouble is almost all the sites he would use to do this were blocked by his company’s web traffic filter. So, he turned to the Raspberry Pi and a piece of software called BeautifulSoup to create a web scraper which would poll an (unnamed) service once a minute and then display the results in summary form on an LCD from a Nokia 5510. The data displayed is as follows:

  • Teams playing
  • Currently batting team with overs underneath it
  • The score in the largest font
  • 4s/6s and Run Rate
  • 1st Innings history if 2nd Innings is going on and 2nd innings PENDING if the first innings was underway.
  • Match Status – Rains, Ended,In Progress etc

He has called the whole thing CricPi and you can read more here.

Environment, Making, Sensors, Tutorials

Basement storage temperature and humidity monitor with a Raspberry Pi

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A basement full of old books but no way to monitor humidity and temperature. Enter a Raspberry Pi. This hacker has put together a DHT22 sensor and an LCD screen with the Pi in order to monitor environmental conditions in his basement. The collected data is then output to a .csv file so that he can see the results over time. He’s written the whole thing up as a walk-through tutorial. Read it here. It’s a great introduction to environmental sensors. A possible extension to this is to publish the results online with a stats service so that he can monitor trends in real time as the results are sent to the service.

Education, Events, Raspberry Pi Foundation, Video

Lots of education-related videos from EuroPython over at the Raspberry Pi Foundation website

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Recently, some of the Foundation’s education team headed over to Bilbao, Spain for the EuroPython conference. Many of the talks were recorded and the Foundation have blogged about the ones that they presented. They are:

  • Carrie Anne Philbin – Education: A Python solution
  • Ben Nuttall – Physical computing with Python and Raspberry Pi
  • James Robinson – Raspberry Pi Weather Station
  • James Robinson – Pycon: a teacher’s perspective

These videos, along with a description of the weekend can be found here.

Interview, Raspberry Pi Foundation

Raspberry Pi Guy seeks questions for Eben Upton

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On Tuesday, Matthew Timmons-Brown is heading up to Pi Towers in Cambridge. As part of his visit there he will be interviewing Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading and co-creator of the Raspberry Pi. He wants to know what you the great Raspberry Pi community want to ask Eben. So, here’s your chance to pose all sorts of questions about the past, present and future of Raspberry Pi. You can contact him via email on theraspberrypiguy@gmail.com or via Twitter. Alternatively, just leave a comment on this blog post and I’ll pass it along!