Sandy Macdonald has written a comprehensive review of his recently-arrived Raspberry Pi-powered media player, the Slice. The Slice was created by Five Ninjas and inside has a Raspberry Pi Compute Module which runs OpenElec and Kodi. You can read the review here. It’s extremely positive with a few minor caveats. Well worth reading if you want a media player.
Sacramento-based Chris Osborn likes to control fireworks with electronics. This year, he decided to use the Raspberry Pi to trigger relays that would ignite the fireworks. In the end it didn’t work brilliantly well, but he’s blogged about it and included a wiring diagram for his set-up. Read more here.
California-based 13-year old Nicholas Harris (aka ScarabCoder) has created a great electronics project (okay, it was some time ago but I only just spotted it!). He’s taken some LEDs and buttons to create a ‘keypad’ of sorts and then written some Python code which detects the button presses and changes the state of the LEDs depending on whether the correct ‘code’ is entered. Great to see this sort of thing from a youngster. Watch the video below, leave him a comment on YouTube or read his blog! I previously featured Nicholas when he contributed to the Minecraft universe via Martin O’Hanlon’s website.
Canadian Bell Eapen has decided to leverage the inherent cheapness of the Raspberry Pi and the coolness of Bluetooth beacons to set-up a tracking facility for patients in mental health institutions. It’s just an idea at the moment, but he intends to explore the different technologies available and how they can be used. Read more and follow his progress here.
Keith Ellis and the guys over at Ipswich Makerspace did brilliantly well with their robot, TractorBot, at last year Pi Wars. They won Best Robot under £75 and placed very respectably in most of the challenges. (You can see the full results here). They have decided to open-source their designs and code for TractorBot, which means that other competitors this year will have a head-start on many challenges if they take the time to go through the code. Design specs will also be released so if you want a good base to start from, you could do far worse than take a look! You can read the start of their open-sourcing project here.
Last year, Sam Nazarko renamed his media player operating system Raspbmc to OSMC. Since then, his team has grown and work has accelerated on the new version and he has now announced that the first stable release of the image has been released. So, if you use the Raspberry Pi as a media centre, give it a try and see if you like it! Download the image and find out more here.
