Andreas Lindahl has 3D-printed a lovely bear and put it together with a Pi and some other components to create a cuddly Spotify player. Created as a way to get better at 3D modelling and printing, the bear has a B+ inside as well as a lipo battery and booster and a Pi Hut speaker.
The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration have teamed up with other international partners to develop 3D-printed weather stations that will help to predict flash floods in underdeveloped countries, and they use the Pi to collect data and send it to their experts. Read more here. (This article is more about the 3D printing rather than the Pi, which is odd, but you can’t have everything!)
Phil Atkin has been hard at work developing synth systems with the Pi. Here is a video (above) of his latest effort. I’ll let him explain:
A first-generation Raspberry Pi (Model B+ overclocked to 950MHz) runs a sequencing application which drives 8 simultaneous soft synths running on the Pi, and also renders the 2-oscilloscope waveform on screen via OpenGL ES. Additionally 4 stereo delay effects with low-pass filter are being rendered, and each instrument and each effects unit supports a send amount into a common reverb unit, which also has a low-pass filter in the effects path. So 8 synths, 4 delays, one reverb, one sequencer, two waveform displays.
6 of the synths are 2.5 oscillator Virtual Analog monosynths, the other 2 are 2-layer sample replay synths, each supporting 12 notes of polyphony. All percussion sounds were also sampled from the Pi Virtual Analog synth, so every sound – apart from the wonderful massed Caitlin Downie vocal ‘Mmmh’ and ‘Aaah’ – is derived from the same Raspberry Pi Virtual Analog codebase.
Not sure how I didn’t cover this before… Must have got caught up in Big Birthday Weekend stuff.
Aaron Shaw from Pi Supply and his team have developed a new battery pack for the Pi called the PiJuice and are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund it. There’s just a few days to back the project to get hold of the HAT and battery for £24. An absolute bargain considering it will make your Pi nice and portable! It has a power switch and uses the I2C protocol to communicate.
Ahhh, the famous Hello World program of the Pi 🙂
Jeremy Morgan has written this nice little tutorial to help you get started with using the GPIO to flash an LED. Read the tutorial here.
Shameless plug: We do a similar thing with the CamJam EduKit!
Richard Hayler and his sons have been at the LEGO again. This time, they’ve created a LEGO chicken which lays real eggs by using motors to manipulate an egg out of the tail end. Read all about it here.
