Books, Games, Programming, Reviews

Great review for Adventures in Minecraft book

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David Whale and Martin O’Hanlon’s “Adventures in Minecraft” is fast becoming the de-facto book for learning to program Minecraft through Python. In her ecstatic review of the book, Maryann Goldman of GeekMom.com takes us through the first few chapters which she is working on with her kids. Her response is terrific – she and her kids are clearly having a great time exploring the limits of what you can do both inside the 3D world and outside using electronics. She uses the PC version of the game, but the book is also aimed at both Mac and, most importantly for us, Raspberry Pi users. A great review of a great book. Read the review here.

You can buy a copy of the book from Amazon for around £10.

Accessories, Education, Environment, GPIO boards, Internet of things, Outreach, Raspberry Pi Foundation, Research, Science

Raspberry Pi Foundation’s weather station – schools apply now!

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Dave Honess, part of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s education team, has been working with Oracle on a fantastic project. He has developed a Raspberry Pi weather station board and peripherals that will allow schools to become part of a National network of weather stations.

He has just announced on the Raspberry Pi blog that applications for one of the 1,000 units that have been made are now open. You just need to be part of a school that will use the weather station and set it up!

You can find out more from their blog post here and apply to be part of the programme here.

If you are in a school, I urge you to apply for a weather station and take part in this great initiative. I saw it in person at the BETT exhibition and it’s a fantastic piece of kit – Dave’s done a first rate job on it.

You can see a video of the beta version of the weather station in action below:

Accessories, Arduino, Crowdfunding, GPIO boards

The power of Arduino brought to the Raspberry Pi by RasPiO Duino

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Back in May 2014, I was privileged to get hold of a beta version of the RasPiO Duino. It’s a GPIO plug-in accessory that has an onboard ATMega chip that allows you to bring the additional power of an Arduino to the Raspberry Pi. Here’s what I said about it back then.

It’s been a long road for its creator, Alex Eames from RasPi.TV, but now he has launched the Duino onto Kickstarter. The campaign runs from today until 3rd March.

The RasPiO Duino has the following features (taken from the Kickstarter page):

  • Has a capable microcontroller: ATMEGA328P. 32KB flash. 20MHz
  • 6 analog inputs for reading sensors (light, temperature, pressure etc.)
  • 14 digital input/output pins for controlling and switching things
  • 6 PWM outputs for variable LED brightness or motor speed control
  • Can control up to 12 servos
  • Can exchange the microcontroller as it is socketed
  • Fits on the GPIO header and is programmed directly from a Raspberry Pi
  • Uses the Arduino Integrated Development Environment for programming
  • Is very keenly priced at £9 (plus postage) if you’re quick enough

Alex is planning lots of documentation and videos for the board so you can get the most out of it. He runs RasPi.TV so you know the docs and vids are going to be excellent quality and very informative.

I was very impressed by the Duino when I had a play with it – it’s a great way to use your Pi to do something extra and to expand its capabilities. The soldering required to put the kit together isn’t arduous – there’s a quite a lot of it, but the board is so well laid-out that it’s simple to do – and it’s a real pleasure to use something that has been so well-designed and thought-out.

I have just backed the Duino Kickstarter to get the latest version of the board, and I really recommend doing so – it’s extremely good value for money considering what you can do with it.

You can get hold of a RasPiO Duino board for £9 (plus a small delivery cost) if you hurry and get an Earlybird, and it goes up by a couple of pounds thereafter. Go to the Kickstarter page here. If you’d like to find out more about the board before heading to Kickstarter, take a look at the video below which explains things better than I can 🙂

Accessories, Geeky Techiness, Programming, Robotics

Using the MeArm with the Raspberry Pi

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Carl Monk has blogged about his experience building and using the MeArm from Phenoptix. The MeArm is a kit made from plastic which, when assembled, gives you a robotic arm controlled using servos. Carl has developed a web interface using the Flash framework to control the arm and has also started to experiment using a PS3 controller. All his code is available here and you can read more about his experience on his blog.

You can buy a MeArm for around £30 from The Pi Hut, 4tronix or Phenoptix including the servos and all the fixings.

You can see Carl’s PS3 controller working with the MeArm in the video embedded below:

Raspberry Pi 2, Research

Camera flash causes reset of the Raspberry Pi 2

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This is perhaps the ultimate in non-issues, but it’s worth being aware of all the same.

Peter Onion has found a slight flaw in the Raspberry Pi 2. One of the chips onboard (not the main processor, one of the little ones – shown as a red circle in the image above) causes a crash or reset of the Pi if it gets exposed to a Xenon-powered flash.

The problem can be solved by sticking some electrical tape or blu-tack over the chip while you take the photograph. Or just don’t take the photograph with the Pi turned on. Or use natural light. Really, there are plenty of ways around this, hence why I call it a non-issue. Big thanks and props to Peter for finding it, though 🙂

Altered photo credit: Gordon from South London Makerspace