Over at Make they’re doing a Raspberry Pi birthday series of articles, so I thought I’d bring them to the attention of my blog readers.
The first one is from a guy called Ryan Slaugh. He’s used a Pi and an Alamode (which is an Arduino that plugs into the GPIO) to create a Pinewood Derby-style racetrack. The video showing the full build is shown below and you can read more detail over at the Make site.
Just launched today, the Pibrella is a simple GPIO add-on board for the Pi. It has on-board the following:
It also comes pre-assembled which means you don’t need to worry about soldering anything!
We used these for our workshop at the December Cambridge Raspberry Jam during which the kids used ScratchGPIO to program a traffic lights sequence.
The Pibrella.com website contains a simple Python example and instructions on how to download the pibrella library. There’s not loads of documentation yet, but I’m sure that will come soon and the beauty of the Pibrella is that it’s very simple and just a few examples will get kids started in no time.
By giving protected inputs/outputs, the Pibrella is also protecting your Pi (hence the name).
It only costs £10 (plus P&P) and is ideal for classroom use (because of the functionality and the protection it affords) – I can thoroughly recommend it and give it a hearty 9.5/10. Here’s another recommendation from Darren Christie who borrowed the CamJam boards for a CAS event.
You can program the Pibrella from ScratchGPIO, as I mentioned before, Python, C (see Gordon Henderson’s page) or any other language that can control the GPIO.
You can find out more about the board from pibrella.com and you can buy it from Pimoroni or Cyntech.
Alex Eames took his Pi-plus-screen-plus-camera set-up to the Raspberry Jamboree last week and took some great pictures. He also grabbed some video of the party at the end of the event and has edited it together. So, if you attended the Jamboree see if you can spot yourself!
This nifty little image map is pretty cool – you hover your mouse over a component on the surface of the Raspberry Pi and a little tooltip comes up describing the component.
Stephen Wolfram and his team have been working on the Wolfram Language for 30 years and it is almost finished. Wolfram is designed to be a “totally symbolic, heavily natural, intensely knowledge-based, and extremely large computer programming language” although no-one has yet been able to satisfactorily pigeon-hole exactly what the language will be like in use. VentureBeat has the full story.
The Adafruit PiTFT is a nifty bit of kit that fits on top of the Pi and gives you a small touch screen display. William Phelps has created a touchscreen keyboard for the PiTFT and has shared the code on Github. Here’s what he had to say about it:
I needed a touch keyboard for some projects using the most excellent Adafruit PiTFT. I found Tony Maro’s Virtual Keyboard project, originally for a Nokia tablet, and modified it to work on the Adafruit PiTFT display. This is specifically for the PiTFT – the sizes and display support are all set for the PiTFT in landscape mode.
At present there is no support for Alt, Tab or Ctrl but they could be easily added. It does support tapping in the text input area to move the input cursor (I just got that working today). The Shift key is locking; tap it again to turn off.
One change I am working on is to have a pop-up display of the currently selected key to make it easier to get the right key. Right now it highlights them but if you are using a finger it’s hard to see. With this change you can slide your finger around until you get the key you want and then let go to select it.
It’s fully open source under GNU V3. It’s up on my Github repo.
