Pete Scargill has been experimenting with NodeRED for quite some time, mostly in relation to using it as an Internet of Things platform. At the moment, he is using NodeRED as a translator and to trigger speech synthesis. Check out his efforts and work-in-progress here. If you’re into NodeRED and/or alternative programming languages, I recommend subscribing to his blog – it’s informative and always well-written.
Some great news for owners of the FUZE platform. An update has been released that means you can now interface with the Raspberry Pi SenseHAT using the FUZE BASIC language. The following commands have been added:
You can find instructions on how to download the new version here.
The SenseHAT attaches to the FUZE by way of the interface board which replicates the GPIO pins. You can see it in action in the video below:
Martin O’Hanlon wanted to track aircraft near him. So, he installed PiAware on his Raspberry Pi and then wrote some simple Python to detect when an aircraft was nearby and then light up an LED. It’s a simple project, but it’s a pretty cool one. Read how he did it here.
The fourth episode of Pimoroni’s Bilge Tank is now online. Paul Beech is fresh back from the New York Maker Faire and takes us through what he saw there. Great stuff for old and young geeks alike. Not much about the Raspberry Pi in this episode, but that’s okay – it’s a great videocast as usual!
Maker/enthusiast Mr Fid has taken a cheap pair of video goggles and attached a Raspberry Pi, a Pi NoIR camera and an IR light source. He has then fed the composite video output of the Pi into the goggles and made himself a cheap night-vision apparatus. Read how he did it on his Instructable.
Ben Nuttall has been working hard to create a library which will provide a simpler interface to the GPIO pins. The library is called GPIO Zero. At the moment, on the RPi.GPIO library, there are a couple of commands to set things like the pin numbering system that kids are often told to just “enter and forget about”. This library obfuscates these commands to simplify matters. An example is shown below:
from gpiozero import LED
red = LED(2)
red.on()
Ben has built in several add-on boards so far and aims to make it the easiest way to program the GPIO in Python on the Pi. It’s actually a wrapper for the good old RPi.GPIO library, so existing code will still work the same way. You can read documentation and more information on PythonHosted.org as well as instructions on how to install it. Please bear in mind this is a beta so your mileage may vary!