Teacher Dan Aldred from Thirsk School has been telling Linux User and Developer all about his year 7 club’s winning entry into the Astro Pi competition. He covers everything from how the club was set-up, how they came up with their idea of tracking the ISS in orbit, how they split up the work and the collaborative process which helped their idea come to fruition. You can read the interview here.
Roberto Marquez has set-up a Raspberry Pi to take pictures of his lizard. The Pi listens for a GPIO pin to change state, triggered by a capacitive touch sensor. All his Java code is available on GitHub.
You can see a video about the project, and lots of lizard footage, below:
Making it’s debut in the Olympus Photography Playground in Vienna in February 2015, Neon Golden’s art installation “Swarm” mimics the behaviour of fireflies via LEDs which are strung from the ceiling at various different heights. Using both Raspberry Pi and Arduino control mechanisms, there are motion sensors which detect the movement of visitors and trigger lighting changes according to code which is based on the Boids algorithm by Craig Reynolds. It looks absolutely stunning and apparently really drew the crowds in at the OPP. You can see photographs of the build and the results on Neon Golden’s website. You can see more photographs on DeZeen.com.
Adelaide-based Matt Shaw wanted an arcade machine of his very own. His solution? Take an old wine barrel and adapt it for the purpose. He used a work-surplus monitor as a display and then cut a form-fitting fibreboard box to hold all the controls and the Pi. Surprisingly, he didn’t need to solder anything! He uses the PiPlay distro as the basis for the software. Read more about it here.
Joe Ressington, Isaac Carter and Albert Hickey have teamed up to create “The Pi Podcast“. Their first episode is now online and is all to do with Ubuntu MATE, which is now available for the Pi.
Over at PubNub, they’ve been using Java to do some great things. This time, they’re using it to interact with a Leap Motion. Movements in the user’s hands are replicated with servos. Attached to the servos are some 8×8 LED matrices. It’s all great, blinky fun that is, with the right equipment easily reproduce-able. Take a look here.
