Education, Events

Cambridge-based computing museum expands summer programme

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Due to demand, The Centre for Computing History in Cambridge has announced an expansion of their summer programme with additional workshops and events taking place in the next month or so. A few of these are Raspberry Pi-related so I thought I’d share them with you.

There are plenty of other events, including several retro gaming type events that will appeal to old and young geeks alike.

I would book up quick if you’re in the area. Prices are generally £7/£5 for adults/children.

Environment, Events, Making, Nature, Sensors

Detecting pollution with a duck and a Raspberry Pi

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Teenagers Ben Hope, Harri Bell-Thomas and Benedict Allen from Monmouth teamed up at Young Rewired State’s Festival of Code at the end of July to create Buoy. Buoy is a small, autonomous boat shaped like a duck which records environmental conditions on our waterways including temperature, humidity and UV readings. A live Pi Camera feed from the boat gives a first-duck viewpoint. Here’s what the YRS site says about it:

Autonomous Raspberry Pi powered boat that records and posts data including temperature, humidity and UV readings, with live PiCam feed from the boat, to a web and mobile app client and represents these readings in charts, graphs and maps. This can be used in multiple environments for monitoring and gathering data for users.

Using open source data from UK Gov Environmental Data on pollution hotspots and Google Maps, it detects nearby pollution sites and goes to the sites autonomously, recording data at the pollution site. The user can also send commands to the boat to tell it to start and stop moving from the web client and mobile app for remote control over the boat’s movements. Clockwork SMS is used to report to users when the boat is moving to a destination and when it has stopped moving and also when it detects a potential environmental hazard, such as high pollution, in a certain area.

You can read more at YRS here and a nice summary at Free Press here.

Art, Geeky Techiness, GPIO boards, Music, Shopping

PiPiano follow-up HAT for the Raspberry Pi launched

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Pimoroni have announced the launch of their latest product, a new HAT which follows on from the excellent work of Zach Igielman and his PiPiano board.

The board comes fully-assembled and uses 13 capacitive touch pads instead of physical buttons. It has an LED for each piano ‘key’ and also has additional buttons (and accompanying LEDs) to change instrument and go up and down an octave. It comes with a Python software library to make programming it as simple as possible and is accompanied by examples including the ability to turn the board into a MIDI controller.

The icing on the cake (as you can see from the picture) is that it is a work of art – Pimoroni have done such a lovely job taking Zach’s board and making it even better from a visual point of view.

It is available for a very-reasonably £15 plus delivery from Pimoroni and The Pi Hut.

I’ve already got mine on order and will be doing a review as soon as I possibly can!

Education, Events

Raspberry Pi fun at Illinois summer camp

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In June, 29 students took part in IT camp, part of Illinois State’s Illinois Summer Research Academy (ISRA). Each student received a Raspberry Pi 2 and over the week learned how to program in Python, interact with the real world by interfacing with an Arduino, and how to hack into Minecraft Pi Edition. They finished the week by demonstrating their work. More information on the camp can be found here.

Accessories, Research, Reviews

Best wi-fi dongle for the Raspberry Pi – a group test

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Alex Eames has conducted a series of field tests (okay, not in a field exactly) on three wi-fi dongles: the official Foundation dongle, a standard Edimax dongle and the dongle from The Pi Hut. He tried them out in different locations throughout his house in Poland and recorded the signal strength and power usage for each dongle in each location. He then carried out analysis on the results and has presented them in great style on his blog at RasPi.TV. The results are very interesting and really give you a sense of which dongle performs best and which dongle uses the least power. Read the blog post here.