Sai Yamanoor is planning a trip to the Sierra Nevada in California/Nevada and he’s using a Raspberry Pi to do it! He’s using an API provided by the California Department of Transportation to retrieve road condition data and then manipulating it for his own purposes. This is an ongoing series and you can read part 1 here.
Read the headline. Now re-read it. Yes, that’s right, Marvel!
The Raspberry Pi Foundation and Marvel, in association with the Ant-Man movie, have launched a competition in the US, the prizes for which include tickets for the Ant-Man premiere in California and also an engineering workshop at Disneyland. Ant-Man, of course, is all about how someone who is very small can make a difference. I guess they found a certain poetic satisfaction in teaming up with the tiny Raspberry Pi!
Here’s what the Foundation says about the competition:
We’re looking throughout the United States for girls ages 14-18 in grades 9-12 to create and share micro-technology-based DIY projects they have built using readily accessible and found materials. Upon completion of the contest, build instructions for the winning projects will be provided to a STEM-based girls program in the winners’ home community. Each winner will have the opportunity to lead a workshop in building her project for the selected program in her community.
You can read more on their blog here or visit the MicroTech Challenge website here.
This competition, because of its high profile, is undoubtedly going to raise the long-running question of gender equality. By making it for girls only, it is clearly going down the lines of positive discrimination. There is going to be a lot of disappointed boys out there! However, we must see this positive discrimination in a wide context. There is a lot of negative discrimination against girls and women in tech education and in the I.T. workplace so there is always going to be a need for positive discrimination to re-balance the situation. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has made no secret of their opinion that girls and women need more encouragement, and again, you could argue for and against this.
I’d be interested in hearing your thoughts on this in the comments!
Denis Papathanasiou has taken an off-the-shelf USB barcode scanner and plugged it into his Raspberry Pi. He’s then written some code to use barcode data stored at the Open Product Data (POD) project to tell the Pi what the product is and then plugged it into the Amazon API to let him re-order things with a quick scan. He’s provided all the code on Github. Read more here.
Frederick Vandenbosch is currently building a desk into which he will embed a Raspberry Pi. He’s basing his design on the console from Tron Legacy (see below). While I don’t expect it will be all-singing, all-dancing, he’s doing it in the right spirit! It’s certainly going to have plenty of blinkies, based on what he has written so far. His ongoing tutorial/guide to his build is on the Element 14 website.
Ferran Fabregas flew over from Barcelona last weekend to attend the Southend Raspberry Jam. I was lucky enough to catch his talk on his project: the LifeBox. This is a cube approximately 35x35x35cm featuring an LED matrix panel on the front. A Raspberry Pi inside the box generates an ecosystem of two ‘pixelic’ entities – blue and yellow – along with their food, ‘mana’, which is white. The C code sets various parameters as to how the entities live, die and reproduce and then the resulting environmental array is displayed as LEDs on the panel. It is not Conway’s Game of Life – it’s more complex than that. The result is part art, part science and eminently blinky!
You can read more about the project, and see more pictures, via Ferran’s blog which includes the slides from his Southend presentation. You can see a video of it in action below:
The June 2015 edition of venerable publication The MagPi has just been published. Full of exciting articles and news, it is vital reading for all Pi owners. Perhaps the most exciting news is that from issue 36 (end of July), the MagPi is going to have a massive 100-page print edition. Available in WHSmith and some supermarkets, this is going to be serious competition for other magazines. They’re even going to be offering an annual subscription option so you can get the magazine delivered direct to your door.
Here are just some of the articles that appear this month:
You can download issue 34 from the Raspberry Pi Foundation website or you can buy it on your mobile phone or tablet from both Google Play and the Apple App Store.
