Sandy Macdonald has written an excellent explanation and tutorial for using a shift register with the Pimoroni Explorer HAT on top of the Raspberry Pi. It allows you to control 8 LEDs using just 3 output pins on the HAT, which sounds impossible, but is in fact entirely possible thanks to the way a shift register works! Read his tutorial here.
The Southend Raspberry Jam has swiftly become one of the best Raspberry Jams in the country. Its relaxed atmosphere and a high quantity of knowledgeable people concentrated in one place makes it one of the ‘places to be’ in the Pi world. On Saturday, from 10-5pm, I shall be attending for the third time and I’m really looking forward to it. This is their sixth Jam and they’re getting really good at it!
It’s always nice to go to a Jam and not be organising it, for one thing, although this time I might be helping out on some of the workshops, which will be interesting as I’ve not done it for a looooong time.
They’ve got an interesting mix of talks including:
and several workshops including:
As you can see, Southend’s strength is in its ability to mix Pi-centric talks and workshops with non-Pi stuff, giving a nice rounded experience to the event.
So, if you’re in the area (or if you fancy a trip to Southend!) head on over to Eventbrite and pick up your (free) tickets!
Last month, I covered Neil Matthews’ e-paper HAT for the Raspberry Pi. If you missed out on that Kickstarter, there’s another one that has been running for a little while and now has just 10 days left. This HAT has been developed by Aaron Shaw and his team over at Pi Supply and is called the PaPiRus (which is just a cool name). The HAT can power three different-sized screens: 1.44″, 2.0″ & 2.7″. The HAT comes with 4 onboard buttons (which come free with the board, thanks to a stretch goal) to give you various control options and a real-time clock chip.
The small screen is currently £25, the medium screen is currently £28 and the large is £35.
You can back the Kickstarter here and view their promo video below. Aaron has shown in the past that his team is very good at delivering on-time (or close to it) so it’s a good bet that this one will come to fruition. All the development has already been completed, so it’s just a case of ordering the board and screens in quantity.
Brussels-based Ilhan Ünal (Raz) was inspired to create a giant replica of Nintendo’s GameBoy. He’s used a Raspberry Pi and an old desktop monitor to do it and installed Retropie to drive the games. The case is made out of MDF which a neighbour helped him to paint. Read more here and see a video of it in action playing Tetris below.
Zach Igielman has taken a Pi2Go robot kit from 4tronix plus the pan-and-tilt mechanism for the camera, and created a robot. He’s then used SSH to remote-control it and a web interface to see the video camera stream. Here’s the YouTube video in which you can see the video streaming working:
Linux Voice, in keeping with its promise to release its content for free after 9 months, has just published the PDFs for Issue 6 online. For Raspberry Pi owners, there are examples of several projects including:
You can view the whole issue here or download just the Pi section here.
