Theatre intermission sound controlled by a Raspberry Pi

Scott Wegner operates the sound and lights system for his local auditorium in rural Minnesota. This often involves playing music into the foyer area to warm the audience up before the enter, as well as making announcements about when the show is due to start. He has developed a system with a Raspberry Pi that slots into the A/V rack that has buttons to control the music and announcements. It’s a great, practical application of the Pi. Read more here or watch the video below:

Support Raspberry Pi robotics by voting for Dawn Robotics

Alan Broun at Dawn Robotics is currently pitching for a £20,000 fund from Jisc to develop their Raspberry Pi robotics kit. The kit comes with a chassis, motors, wheels, a driver board, a servo-controlled Pi camera and all the fixings necessary to build a great mobile robot. The funding will help them to develop educational materials that will enable schools to build a robot and learn how to program using it. It only takes a minute and a couple of clicks to vote, so please, get behind this campaign and help Dawn to get their project off the ground. Vote here and see the promo video below.

Interactive Astro Pi model with Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi

Martin O’Hanlon is, basically, a Jedi when it comes to Minecraft Pi. He has now combined his work on the Astro Pi with a model of that same board within the Minecraft world. You can do everything with the model, from getting a read-out of the onboard sensors to lighting up bits of the LED matrix by hitting them with your sword. It’s tremendously well-done and great fun, though, of course, only of interest to those with the Astro Pi board (Alas, alas). Read more here or watch the demo video below.

Run Java EE apps on the Raspberry Pi with Payara Micro

Payara Micro is a fantastic little Java server that requires no installation to get it running. All you need is Java installed on your Pi (which is default on Raspbian) and a simple command and you’re up and running. It’s then easy to run .WAR files and run whatever apps you like. It’s very neat, very small (less than 60MB) and you can find full instructions on using it on the Voxxed website.