“makerblog” has written an Instructable that takes you through the process of embedding a Raspberry Pi into an old rotary phone. Beginning by stripping the innards out of the phone before mounting the Pi inside, he has supplied all the code required to turn it into an MP3 player. Bit of a frivolous project, but great fun. Read how he did it here.
Scots PGC College in Queensland, Australia has taken the Raspberry Pi into its curriculum and is now using it in class to teach kids how to program using online platform Codecademy. Read more here.
You can find my Review of the Year on this page. (I’ve done it on a separate page to preserve some of the formatting!)
Stephen Phillips wanted to listen to BBC radio stations on his Raspberry Pi, but control which station via his mobile phone. So, he’s created a small web server and some interface code to enable him to do it. He’s open-sourced the code and you can download it and read more here.
Richard Saville, creator of the ProtoCam prototyping board, has just launched a new Kickstarter. His new board is for the + series of Raspberry Pi, with a 40-pin header, a slot for the camera module, power rails, plenty of space for prototyping and all the GPIO pins broken out for ease-of-access. Once again, it looks to be a high-quality board. See more in the video below or head on over to Kickstarter to read more and back the campaign.
Simon Long is the user interface guru at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and is the one responsible for the desktop updates featured in the new Raspbian. He’s written about some of the process he went through to improve the desktop and has listed many of the new features here, on the Raspberry Pi blog. He’s also described how to change the position of that pesky task bar/start menu if you’d like it returned to the bottom of the screen (thus neatly side-stepping the argument about whether it should be at the top or the bottom).
To get the new desktop, you can either use the new version of NOOBS or Raspbian, or alternatively type the following into an existing installation.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
sudo apt-get install raspberrypi-ui-mods