Here’s a great video from Carrie Anne Philbin on her YouTube channel the Geek Gurl Diaries. In this, she uses the Pi, a Pibrella, some motors and bits and pieces, together with a Python script, to create a ‘digital garden’. It’s a nice proof-of-concept and should be easily extendible when you reproduce it. Should make for a nice Christmas project for families.
A group of University of Lancaster researchers have used a Raspberry Pi to only allow a kettle to be boiled when the University’s wind turbine is producing power. Dr. Will Simm, Dr. Peter Newman, Dr. Maria Angela Ferrario and Dr. Stephen Forshaw have developed the system, called Windy Brew, to “(use) energy more intelligently when it is more renewable”. You can read more here.
Ferran Fabregas has worked out a way to take images and render them in Minecraft Pi Edition. He’s now extended that idea and created a Python script using picamera to take a photo and then send it into Minecraft. Brilliant stuff. Take a look here.
Last week, the BBC changed the way that iPlayer exposes it’s programme listings to the web. This prevented a lot of third-party software from working including the popular get_iplayer. A fix has now been issued and Alex Eames has documented the procedure over on his blog.
Eric Tsai has put together a combination of wireless, sensor-packed Arduinos with a Pi and come up with a quite neat home monitoring solution. He’s written it all up as an Instructable which you can view here. He’s called in home automation, but I’m not really sure it is – but having said that you could easily make the Pi take physical action by extended the project a bit.
Back in July, the Raspberry Pi Foundation covered a crowdfunding project to create a solar-powered computer lab in South Africa. The crowdfunding was a success and the lab is now up-and-running. At the heart of the lab is a classroom set of Pis, donated by the Foundation. You can read about the success of the lab on the Foundation’s blog.
