Games specialists Liberty Games have taken an old Baby Doll pinball machine, refurbished it, and added a Raspberry Pi into the mix. When you activate certain features on the pinball (such as hitting a target), the signal travels to the Pi via a Pi Face and the Pi then plays an Internet Meme video on a small screen embedded in the upper display panel. Read more about it here.
Glowing Twitter beacon uses the Raspberry Pi and Pibrella
Kate Mulcahy from The Royal Institution has developed a cool little beacon that lights up whenever the Twitter hashtag #XMASLECTURES is used. She’s done this to help someone at the Institution who has an obsession over checking the hashtag. All the instructions and code are available as a tutorial from The Royal Insitution website. You can see a video of Kate working on the project below:
Using the Raspberry Pi with Mathematica in schools
Adriana O’Brien has posted up a series of lessons that she has used at Kenwood Elementary School in Illinois to teach programming using Mathematica to interact with the Pi’s GPIO. Definitely worth a look if you want to use Mathematica! Read it here.
Hackerspace webcam with a Raspberry Pi
Timm Murray from the Wisconsin-based Bodgery has set-up a webcam so that potential visitors can see who is about before they drop in. He’s blogged about it here.
Control a telescope with Mathematica on the Raspberry Pi
Tom Sherlock from Wolfram Research has written an extensive guest post on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog about his work which uses a Pi camera module to take astronomical photographs while the Pi itself controls the position of the telescope using Mathematica. Read the post here.
ScratchGPIO version 6 launched for the Raspberry Pi
Simon Walters has just announced the latest version of his ScratchGPIO software that runs on the Raspberry Pi and allows you to program the GPIO pins from within Scratch. According to his blog post, the following features have been introduced:
- Support for extra pin ons the A+ and B+ boards
- Full support for lots of extra Addon boards like the Pi2Go and UnicornHat
- Added trigger broadcasts for input pin change state.