Trevor Appleton has posted on his blog a way to send email from Python. This is a great way to send a notification when a certain event is triggered. Take a look here.
Time-lapse stargazing with the Raspberry Pi
Now this is something I’ve been wanting to try myself for ages.
Jippo has created some software which captures images from the Raspberry Pi camera module in a time-lapse to enable you to get great night-time pictures of moving objects such as meteors, satellites and can even capture star trails. He has released all the code on his website along with a gallery of his highlights.
Thanks to Hackaday for spotting this one.
Scary Pi-ano with a Raspberry Pi and Makey Makey
Stewart Watkiss (aka Penguin Tutor) has posted details of his 9-year old daughter’s Halloween project. It uses a Makey Makey and conductive Playdough to send commands to a Raspberry Pi which then plays (via Scratch) various sounds and generates lighting effects. It also uses an HDMIPi screen to show what’s happening. Read more about it here.
Get a Christmas tree for your Raspberry Pi and learn Charlieplexing!
Andrew Gale from Bishop’s Stortford in Hertfordshire did some great little robot soldering kits for the CamJam in September. He’s now branching out (ha-ha… oh, wait… that joke doesn’t make sense yet) into Christmas trees (see… branching out? branch… Never mind). He’s just launched a short Kickstarter – a soldering kit in a Christmas tree shape with lots of blinkies. It only uses 4 GPIO pins to control 7 LEDs and it does this by charlieplexing. Charlieplexing is a programming method that… well… he’ll explain everything about it as the campaign progresses! Suffice to say if you look it up on Wikipedia it’ll scare the life out of you, but I’ve seen the code he’s using and it’s not so tricky! So, if you fancy a cute little Christmas decoration to sit on top of your Pi, or if you want to broaden your programming knowledge, back the campaign. Earlybirds get the kit for £5 and after that it’s £6. It’s all being done very quickly so is only available in the UK. Take a look at the campaign here. Andrew’s sent me one so I’ll be trying it out in the next couple of days and will probably blog about my experience with it.
Counting bugs with a Raspberry Pi
Sergey Sharybin and Martijn Berger from Blender presented this awesome bug-o-meter at the recent Blender Conference. It uses a Raspberry Pi and nixie tubes to display the number of bugs being worked on currently. Read more here.
Successful training for teachers at Raspberry Pi Picademy
Spencer Organ, better known on Twitter by his handle @Mruktechreviews, has posted up about his experience at Picademy this week. He describes everything about his time at Pi Towers, including the activities the teachers got up to, the training sessions, the goodie bag and the group project they worked on during the second day. If, as a teacher yourself, you’ve ever been in doubt about whether to attend Picademy, all I can say is read Spencer’s blog post!