The first Kendal Raspberry Jam will take place on 25th March from 10am-12.30pm. The event, which is a general Jam in which people with (and without!) Pis can get together and share knowledge, ask questions and get help with problems, is being held at Kendal Library on Stricklandgate. You can get free tickets for the Jam here.
A couple of years ago, Ben Gray ran a highly successful Kickstarter campaign for the MeArm – a robotic arm. Now, he’s teamed up with Ben Pirt to form Mime Industries. They are now running their own Kickstarter for the next generation of the MeArm – specifically designed to work with the Raspberry Pi. The new version comes in blue or orange (you pick this later) and features a special HAT which sits on top of the Pi and provides two joysticks for control. The MeArm Pi is simpler and comes with pre-calbrated servos, saving you that hassle, and is available from their Kickstarter page. Currently (for the next few hours), you can get hold of one for the bargain price of £40 before it rises to the ‘proper’ price of £60. So, head over to the MeArm campaign page to find out more or watch the video below.
Recently, robotics designer, manufacturer and retailer Pi Borg ran the first Formula Pi competition. For the competition, the used a laser timing rig to record the exact lap times of each robot. They also used a similar method at Pi Wars for the Straight Line Speed Test. They’ve now blogged about both the hardware and software parts of the rig. You can read all about the rig over on their blog. And you can see the final of the competition in the video below!
Recently, I reviewed the JustBoom AmpHAT and found it to be an excellent piece of kit for those that like their audio ‘just right’. Well, now it’s little brother, the Amp Zero pHAT has been used in a project that looks really lovely. Frederick Vandenbosch has taken the pHAT, a Raspberry Pi Zero, a speaker, and a Pimoroni Scroll pHAT and created a beautiful ‘spiral speaker’ with built-in spectrum display. He’s written the whole thing up as a tutorial and it’s been posted on the Pi Supply blog here. You can view a speeded-up video of the build below. You can get hold of the Amp Zero pHAT here.
Quite a while ago, Raspberry Pi commissioned designer Kinneir Dufort to come up with an idea for an ‘official case’ for the Pi (see above one of his sketches). Since then, the case has been produced and is on sale at many good Pi retailers. Unfortunately, some naughty people in China (we’ll call them scammers, for that they are) have begun to copy the case, which has resulted in loss of sales of the official case. They haven’t even done a very good job of it:
Crappy fake Chinese clone
Real case – note the better fit, no extra light pipes and general all-round better quality
So, please, be on the look-out for fake cases, especially from eBay and places like AliExpress. A dead give-away is the two sets of light pipes and general overall shoddiness. I recommend you only buy them from reputable dealers such as The Pi Hut and CPC.
Remember: only sales of the real official case results in some of the proceeds going to the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
Rui Santos from Portugal has written an excellent, comprehensive tutorial for those who want to get into ESP8266 boards and control them from a Raspberry Pi. He uses Python on the Raspberry Pi, with imported MQTT libraries, and C code for the Arduino-like ESP8266. The ESP8266, which is on the same network as the Raspberry Pi, then ‘subscribes’ to a page on the Pi which is changed when a user clicks on a button on the Pi’s web interface. And voila! You can click a web button and have an LED connected to the ESP8266 light up wirelessly! You can read the tutorial here.
ESP8266s must be the flavour-of-the-month, I only posted about reading sensors using one the other day!
