Brian Corteil has written a nice Python script which works out how much time there is until the Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend and then displays it on a Pimoroni Displayotron 3000. Nice use for this cute little add-on board. Read about it and get the code here.
Scott Kildall has written a short Instructable which tells you how to obtain and print out data from the Yahoo Finance API. Interesting to those of you who like to have data sources with which to do interesting things. Read the Instructable here.
Ferran Fabregas has taken Peter Onion’s LED panel driver software and created a ‘life simulator’ in which different coloured plants evolve and spread throughout a digital ecosystem and are then rendered onto an LED panel. You can see the code here and view a video of it in action below. All the behaviour is parameterized so it’s easy to change the behaviour and experiment with it.
Ryan Walmsley from Stevenage, who produced the excellent RTK Motor Controller Board as well as a great value-for-money budget robotics kit, has just launched a new Kickstarter. It’s for a tiny board called the “Raspberry Pi Debug Clip“. The Debug Clip pushes onto the GPIO and, with the aid of a USB cable, connects to your laptop or desktop computer and allows it to communicate with the Pi over a serial terminal. This is great for when you need emergency access to a headless Pi, such as when you’ve built a robot, and is usable in conjunction with other GPIO boards – they just push in over the top of the Clip. Earlybird pledges are currently £5 (+£1 delivery in the UK and £5 delivery for international) rising to £6 after the first 30 are gone.
You never know when you’re going to need one! I’ve backed it already! 🙂
You can back the Kickstarter here. You can view the Kickstarter video below:
In Edmonton, Canada, a piano has been placed in their Underground train system so that anyone can play it. It’s the brainchild of David Rauch (who you can see in this video) and his OpenPianoYEG project. The special thing about this piano is that it’s connected to the internet. The piano has a Raspberry Pi embedded into it which records the public playing music, converts it to MP3 and then uploads it, tweeting to the @OpenPianoYEG twitter account. Read more about it in this Edmonton Journal article.
Myself, Tim Richardson (@geeky_tim) and Jamie (from The Pi Hut) will be at Bett on Friday giving a talk and hands-on with the CamJam EduKits, the affordable electronics kits we developed together over the past year (you can see the second kit above). If you’re at Bett on Friday, we’ll be around, so let us know and we can get together for a coffee and a chat!
