Accessories, Reviews, Video

Speaker from the PiHut for the Raspberry Pi over at RasPi.TV

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Alex Eames got hold of a new speaker from The Pi Hut and has done a review video over on his site, RasPi.TV. Read and watch the video here.

My review of the speaker will appear on my blog this weekend. I just haven’t had time to get around to it! I think I’ll also use Big Buck Bunny (as Alex says, it’s free and open source) and I think I’ll try it coming out of the B+ audio jack, just to be different! 🙂

You can get hold of one of these excellent speakers from The Pi Hut’s shop. They only cost £12 and, I believe, are the best solution for playing sounds on the Pi at the moment.

Arduino, Tutorials

French-language site for Raspberry Pi and Arduino

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As you know, I normally only cover English news and projects on the blog. This isn’t due to any xenophobic tendencies, I’m just not very good at other languages. However, a site has just come to my attention that might be interesting for any of you French speakers out there. It’s called GeekOfYou and can be found here. One of their articles is about reading a temperature sensor via an MCP3008 ADC and gives you pointers on where to find the code to make it work. You can read that article here. I think it’ll definitely be worth keeping an eye on the site if you’re able to read it 🙂

Databases, Geeky Techiness, Making, Programming

Multi-Datacenter Cassandra on 32 Raspberry Pi’s

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Brandon Van Ryswyk and Daniel Chin have just finished building a 32-node DataStax Enterprise cluster running on Raspberry Pis. It’s being used to demonstrate the fault-tolerant nature of Cassandra by letting visitors to their lobby take down a ‘data centre’ with a touch of a big red button. Cassandra is a database platform used in a lot of ‘big data’ applications. You can read a lot more detail about the project on their website.

Competitions, Education

PA Consulting Group launches 3rd annual Raspberry Pi competition

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PA Consulting has launched their 3rd annual competition for Raspberry Pi projects. (You can see one of the winning entries from this year’s competition above).

This time, the challenge is to “revolutionise people’s health and wellbeing” using a Pi and other hardware. Head of IT delivery Anita Chandraker has said: “The competition gives entrants the opportunity to discover what they can achieve through coding in a fun and informal way. Our aim is to help support the teaching and learning of computing, science, design and technology and also inspire the UK’s next generation of tech experts.”

The competition has the following categories:

  • PA’s primary school award: academic years 4-6
  • PA’s secondary school award: academic years 7-11
  • PA’s sixth form & college award: academic years 12-13
  • PA’s young entrepreneur award: open to all university undergraduates.

You can read more about it on their website.