Stephen Lovely has just blogged a great interview with the creators of RetroPie, the retro gaming operating system for the Raspberry Pi. It’s really interesting and deals with the development of the software, the team behind it, trademark disputes and their loose relationship with the Raspberry Pi Foundation. You can read the interview here.
Katja Budnikov works for a company (shopping24) that has the occasional two-day hackfest where employees get to play around with new technology and come up with non-work related projects. (Sounds like fun!) For the current round of hacking, Katja’s team used a Raspberry Pi, some buttons and LEDs to construct a box which would allow employees to indicate how happy they are on a particular day. The buttons trigger the illumination of LEDs in the shape of a ‘tick’ and also send messages to Graphite, a web-based app which stores and graphs results. The code to do it is written in Python with a healthy dose of GPIO Zero thrown in for good measure. If your German is good, you can read Katja’s account of the project here or alternatively run it through Google Translate for the English. Thanks to Hackaday for spotting this one.
Martin Fitzpatrick has taken a Scroll pHAT and attached it to a Raspberry Pi Zero to create a Tetris game. He’s then added several buttons to allow the user to control the pieces to play the game. One would imagine this will work even better on the Scroll pHAT HD! You can see instructions for how to build it yourself here, together with diagrams, photographs and videos of it in action.
Logan Rickert wanted to bring a Raspberry Pi Zero into a penetration testing environment but in a covert manner. He decided to repurpose an old hard drive, fit the Zero inside and then power it from the 5V line of the hard drive. That way, when installed, the Zero would be powered and it would look just like an extra hard drive. Read more here.
Richard Hayler likes to keep fit but his recent job change has meant that he unable to get to fitness sessions with an instructor. He now exercises in his back garden but wanted some way of having a visible and audible cue to his programme of exercises. Enter the Raspberry Pi. Richard’s taken a Raspberry Pi Zero, Pimoroni Scroll pHAT HD, a Pico HAT Hacker, a couple of buttons and a buzzer to make his own Pi-rsonal Trainer. The exercises are programmed in and the buzzer sounds when he needs to move onto the next one. The Scroll pHAT is used to display the current exercise and the whole thing is portable thanks to USB battery pack. Read more about the build here and see a video of it in action below:
Maker and Educator Spencer Organ has recently re-launched his website and can now be found at www.themakercupboard.space. As part of the re-launch, he’s blogged about his latest project – a Spiderman-themed lamp which changes colour when he is mentioned in a Tweet. He’s used the Pimoroni Blinkt for illumination (also available here) and the Twython Python library to communicate with Twitter. Everything’s connected to a Raspberry Pi Zero W for connectivity. A very nice project that shows what you can do with a little bit of programming and some know-how. Take a look at the code and build details here.
