JosephEarnest has taken a Raspberry Pi 2, a USB digital-to-analogue converter (for sound output) and some other components soldered to stripboard to create a midi input/output device. The software is written in Python and cython and is available here. He’s made the whole thing open source on his website where you can read more and, perhaps, build it yourself. You can see a video of it in action below:
Great news today – Picademy is going to the USA! Based at The Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California, Picademy USA will be made up of 4 sessions, each hoping to reach 25 US educators. This will be a free, hands-on experience for the educators just as it is in the UK. Read more here.
Alex Eames of RasPi.TV has written a brilliant blog post all about CamJam which took place on Saturday, 6th June. It covers everything that was going on in the Marketplace and Show-and-Tell. I’ll be writing up my experience of the day very soon. I’m currently dog-proofing the garden in advance of getting a new puppy next week (hence why it’s been a little quiet on the bloggage front!) Read Alex’s write-up here.
Kevin Uhlir has taken a Raspberry Pi and a large HDMI screen and then programmed the Pi to use the Weather Underground API to create a clock and weather monitor. The software will run on Windows, MacOS and Linux as long as Python 2.7+ and PyQt4 is installed, making it truly cross-platform. Read more and see the software here.
The Ruiz Brothers have published a new tutorial on the Adafruit website. This tutorial shows you how to create a handheld Raspberry Pi computer using a 3.5″ PiTFT screen, a mini wireless keyboard and a LIPO battery. It’s rather nifty and all the pieces go inside a 3D-printed case that is fully hinged. They do point out, however, that the 3.5″ screen is slower than the smaller screens available so it’s not much good on the video front. This is a shame as it would make a fantastic portable gaming console. Oh well, it’s a nice project anyway. Read more here.
Another one from Richard Hayler. This time, he’s using Python on the Raspberry Pi to detect changes in the Astro Pi’s accelerometer and then translate that into commands he sends over bluetooth to a Sphero. The Sphero is a cute little ball-shaped robot with internal lighting that moves at great speed across the floor. You can read more about Richard’s experiment and see his code here and you can find out more about the Sphero from their website. You can see the whole thing in action in the video below:
