Phil Herlihy has written a tutorial for Adafruit in which he takes a Sega Game Gear handheld console and fits it out with all kinds of stuff, including a LiPo battery to power it and, of course, a Raspberry Pi for brains. Fantastic project, fully documented and one which I’d love to have a go at as I got hold of a Game Gear specifically to mod it for Pi. Phil has even exposed a USB port so you can plug a keyboard in, so it’s fully ready as a portable Pi! Read all about it here.
Stephen Blythe has built on work done by Carl Monk to create some worksheets for the camera module. The worksheets use the picamera Python library and are very simple and easy-to-follow. Take a look here.
People were surprised when the Raspberry Pi 2 was launched that there was a new operating system on the block, in addition to the existing mainstream Raspbian offering. That new OS is Snappy Ubuntu Core. It is a (very) cut-down Ubuntu distro that is perfect for small servers. Ferran Fabregas has written a tutorial that will tell you how to get it working. Read it here.
Following the huge success of his Two Years of Pi video, Matthew Timmons-Brown has now created Three Years of Pi – a tribute to the third birthday of the Raspberry Pi. You can view it below. Don’t forget to leave him a comment if you’ve really enjoyed it!
Martin O’Hanlon teamed up with David Whale at the weekend to give a talk on Minecraft to the Big Birthday Weekend crowd. For this presentation, Martin wanted to really show off the capabilities of programmable Minecraft and he has created a full Star Wars-themed animation including Alderaan being explodicated and the Death Star trench attack run.
Take a look at the video here and you can also download the code.
Community-driven magazine The MagPi has got a new home!
Now on issue 31, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has acquired the magazine as an ongoing project and is publishing it in-house. With the change of ownership and editorial team comes a complete layout redesign, as you can see above. The community will still be very much involved, but you can expect much stricter editorial standards and higher quality articles because of the Foundation now being behind it.
I personally think this is an excellent move. The content of The MagPi was always very good, but with the redesign and the establishment of a new editorial team under the leadership of Pi journalist Russell Barnes (of RasPi.Today and other existing magazines), I fully expect the magazine to go from strength to strength and become a print publication before long.
You can read the launch announcement on the Foundation’s blog here.
