JCR Matos has created a circuit layout in Fritzing for a ping-pong game that you can reproduce for a bit of fun with your Pi. You need several components, including driver chips for the seven-segment displays. He’s included all the code you need to run the game and published it over at Fritzing. Take a look here.
Kyle Gabriel grows mushrooms (the non-hallucinogenic kind!) and wanted to control the environment in which they grow to achieve a better yield. He’s now using a Pi to monitor temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide concentration. When the Pi detects an undesirable change in conditions, it triggers relays to control heaters and fans that return conditions to optimum. To read more about how he’s set this up, and to look at his code, take a look on his blog.
Matt Manning, from Raspberry Pi IV Beginners, has done a short video looking at Pimoroni’s Unicorn HAT which has an array of Neopixels that you can control direct from the Pi. If you haven’t seen the Unicorn in action, take a look – it’s a lovely little add-on board with much blinkies!
You can buy a Unicorn HAT from The Pi Hut or Pimoroni, amongst others.
Max over at EmmeShop has posted a great tutorial on communicating with the mobile messenger app WhatsApp through the Raspberry Pi. He takes you through installing the software required (called yowsup) and then using it to send messages. It’s actually a Python library, although he doesn’t take you through using that, just a command line interface. Read it here.
The Foundation have blogged about some advances in the field of emulation since the launch of the Raspberry Pi 2. According to them, the CPU performance of previous models of the Pi meant that only 3rd and 4th generation games consoles could be emulated adequately. The quad-core Pi 2, however, can run emulation of 5th-generation consoles. You can see videos of some of these consoles on their blog page.
Robin Newman, who is normally to be found hacking with Sonic Pi, has turned his attention to an online service called Telegram. Using your mobile phone, you can send messages to Telegram which will send them to your Pi which uses the Lua language to read the messages. The Lua and Python scripts then work together to bring about the desired behaviour – in this instance Robin is using LEDs and a buzzer from CamJam EduKit 2 and also the PiCamera. Read all about it and learn how to do it by following his tutorial.
