Frank has written a comprehensive tutorial on using your Raspberry Pi as a backup server, including making a case to hold everything in. Some of the scripts are in French (but should be easy enough to understand anyway) and it’s well worth taking a look if you’re looking for a home backup solution that can be made on-the-cheap. Read about it here
You can never have too much Minecraft hacking on a Pi. This is a universal constant 🙂
Seriously, though, one of the main things we’ve learnt from the recent Cambridge Raspberry Jam is that Minecraft is incredibly popular. We sold out a 20-person workshop in an hour, put another one on as well, and that sold out almost as quickly. We ended up with a waiting list long enough to run another one.
So, in case you didn’t already know how to do it, Matt Hawkins has written a brief tutorial on how to set-up Minecraft for use in programming on the Pi.
If you’d like more information about Minecraft Pi Edition, visit Craig Richardson’s blog or alternatively buy Carrie Anne Philbin’s book which contains a Minecraft chapter. (If you haven’t got the book, this gives you an ideal excuse!)
Mike Redrobe has written a very brief tutorial on using a very small SD card as a boot device with a USB pen drive containing the main operating system. He’s using a 2GB pen drive, but of course you’ll need to use a larger pen drive for more up-to-date distros than the one he’s using. Read more here
Stephen Phillips has written a comprehensive tutorial on using mpc and mpd to play BBC radio streams. Read his blog here.
Alex Eames has been very busy of late. Not only has he been running the HDMIPi project but he’s also been working on a series of GPIO boards. One of the latest, the RasPiO duino, which brings the power of an Arduino chip to the Pi, has been making it’s way into the hands of beta testers. I’ve got one myself and have had a play around with it. It seems like a great way of getting into Arduino programming, and there’s a hundred and one uses for it in conjunction with the Pi. By using something like the Firmata library, which allows two-way communication between the Pi and the ATMega chip on the Duino, you can easily get it reading analog inputs and doing PWM output. It’s a really exciting development and I hope it does well when Alex eventually releases it on Kickstarter.
Edit: The Kickstarter has been launched – it runs until 3rd March 2015.
Pete Taylor has got hold of a RyanTeck MCB, put it together, and then hooked it up to a 9V LEGO motor. Read his blog/review here.
