DSI display, Magazines, Raspberry Pi Foundation, Robotics, Tutorials

October issue of The MagPi for Raspberry Pi owners out now!

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The latest issue of The MagPi is out and it looks to be a good one. The central feature is a “building a robot” special which aims to get you up-and-running for £50. We recently announced the third CamJam EduKit which is a cheap robotics kit for under £20. It will be available soon from The Pi Hut.

There are also features on making a web-powered plant waterer, using the Piano HAT, using the SenseHAT and, of course, a review of the new touch screen (for some reason, I can’t see that being a bad review…). Plenty of other stuff in there as well. You can now buy it from Tesco as well as WHSmith in the UK. In the USA it’s available in Barnes & Noble and MicroCenter. You can also, of course, download it for free in electronic form from The MagPi website.

Accessories, Games, Programming, Silliness

Raspberry Pi pong game uses crane controllers

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playing-pong-with-a-crane-remote

Here’s a nice bit of silliness for you. A German crane manufacturer asked “hwhardsoft” to create a game that used the company’s crane controllers. So, that’s what they did – the created a Pong game using Python and then adapted the control boards for use with the Pi. They added an ATMEGA chip to do the analog to digital conversion and voila, Crane Pong!

Thanks to Hackaday for this one.

Education, Events, Making, Programming

Raspberry Pi space invaders comes to Cambridge Makespace

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The workshops run by HackLab UK are among the newest additions to the Cambridge Raspberry Jam and have so far also proven to be the most popular and successful.

This Saturday (26th), HackLab will be at the Cambridge Makespace at 16 Mill Lane running their Scratch/GPIO Space Invaders workshop. Here’s what they have to say about it:

Students will be able to program a Space Invaders style videogame in Scratch, then wire up a Big Red Button to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins to fire the ‘Doomsday Laser’ when the battle for galactic supremacy gets too hot to handle! A fun and engaging combination of programming and physical computing, StarFighter shows students how we can affect computer programs through physical and real-world inputs.

The event runs from 10am-12pm, is suitable for ages 8+ and is free. To book your place, head over to meetup.com and Join/RSVP.

Games, Programming, Tutorials

Learn Minecraft coding on the Raspberry Pi with LavaTrap

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Recently, Martin O’Hanlon attended PyCon UK. During the conference, he ran workshops using Minecraft Pi Edition during which participants could create a game called “LavaTrap”. The end result of the game is that you have to avoid the lava by walking onto blocks which are slowly disappearing! Martin has blogged about the workshop and made his materials available online as a downloadable worksheet.