Databases, Geeky Techiness, Internet of things, Programming, Sensors, Software, Tutorials

Raspberry Pi iBeacon system for bypassing theme park queues

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Hacker (and fellow amateur thesp) Michael duPont attended a hackathon at Universal Studios in March and helped to create a system whereby guests to the theme park could bypass ride queues by visiting certain checkpoints in a park area, thus completing ‘challenges’. This was accomplished using iBeacons. He has written an Instructable which takes you through the process of setting up a Pi as an iBeacon and then acting as the ‘gateway’ device for the system. Read it here. See a demo of the hackathon device below.

Arduino, Audio, Geeky Techiness, Making, Music, Robotics

Guitar powered by a Raspberry Pi and Arduino plays network logs

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Ben Reardon saw a robot playing a classical guitar in 1988 at a World Expo in Brisbane, Australia. It stuck in his mind and he has now done his own version using a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and some servos to pluck the strings. It’s obviously much more complicated than that, and he explains the challenges in his blog which has photos of some of the build process and lots more of the finished product. There are several videos (one of which you can see below) of it in action. The intriguing part of the project is that he has programmed it to take in the logs from his firewall and convert it into music. Read more here.

Software, Tutorials

Use WordPress to host your own website on the Raspberry Pi

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Instructables user  has written a tutorial that shows you how to install PHP, Apache, MySQL and WordPress so that you can host your own website on the Pi. It’s pretty straightforward. I wouldn’t personally use Apache or MySQL as they’re a bit heavy for the Pi, but I guess on a Pi 2 it would be okay. For older Pis, something lighter like lighttpd and SQLlite might be better. Read the Instructable here.