Paul Weeks has taken his Pi, hooked it up to an ultrasonic sensor and then created a LEGO contraption that fires a Minion Fart Gun when the Pi detects someone is near. It sounds utterly mad and stupid and… well, it really is, but it’s ever so inventive 🙂 Full details of the build are available here.
Hook a Maplin weather station up to a Raspberry Pi
Dave Akerman has taken a Maplin weather station and hooked it up to his Raspberry Pi. He used a piece of software with the oh-so-catchy name of “pywws” to read in the data from USB and then uploaded his data to wunderground.com. Read more here.
Low-power E-paper display HAT for the Raspberry Pi
Percheron Electronics, which is spear-headed by Neil Matthews (who regularly attends and helps at our Cambridge Raspberry Jams), has just launched its first Kickstarter.
The campaign seeks to raise funds to produce an e-paper HAT for the Raspberry Pi. The display is a 2.7″ screen with a resolution of 264×176 pixels. The HAT also comes with a built-in real-time clock which helps the Pi keep in time and opens the way for projects such as clocks and weather stations. The software that comes with it is a low-level C driver that interfaces to some Python demo programs which enable you to get something up-and-running very quickly. Above all else, it is great for projects where power usage is important – the display only draws significant power when it is redrawing an image.
The Super Early Bird pledges have already gone (the HAT has drawn significant interest already) but the Early Bird is still available at £36 plus delivery, rising to £39 when they’ve gone. This is extremely good value for an e-paper display – the existing solutions out there tend to sell the driver board and display separately and can be a bit clunky with cables all over the place. Creating it as a HAT tidies all that up into a very neat package.
Neil’s a great guy and I wish him all the best with the campaign!
Back the Kickstarter project here. Watch the campaign video below:
The Raspberry Pi as a Stratum-1 NTP Server
David Taylor has written a comprehensive (and possibly bewildering) guide to setting up the Raspberry Pi as an NTP server (and therefore getting the correct time on your Pi). He uses various methods including a USB GPS receiver and also, more compellingly, the Adafruit Ultimate GPS board (get hold of this from Makersify here or you can get hold of a HAT version from The Pi Hut here). Read it here.
Access your Raspberry Pi from anywhere in the world with Weaved
Weaved is based in America and is a portal that can be used to access your Pi from anywhere in the world. You sign up for an account (which is free, as far as I can tell, but may have some paid components), install the software on your Pi and then configure which services you want to be made available. It’s an intriguing way to open up access, but don’t forget to change your default passwords! Read a tutorial here and read more information from Weaved here.
Set up your Raspberry Pi to play Atari 2600 games
John Browning over at Engadget has written a great tutorial about using a piece of software called ‘Stella’ to emulate the Atari 2600. He takes you through installing the software and then configuring it to play the ROMs which you need to download separately. Read it here. (It’s actually quite an old guide, but I thought it was fun!) 🙂