3D printing, Crowdfunding

Pi-Top, the Raspberry Pi laptop, version 3 revealed

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Ryan Dunwoody and Jesse Lozano, the creators of the Pi-Top laptop, have unveiled the latest version of their machine. It is much thinner and features a larger trackpad and specially designed cantilevered trackpad buttons. I saw the version just before this at BETT and it looks fantastic, a really great solution to keeping everything together in one neat package, although the $299 price tag will still put some people off, which is a shame. Remember, this is a laptop through which you can hack, add extra boards and access the GPIO pins. You can read more over at 3dprint.com. You can visit their (very nicely designed) website here.

Competitions, Raspberry Pi Foundation, Science

Raspberry Pi space competition AstroPi continues to develop

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Dave Honess of the Raspberry Pi Foundation has written an excellent (and lengthy) update to the AstroPi project. AstroPi, for those of you who don’t already know, is aiming to send two Raspberry Pis up into orbit with astronaut Tim Peake. The Pis will be accompanied by several SD cards which carry experiments set-up by school teams to be carried out using a custom-designed HAT add-on board. You can read all about it, and get your school involved, by reading Dave’s blog post here.

Take a look at this FANTASTIC video from Salad House Animation which, together with the voice of Tim Peake himself, explains everything:

Art, Research, Silliness

The evolution of Raspberry Pi… in LEGO

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This is by far the coolest thing on the Internet.

Richard Hayler and his sons have constructed a huge LEGO representation of the history of Raspberry Pi tracking it’s evolution from concept to its eventual Astro Pi launch into space to do experiments on the International Space Station.

It’s a work of pure genius. I urge you to head over to Richard’s blog and leave as many nice comments as you can muster 🙂

High altitude ballooning, Tutorials

Guide to High Altitude Ballooning

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This isn’t strictly confined to the realm of Raspberry Pi, but I thought I’d share it anyway. Dave Akerman, who has launched loads of balloons (including the famous Babbage Jump and the T.A.R.D.I.S. launch) and has now written a guide to the process. If you’ve ever wanted to launch a balloon (with a Pi attached, of course) into near-Space, make sure you read this guide first.