Here’s a nice tutorial from Tyler Winegarner over at Make. It uses the PiPlay distro to give you an arcade emulator. You then add your controller in the form of an Arduino Esplora and configure your games accordingly. All the instructions for how to do this are over at Make. See it in action below:
Teenagers Ben Hope, Harri Bell-Thomas and Benedict Allen from Monmouth teamed up at Young Rewired State’s Festival of Code at the end of July to create Buoy. Buoy is a small, autonomous boat shaped like a duck which records environmental conditions on our waterways including temperature, humidity and UV readings. A live Pi Camera feed from the boat gives a first-duck viewpoint. Here’s what the YRS site says about it:
Autonomous Raspberry Pi powered boat that records and posts data including temperature, humidity and UV readings, with live PiCam feed from the boat, to a web and mobile app client and represents these readings in charts, graphs and maps. This can be used in multiple environments for monitoring and gathering data for users.
Using open source data from UK Gov Environmental Data on pollution hotspots and Google Maps, it detects nearby pollution sites and goes to the sites autonomously, recording data at the pollution site. The user can also send commands to the boat to tell it to start and stop moving from the web client and mobile app for remote control over the boat’s movements. Clockwork SMS is used to report to users when the boat is moving to a destination and when it has stopped moving and also when it detects a potential environmental hazard, such as high pollution, in a certain area.
You can read more at YRS here and a nice summary at Free Press here.
Pimoroni have announced the launch of their latest product, a new HAT which follows on from the excellent work of Zach Igielman and his PiPiano board.
The board comes fully-assembled and uses 13 capacitive touch pads instead of physical buttons. It has an LED for each piano ‘key’ and also has additional buttons (and accompanying LEDs) to change instrument and go up and down an octave. It comes with a Python software library to make programming it as simple as possible and is accompanied by examples including the ability to turn the board into a MIDI controller.
The icing on the cake (as you can see from the picture) is that it is a work of art – Pimoroni have done such a lovely job taking Zach’s board and making it even better from a visual point of view.
It is available for a very-reasonably £15 plus delivery from Pimoroni and The Pi Hut.
I’ve already got mine on order and will be doing a review as soon as I possibly can!
In June, 29 students took part in IT camp, part of Illinois State’s Illinois Summer Research Academy (ISRA). Each student received a Raspberry Pi 2 and over the week learned how to program in Python, interact with the real world by interfacing with an Arduino, and how to hack into Minecraft Pi Edition. They finished the week by demonstrating their work. More information on the camp can be found here.
Alex Eames has conducted a series of field tests (okay, not in a field exactly) on three wi-fi dongles: the official Foundation dongle, a standard Edimax dongle and the dongle from The Pi Hut. He tried them out in different locations throughout his house in Poland and recorded the signal strength and power usage for each dongle in each location. He then carried out analysis on the results and has presented them in great style on his blog at RasPi.TV. The results are very interesting and really give you a sense of which dongle performs best and which dongle uses the least power. Read the blog post here.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Carrie Anne Philbin was recently in Sydney giving talks and workshops to do with the Pi. As part of this, she set-up a slideshow tutorial at speakerdeck.com that tells you how to use the Pimoroni Explorer HAT Pro as a musical instrument by plugging it into bananas! All the code is included in the slideshow and this is a great way to make a start with physical computing. Take a look at the slideshow here.
