Helen, over at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has published a lovely blog post on the wide variety of Doctor Who-inspired projects that have been powered by the Raspberry Pi. There are multiple K9s, a Dalek and, of course, Dave Akerman’s famous TARDIS-in-space. Take a look here and join in the discussion on whether Capaldi is any good or not 🙂
David Meiklejohn from Gooligum Electronics has just launched a Kickstarter for their new add-on board called the Joey. The Joey slips over the GPIO pins (without a header – it’s all done with friction, similar to the Ryanteck Debug Clip) and sticks out to the side and provides you with an I2C-controlled 8-segment, 4-digit display. This has many uses, from displaying your IP address to providing sensor readings. Earlybirds are currently available at $11 which is great value for something so useful. Take a look at the Kickstarter here or watch their video below:
Alan Pullen is currently working on a weather station project which will bring together a Pi with an Arduino to take readings and display them onto a Raspberry Pi touchscreen. He wants to measure temperature, pressure, humidity, rainfall and, very excitingly lightning strikes! The interface will be written in Kivy which has previously been shown to be a great way of doing touchscreen control panels. He wrote about the start of his project on his blog and he is maintaining a project page here.
Alex Eames has scored a great interview with Ben Nuttall about his new GPIO library, GPIO Zero. Zero, which is written on top of Ben Croston’s great RPi.GPIO library, aims to abstract some of the more difficult or long-winded concepts and is aimed at education and developers who want to do their code in a more object-orientated and neater way. Read the interview and Alex’s initial thoughts here.
Pictured: a Raspberry Pi and the RasPiO portsplus board (credit: Alex Eames)
Artist Râ–˛has created the VIDEOBLAST_R which is a wrist-mounted device which allows the wearer to project pre-prepared artistic imagery on any surface. Animation is triggered by a Wii nunchuck controller and the whole thing is mounted on a rollerblade armguard. An Arduino holds the imagery and transmits them to a Raspberry Pi which then handles the output via a tiny projector. Sounds are also included and the unit is powered by a powerbank (which is the thing hidden up his sleeve). You can read more about the project at the artist’s website.
The Turing-Welchman Bombe was a decryption machine used in World War II to decipher Enigma-encoded German messages. There is a real one running at Bletchley Park:
New Zealander Simon Jensen visited Bletchley and decided that he wanted to build a replica of the machine, but in desktop form and using a Raspberry Pi.
He initially wrote the software on a home-made 6502 computer in BASIC and then ported the general algorithm to C++ on the Pi. He uses an Arduino to control three stepper motors which animate the dials on the front.
You can see a video of the working machine below and read a lot more about it on his blog, including a full account of the build.
Simon also built a wrist-mounted Enigma decoding machine using a tiny Arduino and OLED screen which is just lovely. You can read about that here.
