Here’s a nice bit of silliness for you. A German crane manufacturer asked “hwhardsoft” to create a game that used the company’s crane controllers. So, that’s what they did – the created a Pong game using Python and then adapted the control boards for use with the Pi. They added an ATMEGA chip to do the analog to digital conversion and voila, Crane Pong!
The workshops run by HackLab UK are among the newest additions to the Cambridge Raspberry Jam and have so far also proven to be the most popular and successful.
This Saturday (26th), HackLab will be at the Cambridge Makespace at 16 Mill Lane running their Scratch/GPIO Space Invaders workshop. Here’s what they have to say about it:
Students will be able to program a Space Invaders style videogame in Scratch, then wire up a Big Red Button to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins to fire the ‘Doomsday Laser’ when the battle for galactic supremacy gets too hot to handle! A fun and engaging combination of programming and physical computing, StarFighter shows students how we can affect computer programs through physical and real-world inputs.
The event runs from 10am-12pm, is suitable for ages 8+ and is free. To book your place, head over to meetup.com and Join/RSVP.
Recently, Martin O’Hanlon attended PyCon UK. During the conference, he ran workshops using Minecraft Pi Edition during which participants could create a game called “LavaTrap”. The end result of the game is that you have to avoid the lava by walking onto blocks which are slowly disappearing! Martin has blogged about the workshop and made his materials available online as a downloadable worksheet.
Back in November 2013, Bonnie Eisenman and her team used light sensors and torches to create a set of musical stairs at Princeton:
The team have now written up the project as an Instructable so you can create your very own set of stairs! Take a look here.
Using a Bluetooth keyboard can be a pain in the backside. Fortunately, Tom Herbison has written a neat little tutorial on how to get it working. Read it here.
Jeremy Morgan has recently been tinkering with a bunch of sensors attached to a Raspberry Pi, out of which he has made a ‘weather station‘. The station measures temperature (several different ways!), humidity, barometric (atmospheric) pressure and light levels/luminosity (lux). He has now written up the whole thing as a tutorial on his blog. Read it here. It’s a really good way of getting into sensors and showing them on a web interface, so great job Jeremy! For those of us in the UK, all the parts specified in his tutorial can be purchased from either The Pi Hut or Makersify, as well as other sources such as Element 14.
