Art, Programming, Robotics

Servos and Raspberry Pis come to life in kinetic sculpture

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Sam Blanchard, an Assistant Professor of Sculpture at Virginia Tech, has developed SeeMore. SeeMore features 256 Raspberry Pis attached to servo arms. It works as an enormous parallel-processing computer but it is also articulated to show how it works as a cluster. There is a touch screen attached which allows visitors to set the cluster tasks to perform. The Raspberry Pi Foundation covered it on their blog and you can visit Sam’s website here. You can also see a video of SeeMore in action below:

Art, Geeky Techiness, Graphics, Making

Art installation in a French railway station uses a Raspberry Pi and over 16,000 LEDs

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Fred Sapey-Triomphe and Yann Guidon were hired to liven up the entrance to a temporary railway station in Mons, France. The project is called ElectroSuper and is comprised of a 42m long ceiling screen made out of six sections containing 2800 LEDs each. That’s 16,800 LEDs in total. The project took two months to produce. There are four infra-red sensors at the entrance to the “tunnel” which detect the number of visitors and this figure affects the images that are displayed. It will run for a year and the images are also affected by the time of year. The whole thing is master-controlled by a Raspberry Pi Model B+ which runs in read-only mode to protect the SD card. When it is running at full-pelt, the image transmission only takes up to 15% of the CPU. You can read an interview with the pair over at Linux User and Developer or watch a video of ElectroSuper in action below:

Accessories, GPIO boards, Making, Reviews

Prototyping from down under – a review of the Wombat prototyping board for the Raspberry Pi

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Richard Saville, aka the Average Man, has just published his review of the Wombat Board. This board is ideal for prototyping and carries a full-sized breadboard, an analogue-to-digital converter and plenty of other bits and pieces. It was originally a Kickstarter and is now available from Gooligum for around £30 ($50). Average Man’s “bonza” review is over here.

Accessories, Camera module, Photography, Software, Tutorials

Use a Codebug to take pictures with your Raspberry Pi

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Codebug, the ex-Kickstarter project, is now on sale at CPC for £15. The small board can be connected up to a Raspberry Pi via USB and used as an input device via a Python library. Thomas Macpherson-Pope has, over on the Codebug site, written a tutorial which shows you how to detect when a circuit is created on the Codebug and then have that trigger, via the picamera library, the use of the Pi Camera. It’s a nice little project that shows you how to use the two devices together. Read the tutorial here.