Scott Wegner operates the sound and lights system for his local auditorium in rural Minnesota. This often involves playing music into the foyer area to warm the audience up before the enter, as well as making announcements about when the show is due to start. He has developed a system with a Raspberry Pi that slots into the A/V rack that has buttons to control the music and announcements. It’s a great, practical application of the Pi. Read more here or watch the video below:
Alan Broun at Dawn Robotics is currently pitching for a £20,000 fund from Jisc to develop their Raspberry Pi robotics kit. The kit comes with a chassis, motors, wheels, a driver board, a servo-controlled Pi camera and all the fixings necessary to build a great mobile robot. The funding will help them to develop educational materials that will enable schools to build a robot and learn how to program using it. It only takes a minute and a couple of clicks to vote, so please, get behind this campaign and help Dawn to get their project off the ground. Vote here and see the promo video below.
Martin O’Hanlon is, basically, a Jedi when it comes to Minecraft Pi. He has now combined his work on the Astro Pi with a model of that same board within the Minecraft world. You can do everything with the model, from getting a read-out of the onboard sensors to lighting up bits of the LED matrix by hitting them with your sword. It’s tremendously well-done and great fun, though, of course, only of interest to those with the Astro Pi board (Alas, alas). Read more here or watch the demo video below.
Payara Micro is a fantastic little Java server that requires no installation to get it running. All you need is Java installed on your Pi (which is default on Raspbian) and a simple command and you’re up and running. It’s then easy to run .WAR files and run whatever apps you like. It’s very neat, very small (less than 60MB) and you can find full instructions on using it on the Voxxed website.
Richard Saville has done a great round-up/review of the various options available to you when you’re using the Pi as a media centre. He covers various options including the Yatse phone app, a wireless keyboard/trackpad combo device and a FLIRC IR dongle. Read his article here.
Martin O’Hanlon is usually to be seen hacking around with Minecraft Pi. This time, however, he’s taken one of his wife’s collection of broken useless rubbish vintage radios, a Raspberry Pi, an IQaudIO audio board and amplifier and some other small parts and given it a new lease of life. Details of his build can be found here and you can see a video of the final ‘product’ below:
