Over at Raspberry Alpha Omega, Frank has been playing around with a £10 Freescale KL25z board. This board is small, beautifully formed and has a whole raft of things onboard that could be used with the Pi including 6xPWM and 6xADC. It seems like a perfect bedfellow at the price and Frank is already having some success communicating with it over a USB serial port.
Martin O’Hanlon is being awesome again. He has created a .obj interpreter/converter for Minecraft for the Raspberry Pi. Take his script, run a 3D object file through it and see it come to wireframe life on the Pi. He’s also working on a solid-shape version of the script. Read more here and get the script
Dale Hamel, developer of RasPlex, has publicly called for collaboration amongst the (currently) four projects developing the XBMC media centre platform. He has called on the developers of OpenElec, Xbian and Raspbmc to join him like so:
I call for us all to work together, share our work, and improve one another to provide the best possible UX, and provide stronger platforms than we would separately, reinventing each other’s work.
Given the public rights argument between Xbian and Raspbmc, this may be a big ask, but just imagine the benefits in uniting their efforts – suddenly they would all be on the ‘same page’, sharing ‘best practice’ methodologies and putting aside their differences to focus on the commonalities between their distributions, improving all of them.
Read more here and hear what Mr Hamel has to say about his vision for collaboration.
I (wisely or not!) have volunteered to organise the next Cambridge Raspberry Jam in the hope of energising the local Raspberry Pi community.
At the moment, I am trying to secure a venue for the afternoon of the 18th May for around 30-40 people. This will let us see how much demand there is for Jams in the area in advance of organising a much larger event for the middle-end of September.
With 18th May in mind, I’d like to see who out there would like to present something at the Jam. I’m hoping for a number of short presentations (10 minutes max) on a variety of topics, from software writing to hardware tinkering.
In particular, I’d like to hear from anyone who can present a project written with the Scratch graphical programming language. 18th May is World Scratch Day and it’d be great to tie in with that.
The exact format of the Jam will depend on who wants to be involved, which will hopefully make it a true community-driven event!
Patrick Aalto has released a new version of his x86 DOS emulator for the Raspberry Pi. You can read more about it here or download the emulator from here.
You can play all kinds of old DOS games with this – in fact, I think this ought to have more publicity!
These have just come on sale on Etsy – wooden cases for the Raspberry Pi Model A.
These are really nice-looking cases made out of birch plywood and require no glue or screws to put together – the teeth just lock together. It has slots for all the ports and also vents for cooling. Not bad for about £10-12. You can buy them from Bitcrafts here
