A group of year 11 students from Frome College have entered (and won one of the prizes) the PA Consulting Raspberry Pi inventions contest. Jake Malley, Gabriel Barnes and Alex Osbourne have linked together a Raspberry Pi and an ATMega328P-PU board to monitor temperature, humidity, light, rain and soil moisture. They are connected by an RF wireless radio signal. They’ve fully documented the project and have put together a lovely little site to go along with it.
After yesterday’s much-appreciated (and little maligned) retro-styled website skinning, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has now launched it’s ‘real’ new site. The site has a beautiful all-new design and is now much more heavily focussed on the Education aspects of the Pi including several full schemes of work. The site has been completely revamped, except the Forums which stay the same, and I haven’t yet been through it all yet. Well worth a browse but please bear with them during this heavy traffic period as it may be a little slow!
Congratulations to the entire team, and especially Ben Nuttall who worked his socks off.
Take a look at how the Foundation announced the site themselves.
Zach Igielman, a long-time CamJammer, has just started to do video tutorials. His first one is all about using an accelerometer with the Pi and he’s chosen to use the MMA7455 which is fairly easy and cheap to get hold of from eBay or from Tandy Online if you’d rather not. It’s especially good for his first video and he explains things with a clear voice and plenty of detail – he’s clearly spent a good deal of time planning out what he wants to say and has chosen a very interesting subject. So, if you want to get into using this sensor, give his video a watch and you’ll be up-and-running in no time.
I’ve decided I’m not going to embed it here, but instead I’ll give a link to it so you can leave a comment and a thumbs-up if you wish 🙂
The Java Source has published a couple of videos. The first is all about getting JDK 8 up-and-running on the Pi.
The second moves onto using Pi4J and controlling the GPIO
YouTube channel owner boltszmann138 has created a Trekker’s dream come true – an LCARS interface running a Raspberry Pi. There’s lots of technical detail on his YouTube video page and he hopes to eventually publish his code open source-style so that other people can use it. Take a look at the video below or visit the video page to leave a comment.
The fine folks over at Phenoptix have just started selling the SR-04 ultrasonic distance sensor for £1.99. It comes with a couple of resistors to protect your Pi. All they need now is some instructions on using it with your Pi, but that’s a fairly straightforward thing to do and, in fact, Raspberry Pi Spy did an excellent tutorial on it a while back. It’s a digital sensor with only a 3mm margin for error so you don’t need an analog-to-digital converter and it has a big range (bigger than the 2-5cm Phenoptix are advertising – I’ve had readings up to 3m, admittedly with a larger margin for error than 3mm).
There’s no excuse not to get one if you want to measure distance such as, for example, on a robot.
Take a look at their online shop now to get hold of one.
I have no connection to Phenoptix apart from having met the Founder (Ben) at the most recent CamJam and thinking that they’re a very good online retailer. Just sharing the good shopping news!
