Matt Hawkins, of Raspberry Pi Spy, has worked out how to take screenshots of Minecraft Pi Edition. The previously tried utility, scrot, was unable to capture from the 3D game whereas the new tool, raspi2png manages it. Read more on the Spy blog.
Spud in Space with a #RaspberryPi
Dave Akerman’s been at it again with his high altitude ballooning. This time, he launched a potato into space for Heston Blumenthal! You can read more about the launch over on Dave’s blog or catch up with the episode on 4oD.
Build a pan/tilt mechanism for your #RaspberryPi camera out of wood
Over on ScrapToPower.co.uk, they’ve done a lengthy tutorial for those of you who like working with wood and don’t mind a bit of DIY. It’s a pan/tilt mechanism that uses stepper motors and ULN2003 driver boards to make the parts move. Read the tutorial here.
#RaspberryPi used for monitoring penguins in Antartica
Way back in September last year, I covered a story on Cambridge Consultants, the Zoological Society of London, and their use of the Raspberry Pi in conservation and preservation in Kenya. Since January this year, they have used the same equipment, known as Instant Wild, to monitor penguins in Antarctica. Basically, the Pi is used to send photos and data back from the unit (pictured above) via an Iridium (satellite) uplink. You can read a lot more about the project over on Cnet.com.
Issue 23 of The MagPi for the #RaspberryPi is out now
With a special feature on the just-released Sonic Pi v2, issue 23 of The MagPi has just been launched. Here’s a summary of what’s in it taken from their site:
It’s party time here at The MagPi towers, celebrating our second birthday! To mark this milestone, The MagPi is pleased to provide another massive chance to get your hands on some fantastic Raspberry Pi goodies, with over £2000 worth of tasty treats for our readers to win! Thank you to all our sponsors who have kindly given towards this massive collection of prizes. See pages 18-19 for more information.
This month you’ll find us in the club with Sonic Pi. The MagPi has an exclusive of Samuel Aaron’s brand new release of Sonic Pi v2.0 and how it is aiding build the underground music movement of Live Coding. Samuel describes what is new to v2.0 along with some basics to get you up and mixing in no time.
Jacob Marsh from ModMyPi is back with another great tutorial on physical computing, this month describing how to use 1-Wire temperature sensors. We look at how to build your own XMPP chat server in Gianluca’s Chat Room article, then Bernhard Suter provides the next article in our Linux tool shed series where he describes the bash shell.
Michael Petersen begins his two-part series on using the Raspberry Pi to study atmospheric pollution. In this article he introduces us to the main subsystems involved in the multi-sensor array used in the research balloons which are sent into the lower stratosphere of Utah. We also take a look at stackable hardware with Sai Yamanoor’s article about GrovePi.
Our very own William Bell has been working overtime this month with no less than three articles. First, he shows how to interface BrickPi with Scatch, then he describes how to bring Minecraft to the real world and finally the C++ Cache series makes a welcome return with an explanation of classes.
Sonic Pi v2 for the #RaspberryPi
The title says it all, really. Release candidate 1 of the newest version of Sonic Pi is now out and available for download from the Sonic Pi website. If you’re interested in making music with the Pi, or you’ve tried Sonic Pi before, I can thoroughly recommend trying it out!