Digital Zoetrope controlled by a Raspberry Pi

Brian Corteil has been working on his digital zoetrope for most of this year. At the recent Newcastle Maker Faire he showed off his creation. Later on, his brought it along to CamJam and showed the Raspberry Pi community what he’d been up to. The zoetrope uses 12 small Adafruit OLED displays connected to a single Raspberry Pi via SPI. By positioning yourself correctly at the edge of the zoetrope and giving it a swish with your hand (it doesn’t have motors, thus maintaining that true, historic zoetrope feel) the static images that pass by your eyes appear to be animated, thanks to “persistence of vision“. My description is hardly adequate for this project, so I hope that some of you will come along to the next CamJam to see it in action! You can read more about how Brian put together the zoetrope here.

Monitoring cricket scores with the Raspberry Pi

Rohit Gupta wanted to monitor cricket scores while he was working in his office. The trouble is almost all the sites he would use to do this were blocked by his company’s web traffic filter. So, he turned to the Raspberry Pi and a piece of software called BeautifulSoup to create a web scraper which would poll an (unnamed) service once a minute and then display the results in summary form on an LCD from a Nokia 5510. The data displayed is as follows:

  • Teams playing
  • Currently batting team with overs underneath it
  • The score in the largest font
  • 4s/6s and Run Rate
  • 1st Innings history if 2nd Innings is going on and 2nd innings PENDING if the first innings was underway.
  • Match Status – Rains, Ended,In Progress etc

He has called the whole thing CricPi and you can read more here.

Basement storage temperature and humidity monitor with a Raspberry Pi

A basement full of old books but no way to monitor humidity and temperature. Enter a Raspberry Pi. This hacker has put together a DHT22 sensor and an LCD screen with the Pi in order to monitor environmental conditions in his basement. The collected data is then output to a .csv file so that he can see the results over time. He’s written the whole thing up as a walk-through tutorial. Read it here. It’s a great introduction to environmental sensors. A possible extension to this is to publish the results online with a stats service so that he can monitor trends in real time as the results are sent to the service.

Lots of education-related videos from EuroPython over at the Raspberry Pi Foundation website

Recently, some of the Foundation’s education team headed over to Bilbao, Spain for the EuroPython conference. Many of the talks were recorded and the Foundation have blogged about the ones that they presented. They are:

  • Carrie Anne Philbin – Education: A Python solution
  • Ben Nuttall – Physical computing with Python and Raspberry Pi
  • James Robinson – Raspberry Pi Weather Station
  • James Robinson – Pycon: a teacher’s perspective

These videos, along with a description of the weekend can be found here.

Raspberry Pi Guy seeks questions for Eben Upton

On Tuesday, Matthew Timmons-Brown is heading up to Pi Towers in Cambridge. As part of his visit there he will be interviewing Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading and co-creator of the Raspberry Pi. He wants to know what you the great Raspberry Pi community want to ask Eben. So, here’s your chance to pose all sorts of questions about the past, present and future of Raspberry Pi. You can contact him via email on theraspberrypiguy@gmail.com or via Twitter. Alternatively, just leave a comment on this blog post and I’ll pass it along!

Get yourself a Raspberry Pi RPi.GPIO Quick Reference Ruler before time runs out!

I’ve just realised that the campaign I’ve been featuring on the blog for the last few weeks is almost at an end.

The RasPiO GPIO Ruler is a great little reference guide to the RPi.GPIO Python library that (almost) everyone uses to interact with the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi. Since Alex sent me one of the prototypes, I’ve found myself forgetting how to use the library more times than I care to admit and I found myself thinking “Oh, I wish I had a quick refer… Oh, I do!” and into my bag I delved once more. It’s now, unaccountably, become one of the ‘essential’ pieces of kit I carry in my Pi bag.

It is available on Kickstarter until tomorrow morning!

As you can see from the pictures, it solves multiple purposes. It can act as a slip-over reference for the GPIO pins themselves with both functions labelled depending on which way up you have it; it tells you all the different functions of RPi.GPIO; it’s a ruler (I’ve even used it as a ruler!); it has a handy URL to go to for GPIO tutorials.

I really can’t recommend it enough. It’s only £4 plus (very reasonable) shipping. Delivered, it’s a fiver in total for the UK. Alex has had a good level of success in his campaign so far, but I’d love to see him get to 1,000 backers before it finishes just after 8.20am tomorrow morning.

So, if you haven’t pledged yet, or if you want to order more of them, head over to Kickstarter.