Carmelito Andrade has written an excellent tutorial in which he uses the Adafruit Capacitive Touch HAT together with a Raspberry Pi Model A+ and some 3D-printed bits to create a Pi-powered drum kit. Read it here.
Build your own digital clock with a Raspberry Pi with this Kickstarter
David Saul is running a Kickstarter campaign to fund a new add-on board for the Raspberry Pi. Compatible with the B+, A+ and Pi 2, the PiMuxClock plugs into the 40-way GPIO header and stands up, giving you a large digital clock display. Also attached (on the enhanced version) is a temperature sensor (just because there was room on the board) and on the back is a mount point for an Adafruit real-time clock board, which means that internet connectivity is not required once the time has been set. There are various pledging options available, depending on how much you’d like to learn from and do with the kit. There are also pre-built options available if you can’t face the soldering (although this is a great kit to start with if you want to learn!)
Interfacing a VFD display to the Raspberry Pi
Dr Scott Baker has been messing around with VFDs (Vacuum Fluorescent Displays) which emit light directly rather than being backlit like normal LCD displays. He has worked out how to interface such a display with the Raspberry Pi and has blogged about it here, including giving a listing of a small Python library you can use.
Big Data on the Raspberry Pi 2
Newcastle-based Darren has written a tutorial that covers installing Apache Spark on the Raspberry Pi. Spark is a Scala library that is used for the analysis of so-called “big data”. This is the first in a series of posts and his next will deal with setting up a cluster of Pi 2s to do fast, distributed analysis. As he points out, it has to be the Pi 2 due to the increased memory and multiple cores, and it is limited by the specs of the machine such as the comparatively low throughput of the network interface. Read more here.
Limit SD Card writes on Rasberry Pi using Ramlog
It’s well-established that SD cards have a finite lifespan. This lifespan is dependent on the number of writes that you do to the card (although the number of reads is largely irrelevant). Alexander van der Sar has blogged about using a piece of software called Ramlog. At boot time, the current logs are read into memory, then subsequent log writes are done directly to RAM, therefore not using the SD card. The logs are then written at shutdown time to the SD card, thus minimising the number of writes. Read about this here.
Thanks to Peter Scargill who went through the pain of finding some instructions that worked!
Low memory-usage blog platform for the Raspberry Pi
Andy Molenda has blogged about his experiences using Grav which is a low-memory footprint and highly efficient flat-file CMS. It has enabled him to run a blog on his 256MB Pi with very good performance. He has written up how to install the stack necessary to run Grav – read it here.