Recently, a two day event called “Hack North Korea” was held in which teams came up with ways to distribute information in the notoriously difficult-to-crack North Korea. North Korea uses some particularly draconian measures when it comes to freedom of information – politely put, there is no freedom of information. The winning team wants to use Raspberry Pis to pick up South Korean broadcasts and distribute pre-loaded SD cards. Not sure how feasible the idea is, but they’ve won the right to travel to South Korea and work with North Korean dissidents on getting the idea into practice. Read more here.
45 Raspberry Pi cluster mines Java code
Lee Martie and his team took 45 Raspberry Pis and clustered them together. They mine Java code repositories on GitHub and provide an interface to search the code online. You can use the searching tool here.
Raspberry Pi NFC-based achievement tracker for Jams
Well-known blogger, Pi enthusiast and all-round nice person Charlotte Godley has just started blogging over at Element 14 about a new project she wants to start. Called Pi Passport it uses an NFC-chipped card to allow people to check in at Raspberry Jams and gain achievements by the number of Jams they attend. I can see a lot of mileage in this, with different NFC check-ins for different workshops and activities. It’ll be interesting to see how it progresses. You can read her introduction to the project here.
Hear all about the Raspberry Pi in Education with Ben Nuttall
Ben Nuttall, member of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Education team, is currently on tour in the United States spreading the good news about the Pi and generally making a nuisance of himself (he says, ducking things being thrown at him from across the pond). He visited North Carolina State University and gave a presentation. Thanks to the miracles of technology, it’s now up on YouTube and you can view it below:
Control motors with your Raspberry Pi and this video tutorial
Matt Timmons-Brown (aka The Raspberry Pi Guy) has done a new video! Always slickly produced and accessible, this one is an update to a previous video he did in which he controls a DC motor. He uses a RyanTeck Motor Controller Board and a battery pack, adds them to a Raspberry Pi and writes some Python to control movement. Watch it on YouTube.
Motorised Raspberry Pi webcam with Ben Heck
Ben Heck, celebrity hacker, has taken a Pi, an Arduino and a servo and created a webcam which can be moved according to commands sent to it via a chat app. Watch his video below:
Ben Heck’s Raspberry Pi Shop Cam – The Ben Heck… by BenHeckShow