Thursday saw the publication of the newest issue of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s magazine The MagPi. This month there is a special feature on the new Raspberry Pi camera module as well as lots of articles from the community. It’s especially nice to see Dr Lucy Rogers’ dinosaur robotics work at Blackgang Chine get some love. You can download and/or subscribe to the magazine here.
Jamie Bailey from Initial State has been in contact. They have taken the data from Ed and Izzy, the two AstroPi units on the International Space Station, and imported it into their Internet of Things platform. They have made the entire graphing display available publicly so you can see what a vast amount of data has been collected. Read more and view the data/graphs here.
In 1980s, SIMON was all the rage. SIMON was a memory game in which segments of a circle lit up a particular colour in a particular sequence. The player then had to reproduce the exact same sequence to progress with the game. Les Pounder has taken a Raspberry Pi and a bunch of components from CPC (bet you couldn’t guess that) and put them together in a large box to make a very blinky version of the same game. You can read how to build it yourself, and program it using gpiozero (and some other libraries) here. If you want to do it on a smaller scale, you could do it with some illuminated momentary push buttons!
You can see a demo video of it working below:
London-based Laarco have developed a machine to create large works of art using a technique known as “String Art”. This technique uses thousands of nails and a single piece of string to construct a ‘painting’ of a subject. Laarco’s machine, called “Autograph”, uses a Raspberry Pi at it’s core which sends commands to an Arduino Mega fitted with a 3D-printing shield which controls the mechanism. The results are astounding as you can see from the time-lapse video above. You can even buy a piece from Laarco for upwards of £700/$1100 (approx).
As you probably know, two new camera modules have just been released by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Alex Eames has carried out a comparison of the old versions and the new versions and has written up his (surprising) findings. Take a look here.
Mike Hooper has been looking at ways to get the full version of Minecraft working on his Pi. He’s now managed it and has written up a tutorial over on the Raspberry Pi Forums. Great work, Mike! You can see a video of it in action above. Thanks to Albert Hickey for pointing me at this one – much obliged!
