Matt Hawkins from Raspberry Pi Spy has done a comparison and benchmarking of 5 different microSD cards, including the official NOOBS one from the Swag store. He’s published his results and you can view them here.
Build your own scrolling LED wall with a Raspberry Pi & Cotswold Raspberry Jam this weekend
Andrew Oakley, from the Cotswold Raspberry Jam, has written an excellent tutorial in which he describes how to create a large, scrolling LED wall, controlled from a Raspberry Pi. He takes you through all aspects of the construction and powering the LEDs and includes the code to scroll messages across it. Take a look here. Here’s a video of it in action:
Cotswold Raspberry Jam
The Cotswold Raspberry Jam takes place THIS SATURDAY (28th) at the University of Gloucestershire Park Campus in Cheltenham from 1-4pm. This is a new venue with lots more room, so if you’re in the area go and visit them! You’ll be able to see the LED matrix above on display. You can get free tickets here.
New armour-plated robotic car kit from Pi Borg
Pi Borg, the Cambridgeshire-based robotics specialist, who made such a splash with their Diddyborg, have just released details of a new kit. This kit, costing £99, comes complete with a foldable metal chassis, add-on boards and all the fixings you need to create a heavy-duty robot car. Take a look on their site for more details.
HAT storage boxes for Raspberry Pi accessories
James Mitchell, who runs Raspberry Jam Berlin, recently decided that he wanted to protect and store his HATs. I can sympathise! I’ve got so many of the things and no handy storage solution. He has created some templates that you can print out on paper or cardboard to solve the problem. They come in a variety of sizes (10mm, 12mm, 15mm) and can be found on his GitHub account. Take a look here.
Apologies for lack of bloggage
Hi everyone. My apologies for the lack of blogging action over the past week. I’ve been performing in a musical called Parade at Sharnbrook Mill Theatre (that’s me, first on the left in my guise as Hugh Dorsey, lead prosecutor in the Leo Frank case) and, despite having the week off work to concentrate on that, I was finding myself too tired during the day to concentrate on much besides Pi Wars. It was an amazing week, the best experience I’ve ever had in amateur theatre. Loved the show, loved the cast and crew and had a brilliant time.
I’ll be posting some Raspberry Pi news today and should be back up to speed by tomorrow! Thanks for your patience! 🙂
Drive a 7-segment display from a Raspberry Pi
Alex Eames has written a great blog post in which he wires up and uses a 7-segment display using the Raspberry Pi. The display, which is of the common cathode type, has 4 digits and Alex shows you how to get resistors in place to prevent the display from burning out. He then provides the Python code to display things on the unit. He is offering kits for £12, including postage, which I think is good value for money considering what is contained in it (pictured below). Read the blog post here.
