Daniel Stinebaugh wanted to replace his Chevy’s failing head unit with a Raspberry Pi. So, he ripped the old one out and fitted the Pi and a wireless router in it’s place. The Pi runs Volumio and he’s also using the DAC+ HAT from HiFiBerry to route the signal to an amplifier. Read more about the project here. He’s been left with a system which is, in his opinion, vastly superior to any head unit out there with a lot of flexibility and gorgeous sound.
Jeremy Morgan has written an excellent, comprehensive tutorial on reading data from a waterproof 1-wire temperature sensor and then outputting it to screen. He has then expanded on this to push the data up to online service Firebase. Read the tutorial here.
We use an identical method to grab data from a temperature sensor with the second CamJam EduKit. So, if you’d like to get into reading sensors, take a look at the kit, available from The Pi Hut, here.
I’ve featured a few of these before, but this one looks particularly nice. Rasmus Hauschild is 14 years old and from Denmark. He has created a portable retro games console with the Pi and some nifty 3D printing. He has posted up the 3D files and various scripts onto Thingiverse. Bear in mind that this isn’t an Instructable – it has a list of items that you’ll need to get to replicate the project, but no instructions on how to do it. However, if you do a Google around, you’ll soon find that instructions are out there. Take a look at the ‘thing’ here.
Good news from Dexter Industries today. Together with ‘a few key contributors’ their GoPiGo robotics kit is now controllable via programming language node.js. If you have one of their kits, or you just want to look at how node.js can be used in robotics, take a look at this GitHub repository which contains all the instructions you need to get going. More information about their efforts to get the kit compatible with more languages is available here.
Not much detail on this, but it’s way too cool not to share. David Pride announced on Twitter that he has created a DIY laser harp. He uses a 50mW laser with a stepper motor to create beams of light and then LDR sensors detect beam breaks and the Pi plays a corresponding midi note. The whole thing is tied in to a RasPiO Duino board. You already know I hold the board in very high esteem, but this is the first time we’ve seen something this big and fantastical! Hopefully he’ll provide more details in a future blog. Here it is in action. Leave him a comment on the YouTube video if you like it!
Jeff Highsmith, who previously created the wonderful Mission Control Desk and bedroom Apollo Mission has been hard at work again. This time he’s installed a hatch in each of his children’s bedrooms which give access to a pair of tubes into which they can put their fallen-out teeth. A vacuum cleaner in the loft is then controlled by a Raspberry Pi, which is itself triggered using an iPhone app. The vacuum sucks the capsule containing the tube up and away to the tooth fairy’s magical tree house. It’s a great piece of work and just shows what you can do if you’ve got imagination and time to spend. Below is a video of the project in action. Thanks to the Raspberry Pi Foundation for spotting this one which first appeared back in September 2013 on Make.
