I recently reviewed the Picon Zero from 4tronix. It’s a motor controller board with the ability to drive six servos and two DC motors. It’s a great little board and Robin Newman has done something with it that just appeals to my robotics brain 🙂 He’s used the Picon Zero together with the Raspberry Pi and a MeArm. He’s then hooked up a PS3 controller (I think by Bluetooth) and programmed everything to worth together. He has therefore got a very controllable, very smooth-operating robot arm. You can see it at work in the video above. Visit YouTube and give it a thumbs-up!
Boston college gets a Raspberry Pi powered map system
A Boston-based college project team has worked together to build a map system for one of their halls. Fulton Hall in Boston College has a confusing layout so they took a Raspberry Pi and a touch screen and then worked on a user interface to allow people to see where they were. Read more here.
Building a tower with a Raspberry Pi DeltaPicker
Tobias Kuhn has taken a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino Mega and 3 DC motors and built what he calls the “DeltaPicker”. It is a robot which operates on multiple axis and uses the Pi to do image capturing and processing to spot black and white plastic discs (like you might get in the game Othello). It then stacks the discs automatically. Take a look at the video above or go here to read slightly more.
Set-up Raspberry Pi Zero OTG without a keyboard, mouse, screen etc
Andrew Mulholland previously posted about using the Raspberry Pi Zero over USB OTG, i.e. programming a Zero over just a USB cable from another machine such as a laptop. Thanks to some improvements to the Raspbian operating system and a bit of as-yet-undiscovered functionality, Andrew has found a way to configure OTG without needing to plug the Zero into a monitor, keyboard etc. This is a marvellous thing and gives you a lot of options such as programming the GPIO from a laptop without any other equipment, save a USB cable. Read how to do it here.
Official Raspberry Pi touchscreen case reviews by the Average Man
A little while back, in March, I did a round-up of the various case options available for the official Raspberry Pi touchscreen. It wasn’t quite a comprehensive list, but now along has come Richard (Average Man) Saville with his round-up of the options. Read what he has to say here.
After using the Pimoroni and OneNineDesign cases for a while now, I’ve stuck with the OneNineDesign case I bought from The Pi Hut as it offers a good amount of protection for the Pi.
Use an analog to digital converter to get analog sensor readings on the Raspberry Pi
Gus over at PiMyLifeUp has done a great tutorial on using the “famous” MCP3008 analog-to-digital converter chip to read values from a light-dependent resistor. He goes through wiring it up and programming it using the spidev Python library. I prefer the GPIO Zero way of doing things now, but Gus’ way teaches you a little more about getting the values out. He also goes through setting up the MCP3008 inside MyDevices Cayenne, a great IoT platform. Read how Gus does it here.
If you want to get into analog sensors, and don’t want to bother with all that wiring (!), keep an eye out for a Kickstarter coming soon featuring Alex Eames’ Analog Zero board.