Jordan Balagot has created a robot that shoots mini Nerf darts. She’s used a “Romo” robot for transport and the Raspberry Pi for control of the servo that fires the gun.
Take a look at the video below or view her blog post here to see how she did it.
Shane Snipe, and his dad, have built a system to teach you how to play the piano and they’ve used a Raspberry Pi to do it. They’ve rigged up a series of servos which control some laser pointers which then point at the keys you need to play to form the chords displayed on the screen. See the video below. What all the more extraordinary is that they didn’t know how to program in Python to begin with and learnt as they went along during the project’s 50 hours-or-so of build time.
Darren Christie has done a quick review of the Pi-LITEr board from Ciseco. This little collection of LEDs, costing a massive £3, is great value and apart from a few reservations, Darren gives it the thumbs up.
Kano, creators of the Kano kit which has had a bit of a rough road in the Pi community, has now stated what it plans to do in terms of open-sourcing it’s code.
You can read their initial announcement here and you can read more about their first offering, Snake, here.
I think it’s great that they’re now “giving back” to the community and I look forward to seeing more announcements from them over the coming months.
The Foundation has today announced a £1 million pot called the Raspberry Pi Foundation Education Fund. This will fund projects and initiatives for kids aged 5-18 in the 4 core STEM areas. Priority will be given for not-for-profit projects. You can read more about it here. I think this is a fantastic idea and it will be a real shot-in-the-arm to the STEM sector.
A group of year 11 students from Frome College have entered (and won one of the prizes) the PA Consulting Raspberry Pi inventions contest. Jake Malley, Gabriel Barnes and Alex Osbourne have linked together a Raspberry Pi and an ATMega328P-PU board to monitor temperature, humidity, light, rain and soil moisture. They are connected by an RF wireless radio signal. They’ve fully documented the project and have put together a lovely little site to go along with it.
