John Carmack wanted to off-load document scanning from his home PC and chose a Pi to do the job. It’s a little slow and there is a limit to the amount of scanning you can do (because of the Pi’s memory limitations) but it’s still a neat solution.
Drive a scrolling LED badge from a #RaspberryPi
Dave Akerman (of high-altitude ballooning/Babbage Bear fame) has taken apart a £13 LED badge, re-soldered some of the connections and written some nifty script in C to create a status display for his ballooning flights.
ScratchGPIO gets support for the Pibrella #RaspberryPi add-on board
Simon Walters (@cymplecy) has been beavering away at his ScratchGPIO software. This software brings GPIO support to Scratch so that you can use LEDs and, now, expansion boards from the popular visual programming environment.
The latest board to receive support is the upcoming Pibrella from Cyntech/Pimoroni. I’m currently writing some material for the Cambridge Raspberry Jam next week which uses the Pibrella to teach kids about connecting to the real world so this couldn’t have come at a better time.
The Pibrella features 3 LEDs, a buzzer, a switch (with a fun large cap on it), 4 protected inputs and 4 outputs with LEDs showing status. You can also power the Pi using the micro USB connector on the board rather than the normal one on the side of the Pi. You’ll be able to purchase this board soon but you can see it in action at the Cam Jam if you’re coming along!
Other boards that have recently received support are: PiRingo, MotorPiTX, PiRoCon and the PiGlow.
Head on over to Simon’s blog to read more and download ScratchGPIO
Timelapse photography with the #RaspberryPi, Python and avconv
Trevor Appleton has done a very good, comprehensive tutorial on using a combination of Python and avconv to take photos with the camera module and then string them together as a video.
Use your browser to control Sid the #RaspberryPi – powered robot arm
Si digital have used a Pi, Node.js, Nginx and the camera module to create a controllable robot arm. You use controls on your web browser to control the arm and build up points. I was unable to get it working as of writing this (could be to do with my firewall) but it looks like a nicely put-together site. Not too sure about the change of logo on the diagram of the Pi though – pretty sure that’s naughty!
Create elegant graphics with C++ and openFrameworks on the #RaspberryPi
Andreas Muller and Jason Van Cleave over at CreativeApplications.net have written a tutorial on using openFrameworks on the Pi. openFrameworks is an open source C++ toolkit for ‘creative coding’. It provides an interface to graphics, audio, video, networking and access to many popular libraries such as OpenCV and OSC. You’ll be using C++ and the Pi’s powerful graphics chip in no time with this tutorial, so check it out.