Element 14 are running a Halloween competition. They’re looking for creative wearable tech Halloween costumes. Winners will receive a goodie bag containing a Raspberry Pi 3. Entries must be received by midnight on the evening of 1st November. The full rules and details can be found over on their site.
Jamie Bailey’s been in touch. Over at Initial State, they’ve been playing around with the GrovePi Zero by Dexter Industries. It’s an add-on board that plugs into the Zero’s GPIO pins and gives you the ability to use Grove sensors, as pictured above. Using a couple of the sensors, Jamie has created an Internet of Things device that reads humidity and air quality levels and then ties this into the Wunderground weather service API. Together, this data is used to create a dashboard (as you can see above) on the Initial State website. Not only has he written the entire project out as a tutorial but he’s also given an honest review of the GrovePi Zero board including the quality, usefulness and cost of the device. It’s a really great piece of work and you can see the full tutorial and review here.
Philip Organ, a 12-year old, year 7 student from Birmingham. He has recently been captured by the Pokemon Go craze and wanted to bring a bit of Raspberry Pi know-how to the game. So, he took a Pi, added a couple of screens, a camera module and a keypad and then constructed a laser-cut case at his local Makespace. His Dad, Spencer, admits to helping him a little – by driving him to the Makespace and, of course, being the Bank of Dad – but apart from transport and money, it’s all Philip’s own work!
What you do is to type in the number of the Pokemon into the keypad and then the large screen displays a picture of the chosen monster. The smaller screen is used for menu selection. You can read more about it on the UK Tech Reviews blog, see the code on GitHub and you can see Philip giving a talk at CamJam about the project below. Great stuff – keep on making, Philip!
Wolfie wanted to build a costume for his 12-year old granddaughter for this Halloween. He settled on the idea of a giant wearable disco ball (as you do) and set about building it out of suspended ceiling hanger wire. He added chicken wire and a looooot of duct tape to the framework and then embedded 288 WS2811 LED pixels. Into the mix is thrown a Raspberry Pi 2 to control the sequencing of the LEDs and a level converter to protect the Pi. The Pi itself is powered from a portable power bank, whilst the rest is driven by a drone battery. You can read more over at Thingiverse.
A while back, Jacob over at ModMyPi sent me a new board – a relay board designed to be used for IoT projects. I haven’t had a chance to use it myself yet, but I would like to feature it a bit here.
Here is a list of features:
First of all, here’s a review from Average Man, Richard Saville. He likes the board generally, but does warn that although the relays are rated for mains voltage, you’d be a damn fool to use it for that unless you enjoy danger.
Secondly, Matt over at Raspberry Pi Spy has reviewed the board. He also likes the board, particularly the way you use buttons actually on the board to configure it.
Over at sudomod.com, banjokazooie has been sharing photographs of his latest build. It is a Wii U gamepad with the innards taken out and replaced with a Raspberry Pi 3 and some other components. He’s put RetroPie on the finished result and you can read a short interview with him over on their blog.
