Recently, Slashdot asked its readers for questions to be posed to Raspberry Pi Founder & CEO Eben Upton. They’ve now conducted the interview and Eben’s (very technical, in some cases) answers can be found on their site.
Office memos on Slack driven from a Raspberry Pi
Nate Welch over at Arkatechture (bet that’s nice to have to spell every time! ;-)) has blogged about some integration they’ve done between instant messenger app Slack and one of their Raspberry Pis. The Pi is hooked up to sensors that detect when fresh coffee or popcorn is made and then uses the Slack API to generate a memo which is posted to everyone in the Slack group. The code is available on GitHub and you can read more on their blog.
Powering your Raspberry Pi from a LiPo the right way
Powering a Raspberry Pi from a LiPo battery isn’t a piece of cake. Fortunately, a couple of expert hackers have done the work for you by writing up the methods.
Building on Daniel Bull’s work to power a Raspberry Pi from a LiPo, Rob Jones has added an analog to digital converter chip to measure voltages and LED indicator lights. This means that you can not only build the power circuitry, you also have some health check indicators to go on.
Sorry, that English was a bit clumsy!
Anyway, if you want to check out Rob Jones’ new tutorial, it’s over on GitHub.
Flashing the new Raspbian image onto a Raspberry Pi’s SD card
The new Raspbian image is over 4GB. This introduces some challenges when trying to write it to an SD card. In particular, unzipping it on Windows and Mac using their built-in tools will fail because they’re a bit naff. Alex Eames has blogged about a lesser-known (but actually quite lovely) tool called Etcher. Etcher is a piece of image writing software that is fully capable of taking a zipped > 4GB image and writing it to your card. That’s right… it’ll write it from the ZIP file. However, if you want to unzip it, Alex has also given ways that you can do this using a couple of extra pieces of software. Read his blog post here.
Superb 50th issue of The MagPi out today for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts
The MagPi has issue number 50 and boy is it a stonker! With a broad collection of news, views, reviews and projects (which doesn’t rhyme, but never mind) and a central feature on the top 50 Raspberry Pi projects, it’s essential reading for Pi owners. Myself and Tim were lucky enough to be asked to be guest judges for the robotics category and they’ve also done a lovely profile of us, which is lovely of them! You can buy The MagPi from all good newsagents and large supermarkets, via the Apps, or download a PDF for free from the website.
Accessories, Arduino, Blinkies, Camera module, Crowdfunding, GPIO boards, Making, Programming, Robotics, Sensors
Kickstarter for terrific robot kit featuring Raspberry Pi, Arduino and loads of blinkies!
Plum Geek have previously launched, and successfully funded a series of Arduino-powered robots on Kickstarter. Now, they’ve moved into the Raspberry Pi arena with the Spirit Rover. Inspired by the NASA/JPL Mars Rover, the full kit features a custom circuit board hosting an Arduino and PIC, blinkies, a pan-and-tilt kit, a Raspberry Pi and accompanying camera module. It’s been designed to teach you about robotics, movement, visual tracking (using the camera) and object avoidance/autonomous operation. The kit comes with a series of worksheets to teach and guide you and it all looks very well thought-out.
Brace yourself, though, this lovely kit does come at a cost with Early Birds starting at $189 for the basic kit (with some of the components not included), and $289 for the “Fully Loaded” kit which includes the Pi and camera. As I say, not cheap, but you can see from the picture at the top of the page that it’s a very pretty robot and beautifully designed.
You can see the (slightly over-long) campaign video below or take a look at the campaign and pledge levels here.