Alex Eames has just written a great tutorial which takes you through the process of removing specific packages from your Pi’s SD card. He chooses to remove Wolfram and LibreOffice for a massive 1.3GB space saving. If you’re running short of space on your card, take a look at his blog post for how to rectify the situation.
Ryan Walmsley of Ryanteck has just launched a new Kickstarter. This time, it’s for a very innovative product called the RTK.GPIO (the jury is still out on the name 😉 ). It connects to any computer (including the Pi) via USB cable and has a full 40-pin GPIO header. It allows you to use selected Raspberry Pi add-on boards and basic electronic components by programming it via Python from the host computer. It’s ideal if you want to do things ‘The Pi Way’ and don’t happen to have a Raspberry Pi itself, and also gives you the ability, for example, to use two HATs at the same time – one on the Pi’s 40-pin header, one on the RTK.GPIO. It’s also a natural ‘port expander’ – you can light up an awful lot of LEDs! There’s details of the board, including technical details, over on Kickstarter.
There are Earlybirds at £9 (plus very reasonable postage) and then standard at £10 (plus postage).
The latest Pi Podcast is out! Along with the usual mixture of chat and news, this one features an interview with legendary high altitude balloonist Dave Akerman. Well worth a listen – go to their site.
Nottingham Hackspace are hosting a Raspberry Jam on Saturday 28th May at their premises on Alfred Street South, Nottingham. This is especially ideal for newcomers, but everyone is welcome to the event which is running from 11am-3pm. Notes about car parking should be read on their Eventbrite page where you can register for free tickets.
Aaron Davies has posted his project up on the Element 14 website. In it, he creates a baby monitor using the a Raspberry Pi 3, a new Pi NoIR v2 camera module and some infra-red LEDs. He uses some software downloaded from GitHub and changes the configuration options to detect movement. Nice little project for any version of the camera module and makes good use of the Pi 3’s inbuilt wifi capabilities. Read more here.
This morning, two new cameras for the Raspberry Pi were released. These cameras, which are direct drop-in replacements for the old ones (i.e. they have the same ribbon cable connector) feature new Sony IMX219 sensors. They still have fixed-focus lenses, but this time they are capable of taking still pictures at 3280 x 2464 pixel resolution. They also support 1080p30, 720p60 and 640x480p90 video recording. The cameras are available in two flavours:
NoIR – a “night-vision” camera which has no IR filter on the lens.
They’re available from all good Pi resellers for around £21-£25 including The Pi Hut, Pimoroni, Pi Supply and Element 14.
Alex Eames at RasPi.TV has taken a look at the standard camera and his video can be found here.
This is great news for those who like the camera – a simple upgrade from the end-of-line original that you can ‘just use’.
