Great work again from Cambridge TV as they attend the Big Birthday Weekend and interview various people including Philip Colligan, Liz Upton and Crazy Squeak. If you attended the weekend, see if you can spot yourself!
The MagPi launches mini print versions of Raspberry Pi guides
The MagPi previously announced the launch of several e-books on various subjects: Python, the command line, the SenseHAT and Sonic Pi. Now, these e-books are available in printed format. They are roughly A5 in size and make for excellent reads. They cost £3.99 each (an absolute bargain!) and are available from The Pi Hut, who recently became their official seller. The MagPi itself is also available from The Pi Hut.
Sweaty Astronauts – the Raspberry Pi AstroPi data comes back to Earth
Richard Hayler and his children spoke at the Big Birthday Weekend about their AstroPi project – how it was developed and the story of how their code ended up in Space! Their experiment, which uses the SenseHAT’s built-in humidity sensor to detect the presence of an astronaut and then takes a picture, has begun to record data, and that data is now back on Earth. You can download the data and photographs yourself from Github and you can read the Haylers’ story on Richard’s blog, along with some analysis of the data.
Whack-a-Pi – Raspberry Pi gaming writ large
Carl Monk brought along this great game to the Big Birthday Weekend. Basically, each large arcade button lights up and you hit it with your hand to score a point. With a Raspberry Pi detecting hits and playing the Mission: Impossible theme to time each game, it was one of the hits of the event. I think my score was 114. Carl’s written about the build on his blog.
Here’s Pippa from HackLab UK playing the game:
Brilliant write-up of the Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend
Zach Igielman has recently started a blog to talk about his life and adventures, not just with the Raspberry Pi, but life in general. For his latest post, he has chosen to talk about his experiences at the Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend which took place in Cambridge, UK this past weekend. As he relates, the Weekend contained talks, workshops, show-and-tell and a Marketplace as well as a party on the Saturday evening. This is a great blog post and gives a really lovely first-hand account of the Weekend. Read it here.
Motorised Connect 4 game using a Raspberry Pi
David Pride decided he wanted to hack something both fun and complicated and so decided to build a motorised Connect 4 game. Called 4-Bot, the project allows a human player to play the Raspberry Pi at the popular game. The Pi works out what move to make based on image recognition and the mechanism is activated to pick-and-place a playing piece into the board. The mechanism is part-knackered 3D printer parts and part-MeArm. You can read about the build on David’s website and see it in action in the video below. David brought the game along with him to the Big Birthday Weekend and one of my highlights of the Sunday was to play the game. It beat me. I am so ashamed! 😉