Brian Corteil is one of this year’s Pi Wars competitors. One of the more interesting challenges he, and the other teams, face is “Proximity Alert”. This challenge involves approaching a wall and stopping as close as possible to it without touching it. Brian has summarised the various methods of accomplishing this over on his blog. Read it here.
Taking inspiration from their home town’s surfeit of public “street pianos”, Mike & Sean wanted to create something special. They came up with a piano that would record what was played on it and then allow the player, or even another player, to overlay that recording with further tracks. They used a Raspberry Pi to bring it all together and called it “Quaver”. Quaver allows up to four players to record their parts of the eventual piece of music, utilising a big button to begin recording. You then press a different button to upload it to the music repository. You can see it in action below and read a lot more about it on their blog.
Love them or hate them, you cannot deny that Kano has done a lot for the popularity of the Raspberry Pi. With the idea that you can “build a computer yourself”, good marketing, attractive packaging and well-written, well-presented resources, they have taken the world by storm and got the Pi into the hands of a lot of kids and schools.
They have just launched their new venture: a 10.1″ screen. It gives a resolution of 1280×800 (which is classed as High-Def) and comes with a moulded case and two-position stand. The driver board and the Pi mount on the back of the screen and there is plenty of room in there to add a battery or micro-keyboard for easy storage and transportation.
The screen alone currently costs $110 or £90 plus postage and you can also buy it in conjunction with a Pi and Kano keyboard for slightly more money. Be aware that on 11th September, the prices go up – these are special ‘pre-order’ prices.
It’s good value for money and looks like it could be a very competitive product against other screens that are available, especially at the size it is. So, if you’re interested in getting hold of one, head on over to Kano’s site to read more and pre-order. (When I tried the site, I had to pick United States and then United Kingdom in the drop-down to actually see the ‘Buy’ buttons, but you might find it’s fixed now).
Daniel d’Entremont has done something faintly ridiculous. He’s taken a small, working fridge, cut a hole for a screen and some more holes for buttons and turned it into a Game Boy-lookalike console. He admits that it’s all a bit unwieldy for actual gameplay, but who cares when it looks this cool! Read more here and see a work log here.
“severdhed” bought an old SNES for $10 and refurbished it with lots of cleaning and a new paint job. He then added a Pi and rigged the original buttons up to the GPIO. He added RetroPie to give the full retro-emulated experience. Read more and see his build notes here.
Carrie Anne Philbin has written a lovely new resource for the Raspberry Pi Learning Resources website. It uses the recently-launched SenseHAT to create a Magic 8 Ball. You ask it a question and then shake the whole Pi and HAT (triggering the accelerometer) to get an answer on the LED display. It’s a simple concept but is a lot of fun and a good weekend project. Get started here.
