Electronics Weekly attended the PA Consulting Raspberry Pi competition finals at the Science Museum. They’ve done a great blog post about the entrants and their projects here. The winners of the competition have now been announced and you can read about that here. Some of the projects are absolutely brilliant – I particularly like the robot dog who is programmed with encouraging phrases š
Oscar is a great fan of the PDP range of computers, in particular the PDP 8/I. He decided that, instead of getting hold of an existing vintage model, he would build a brand new one by using the Raspberry Pi runningĀ the SIMH emulator. He went the whole hog and created a case and an acrylic panel for the front as well as wiring up the Pi’s GPIO pins to a collection of toggle switches and LED. It’s quite a project – you can read more here.
The Kano team has just announced that their operating system now works on the Raspberry Pi 2. Going along with standard Raspbian, they are offering a single download that works across all Pis. You can read more about what the Kano OS has to offer here and you can download theĀ OS image here.
Tony Dicola has written a great tutorial over on the Adafruit site in which he uses an NFC reader and tags together with a Raspberry Pi running Minecraft. The scripts he has written allows you to program different NFC tags to act as Minecraft blocks. You scan the tag and on the screen out pops the corresponding Minecraft block. It’s a great proof-of-concept that happens to be a lot of fun as well. Read more here.
This one is guaranteed to get my buzzing phobia going!
A Newcastle-based engineer has developed a system to track the flight paths and behaviour of bees at London’s Kew Gardens. A pack consisting of a tiny RFID tag and an aerial is glued to the back of each individual bee and the tags are then read by multipleĀ Pis which are dotted around the hive and flower patch. You can read more about it on the BBC’s website.
A little while ago, I backed a Kickstarter campaign to fund the development of the BerryIMU. It’s a (very) small board that gives you access to a gyroscope, magnetometer, accelerometer, pressure/altitude sensor and temperature sensor through the I2C protocol. Mark Williams, creator of the board, has now published a Python library that will help you to get readings out of it (previously he’d developed a C library). Read more about the code and download it here.
You can buy a BerryIMU from his site (although it’s currently out of stock, unfortunately).
