The guys over at PubNub have created a house out of LEGO then filled it with LEDs and sensors which are controlled and read by a Pi. They’ve then used their own proprietary software to create an Internet of Things link up to the components and something called Blink created by the Chromium Project to do the GUI. Read more here. They’re planning on creating a full-fledged tutorial for the project soon, so I’ll keep an eye out for that and re-blog it when it comes out.
Raspberry Pi education CPD Picademy goes up North
Picademy, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s continuing professional development course for teachers, is going to York. The National STEM Centre is hosting the event which is taking place on the 26th and 27th May. If you are a teacher and you want to learn how to bring the Raspberry Pi into the classroom, you can apply here. Read more about it on their blog or on their dedicated Picademy page here.
Review of the Slice Raspberry Pi media player
Here’s some great news for all your Slice backers. Smittytone has now got his and has reviewed it over on his blog. The review is highly positive and there’s really only one caveat: that you could download the software, install it on a Pi 2 and do-it-yourself if you wanted to (which is fair, but doesn’t look as nice!). Read the full thing over at the blog.
Overclocking the Raspberry Pi 2
Hayden James has done a great article on the various overclocking options available on the Pi 2. There are plenty of examples of configurations if you want that extra speed. Read more here.
Raspberry Pi housing with an integrated screen and keyboard – the PiKasa
I was contacted by South Africa-based Ian Harrison who, together with his team, is doing a crowdfunding campaign to fund the PiKasa. The PiKasa is a housing for the Raspberry Pi with an integrated 800×480 screen, a splash-proof keyboard, a 5-port USB hub and amplifier/speaker. It looks rather neat – a bit retro with those keys, quite stylish with the curved edges and all self-contained and child-friendly. It’ll be interesting to see if their campaign, which is on IndieGoGo, goes well. It’s clearly something they’ve put a lot of thought into and I can see this being used quite happily for learning and programming. Take a look at the IndieGoGo campaign here or view the video below.
Performance testing the Raspberry Pi 2 as an Internet of Things device
Henryk Konsek and Arek Jurasz wanted to see how fast the Raspberry Pi 2 was when it acted as part of the toolchain of an Internet of Things set-up using Camel and MQTT messages. I’ll let them explain:
We decided to create a simple proof of concept demonstrating how fast Raspberry Pi 2 can be in the typical field device or the gateway scenario. The field device scenario is the Raspberry Pi acting as the edge node collecting the information from the sensors
If this is your kind of area, you can check out their impressive results over on Henryk’s blog.