David Whale’s Raspberry Pi club is doing great things. This time, he and his young members played around with sound on the Pi. This involved working out a solution to an audio problem caused by an HDMI-to-VGA adaptor – very well worth reading if you use such an adapter and great fun to read anyway. They’ve also been looking at how to play sounds using PyGame in Python.
Matthew Timmons-Brown (aka The Raspberry Pi Guy) has is running a 4-hour workshop (split into two sessions) on Sunday 23rd February at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge. The workshop is for people who have not long got their Pis and will introduce you to the Pi, the operating system, programming in Python and how to do things like control motors. You can find out more about it here and book tickets here.
Andy Bakin has written a guest post over at the Foundation’s blog in which he describes the practicalities of testing out a full production run of 500 (and now 1000) Laika Explorer boards.
Dawn Robotics, mostly known (as the name implies) for their robotics kits and parts, have released a new board called the Pi Co-op. Here’s what they say about it:
The Pi Co-op is an Arduino compatible microcontroller expansion board for the Raspberry Pi. The Pi Co-op makes it much easier to hook up electronics to the Raspberry Pi than using the GPIO pins directly, and provides a powerful programmable microcontroller that can take care of your low level hardware whilst the Pi focuses on the higher level computation. The Pi Co-op brings the worlds of the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino together, and means that you don’t have to make the false choice between an Arduino or a Pi for your next project. Use the best bits of both!
It has an onboard ATMega328p chip which has been programmed with the Arduino Uno bootloader (so it’s easily programmed from the Pi) and includes a 10-bit 8-channel analog-to-digital converter. All the inputs and outputs are broken out to headers. They’ve written a handy manual for the board and also created a script to set it up with the Pi. The price is very attractive – it’s available for £16.99 (inc VAT) with a £2 shipping charge if your total order comes in at less than £50.
It looks like a great board – very compact and neat and a great way to get into Arduino programming. In fact, it could be the most cost-effective way I’ve seen to bring the Arduino and Pi together.
Vincent Willcox over at Class Think has posted a tutorial showing you how to use a PIR sensor to detect movement and then play a sound.
4tronix are now offering a new motor controller board called the MicRoCon. I got one of these in the post the other day and I’ve soldered it together (very easy) but not had the chance to play with it yet. Here’s a list of features (quoted from the 4tronix site):
So if you want to power your Pi and motors from a single power supply, this board’s for you.
As of right now, it is being offered at a bargain price of £7.55+VAT (normally it’s £10.80+VAT). There is a cheaper ‘lite’ version as well which doesn’t include the regulator (and presumably therefore can’t power the Pi at the same time). Oh, you can also get it soldered for you for £5+VAT. This is a great option, especially for those Pi people who don’t want to chance their arm at soldering.
Take a look at it on the 4tronix site and see if it’s for you!
