Accessories, GPIO boards, Tutorials, Video

Stream and watch television on your Raspberry Pi with the new TV HAT

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Image courtesy of The Pi Hut

Raspberry Pi has just announced the release of the new TV HAT. This Zero-sized board will enable you to receive a DVB (digital) television signal on your Pi and then view it or stream it to other devices on your network. It’s a nicely put-together board and is also the first to be in the new form factor, which re-defines the size and shape of HATs. There seems to be some confusion over whether it’s called a uHAT (micro-HAT) or just a HAT, though! You’ll need at least a Pi 2 to view programmes on the Pi (as it’s quite processor intensive) but a Zero will do for streaming.

The board retails for £20 and you’ll need an antenna and co-axial cable to connect it up.

You can buy the board over at The Pi Hut or from ModMyPi. There’s a great tutorial over at The Pi Hut on how to use the board and another from ModMyPi here.

Competitions, Robotics

Formula Pi 2018 – the finals of this Raspberry Pi-powered autonomous robot competition are tonight!

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This year’s edition of the brilliant autonomous robot competition, Formula Pi from our friends over at Pi Borg, comes to a thrilling conclusion tonight (Wednesday, 10th October 2018) at 18.30 GMT. With an international field of roboteers, it’s sure to be exciting to watch. The following teams are in the ‘A’ Final (1st to 5th place):

  • lambda.p.racing
  • Chitty Chitty Pi Pi
  • Team Yoshi
  • Whacky Racer
  • Pi Hard

and the following teams are in the ‘B’ Final (6th to 10th place):

  • Pico HulkenBorg
  • Makerspace Randers
  • Team Limilo
  • lambda.q.racing
  • IQaudIO

Formula Pi is currently using the MonsterBorg robot from Pi Borg. Teams work on their code and then upload that code to Pi Borg to be installed on a standard robot. The races are entirely autonomous and the robots react to the changing ‘start lights’ to trigger them off on their runs. You can read more about the teams and the competition here.

You can view the live stream of the finals below, which is also here on YouTube:

Crowdfunding, Networking

New LoRa boards on Kickstarter aim to forge long-range communications links to your Raspberry Pi

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Apologies for the dearth of posts recently – work’s been a bit… intense and Pi Wars preparations have taken their toll!

Pi Supply have launched a new Kickstarter campaign for several different types of add-on boards which use LoRa technology. So, what is LoRa?

LoRa is a revolutionary new method of sending small amounts of data over very long distances using long range radio and low power. It’s designed for the Internet of Things (IoT) so it’s perfect for communicating with sensors such as weather monitoring, air quality, smart homes etc.

You will need at least a Gateway and a Node to make the communications link work, and Pi Supply are offering both. The different Node boards work with the Raspberry Pi, micro:bit or Arduino and a Gateway HAT completes the equation as a receiver.

You can view the campaign video below and visit the Kickstarter campaign to pledge to get hold of the board(s).

Accessories, GPIO boards, Making, Music, Shopping

Make a MIDI piano with the Raspberry Pi and a PiCap

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The PiCap from Bare Conductive uses conductive ink to transfer touch impulses to the Raspberry Pi. They’ve written a lovely little tutorial on how to do it yourself and have put the code on GitHub. If you want to do it “properly”, you’ll need to follow their screen printing tutorial but you can get similar results by just painting the note ‘buttons’ on a piece of paper or card. The code is based on the FluidSynth synthesizer which uses sound fonts and is the basis for my own music tech project, the Music Box. Take a look at the tutorial here.

GPIO boards, Shopping

Raspberry Pi PoE HAT encounters problems with USB power

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The recently released Power-over-Ethernet HAT from Raspberry Pi was designed to allow the Raspberry Pi to be powered by a single power-enabled Ethernet cable. Aimed mostly at the industrial market, this HAT uses the extra 4-pin header on the 3B+ to receive the power from the cable and includes a fan for cooling.

However, users of the HAT have quickly encountered problems and have reported them on the Raspberry Pi Forums. The problems have boiled down to under-powered USB ports when using the HAT. In an interview with The Register, Eben Upton of Raspberry Pi Trading has explained the cause of the problems and why they were not picked up during the (apparently limited) testing. RPT is now offering refunds through vendors for returned units, although suggestions for fixing the hardware issue have also been given (not for the faint of heart!)

To read the full story, head over to The Register.

You can see the issue illustrated in the EEVBlog video below. Thanks to AB Electronics for spotting this!

GPIO boards, Reviews, Shopping, Telecoms

Bring mobile communications to your Raspberry Pi with SB Components’ PiTalk

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Ivan Holland from CPC has been taking a look at the new PiTalk board from SB Components. The board, which was originally a successful Kickstarter campaign is a 3G-enabled mobile tele-communications solution for your Raspberry Pi. Plugged into the GPIO pins, and with a SIM card added with an appropriate data package, you can trigger actions on your Pi from another phone. Very nifty. With the use of an extended GPIO header, you can piggyback other GPIO boards and HATs and produce versatile projects. Aside from a few issues with the accompanying software, Ivan gives the product a thumbs-up. You can read the full review here. You can find the PiTalk at SB Components website in a variety of packages and the main board also available at CPC.