Competitions, Raspberry Pi Foundation

Raspberry Pi wins the MacRobert Award, presented at London ceremony

by  •  • 1 Comment

At a ceremony in London last night, the team behind the Raspberry Pi won a prestigious award: The MacRobert Award.

The MacRobert Award is the UK’s longest-running and most prestigious national prize for engineering innovation. The award “recognises outstanding innovation, tangible societal benefit and proven commercial success.”

Beating the two other finalists, Darktrace (a cyber-security company) and Vision RT (radiotherapy pioneers) to the prize is a major achievement for the tech company which started so small with just 10,000 units and has now sold over 14 million units.

Congratulations to the entire company – it is an immense achievement and a validation of all the work you’ve put in to make the Raspberry Pi such a roaring success!

Accessories, Camera module, Nature, Science, Sensors

Automatic plant watering system, and a funny story, with a Raspberry Pi

by  •  • 0 Comments

Michael Lynch decided he wanted a house plant. Being a software engineer, however, and not a gardener, gave him a distinct problem: when should the plant be watered? How much moisture is too much? So, he collaborated with Jeet Shetty on an automatic plant watering system called GreenPiThumb.

He used Python on the back-end for managing soil moisture and temperature sensors and for turning the water pump on and off, as can be seen below.

He also recorded events and sensor readings to a database. The front end (see a static example here) was written in AngularJS and Ansible was used to deploy the software to the Pi.

It took over a year to complete, despite the two developers wanting it to be a few weeks’ worth, and they encountered many challenges along the way. The two also captured the growth of the plant using a Pi camera and generated a time-lapse:

You can read a very humorous account of their journey, and see wiring diagrams and more photos, here and see the code here.

Accessories, Making, Music

Go big with this 12-foot tall Raspberry Pi-powered electric guitar

by  •  • 0 Comments

Chris Riebschlager and the Dimensional Innovations team came up with an over-sized build for the two-day Boulevardia music festival in Kansas City. They built an electric guitar for the event which weighs in at 500 pounds and is 12 feet in length. It is made out of MDF and steel and the strings are comprised of 16-gauge wire. They used a Bare Conductive Touch Board to sense the plucking of the strings. The Touch Board then sends messages to a Raspberry Pi which decides which sound sample to play. They added arcade buttons on the side of the guitar to allow the playing of chords (the ability to play chords on the strings somewhat difficult due to the size of the thing!) You can see the guitar in action in the video below and read more and see more of the build over on medium.com.

Programming, Software, Tutorials

Use a Raspberry Pi, RSS and GUI Zero to create a news reader

by  •  • 0 Comments

Les Pounder has been having a play with Laura‘s GUI Zero Python library which makes it easy to create GUIs. He’s created a program which reads in news via RSS and then displays the top news stories inside a miniature GUI. It’s an interesting example of how to use publicly-available sources inside your project and it’s good to see Laura’s fine work being used in this way. Read more on Les’ blog here.