Trevor Appleton has done a great work-through and tutorial on creating the game of Pong using pygame and Python. He literally goes through it line-by-line explaining things. As he points out, Pong may seem a simple game but it has so many aspects to it such as control, movement, collision detection and scoring, that it’s a great way to learn and move on to bigger and better things. Read more here.
Pimoroni have now made their 100,000th Pibow, the excellent multi-layered case for the Raspberry Pi. To celebrate, they’re giving away 512 Pibows (and other accessories) to worthy causes with naked Model Bs. To get hold of the equipment, all you need to do is to comment on this post on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog explaining why you think you should get hold of it!
Paul Brown has done an excellent guide to putting together RyanTeck’s motor controller board. Lots of photographs of how to solder the board up. Read his tutorial here.
Jamie over at The Pi Hut needed some assembly instructions doing for some of his products. So, he tweeted for volunteers and sent out some bits and pieces to various people. The Average Man volunteered to put together the Fish Dish, a small add-on board with some LEDs, a buzzer and a button. He’s done a rather good write-up of the instructions over on his blog.
I was contacted by Mohammed Ikram about something else and he mentioned that he ran an eBay Pi shop. He’s sent me a few things for review. I will, however, be as honest as usual when reviewing the items.
The first item is a case for the Pi made out of acrylic (plastic) and is very similar to the Pibow. So, it’s either been based on their designs or reverse-engineered from a Pibow. But anyway, let’s not focus on that and instead look at the case in isolation.
It comes as several layers of acrylic with plastic wrapping on each. This means a fair bit of messing about removing the wrapping.
Once that’s done, you’re free to assemble it. Slight problem here – the layers aren’t numbered and it doesn’t come with assembly instructions. Bit of a pain, but I watched enough Krypton Factor when I was younger to be up to the challenge and you probably will be too. You put the screws through the bottom layer and then place layers on top to form the sandwich.
Eventually, you’ll get all the layers in the right order and the right way up and you’ll end up with a complete case.
I’ll say this for the case – it’s certainly solid. Considering it’s made up of fairly flimsy layers, the end product once you’ve tightened the screws up is great.
At £9.95 it’s marginally cheaper than the Pibow. I quite like the black-and-clear aesthetics as well.
The trouble is, the Pibow is better. The colours are more ‘fun’ in the original Pibow and the layers are numbered and also marked with the port names. Build quality is probably about the same though and if you’re trying to save a little bit of money, then the eBay one is the one to go for. Something to bear in mind though: a portion of the profits from sales of the Pibow go to the Foundation and other local charities.
Score: 6/10. It does the job.
You can take a look at the eBay item here and you can see the rest of Mohammed’s shop here.
Web designers DTelepathy wanted to create an audio/visual system for their office to display infographics and other information. They combined this with Chromecast and have now published details of their set-up online. Read about it here.
