Average Man (Richard Saville) has just posted up a review of the Pi and Bash add-on board. He very much likes the board and has given it a very balanced review. Read the review here.
You can buy a Pi and Bash from The Pi Hut or from RyanTeck.
Fantastic Pi Wars video – The TractorBot Story
Frank Carver has just posted up a brilliant Pi Wars video – it’s the story of TractorBot, made by Ipswich Makerspace. They eventually won Best Robot Under £75 and were the champions of the Obstacle Course. (You can view an almost-full list of the results here, by the way). Head on over to Frank’s website or watch the video embedded below.
Thanks Frank for putting the video together and congratulations once again to the Ipswich Makerspace guys and girls.
MagPi Issue 29 is out now for Raspberry Pi owners
Issue 29 of the fantastic MagPi magazine is now out. You can see from the screenshot above that it’s (jam-)packed with stuff so head on over to MagPi.com to download or view it.
Streaming Raspberry Pi radio player uses Google Sheet for scheduling
Here’s an interesting Instructable. It’s a 3D-printed radio unit with a Pi inside that reads from a Google Sheet online to determine when it should play. It’s a lovely case, but I expect you can find something pre-fabricated if you don’t have a 3D printer. All the instructions & files, including those for the 3D printing are available over at Instructables.com. You can see a video of it in action below:
Plot data from an Arduino on the Raspberry Pi with Python
Rick Sellens has posted up some simple code to plot data returned from an Arduino using Python and the pyplot library. I’ve asked him to also post up the code from the Arduino so we can see both sides of the process. Read how to do it here.
The Raspberry Pi is heading to the International Space Station
A partnership between the Raspberry Pi Foundation, UK Space, the European Space Agency and British astronaut Tim Peake is sending two Raspberry Pis into orbit! This exciting development, called “Astro Pi”, gets even more thrilling: school children will be given the opportunity to send their code up to the Pis and have them run scientific experiments in gravity-less conditions.
The Pis will be fitted with a HAT that exposes several different sensors and the schools involved will receive units that they can test their code out on before they finalise the code and transmit it. You can see a (slightly blurry) Vine of the HAT below:
This is simply fantastic in my opinion – the chance for school kids to get involved in space exploration and science really fires the imagination.
You can read more about the competition, which will launch properly at BETT in January, on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog. There’s also a dedicated website that you can take a browse through for inspiration.
You can read and watch a BBC news report about the project here or below: