Raspberry Pi Pod and micro:bit base

Prosody is a piece of software to run chatrooms. Here’s how someone has set it up for use in their house.

Setting up Prosody on the Raspberry Pi for house/apartment/secret club house-wide chatroom « Executing Gummiworms.

A watchdog timer is a special kind of timer commonly found on embedded systems that is used to detect when the running software is hung up on some task. The watchdog timer is basically a countdown timer that counts from some initial value down to zero. When zero is reached, the watchdog timer understands that the system is hung up and resets it. Therefore, the running software must periodically update the watchdog timer with a new value to stop it from reaching zero and causing a reset. When the running software is locked up doing a certain task and cannot update the watchdog timer, the timer will inevitably reach zero and a reset will occur.

Cameri’s Workbench: Auto-reboot a hung Raspberry Pi using the on-board watchdog timer.

Now here’s a novel idea – a cardboard computer. Well, a cardboard-cased computer… The specs are interesting, though.

Rock is a complete redesign of the original APC. With a faster processor, more memory, and best of all – lots of expandability – Rock is the perfect system for all those prototyping projects waiting for the New Year. APC Paper, with its unique recycled cardboard case, is a $99 computer for people wanting to connect to the Internet without the need for specific Windows applications.

Both Rock and Paper run a custom Android system built for keyboard and mouse input. Also included are a full set of consumer I/O ports and an extensive set of on-board pin headers for expansion, enabling APC to connect to your PC monitor or TV.

For more information, visit APC News.

Developer Viktor Petersson has created a piece of software called Screenly. Screenly allows you to administer a ‘digital sign’ over a web browser, letting you add images, videos and web-pages to be shown on a loop on a screen connected to the Raspberry Pi. Possible usages, according to Viktor are as follows:

• Display business information or server dashboards
• Advertisements (in-store or in store-front)
• Internal information boards
• Fancy photo-frame

More information is available in various places:

• GitHub repository containing the code
• Discussion thread over at the RPi Foundation website
• Viktor’s blog post announcing the software – other blog posts likely to be posted in future