Accessories, Crowdfunding, GPIO boards, Making, Shopping

Fun soldering practice with A Kit A Month

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Generally, if you’ve learned how to solder then you love to solder! It’s a nice skill to have but you have to keep doing it to keep that skill fresh, I reckon.

Andrew Gale, who did the brilliant GPIO Christmas Tree kit late last year, has just launched his latest Kickstarter. Every month (for 5 months) you’ll get a soldering kit in the post. Most of these are 9V battery kits but in Month 2 you get an extra one (to cover a month gap for Andrew to become a father again!) that plugs into the GPIO pins of the Pi. It’s a simple switch-and-LED kit that should be fun to put together and looks nicely designed. The subscription package is £22 (for Earlybirds) and £25 thereafter including postage.

It’s a nice Kickstarter to get involved with, and I hope Andrew makes it to his (relatively low) goal. Take a look at the campaign here.

GPIO boards, Programming, Science, Tutorials

ISS tracker with a Raspberry Pi and Unicorn HAT

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Carl Monk’s really done a great job on this.

Here’s an ISS tracker using a Raspberry Pi and the 8×8 Neopixel matrix of a Unicorn HAT. The Pi reads in the current co-ordinates and then plots the position on the Unicorn which has a paper overlay of a map of the Earth. It uses a different colour when it’s on the ‘non-visible’ side of the Earth. Carl has open-sourced all the code and the paper overlay and has posted it to his blog with an explanation of the project. Read about it here. You can see a short video of it working below:

Art, Emulation, Games, Making, Music, Retro

Duelling pianos with Raspberry Pi play Street Fighter

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This is an absolutely incredible project that mixes art and technology. Absolutely astonishing – read on!

To celebrate the re-opening of the Maison de la Radio, France’s principal and historical radio building situated in the heart of Paris, a team developed a system, called Pianette, whereby two upright pianos could be used to play a game of Street Fighter! They used a combination of piezo pressure sensors and analog-to-digital converters to supply Raspberry Pis with a musical control signal which was then converted into movement inside the game. The build, which was restricted to 41 days (!) because of the re-opening date, was on an epic scale and much of the time the team only had one attempt to get it right. You can see a video of a battle below and read more about the build on their blog. All of their code, and the design files for the various boards they created, are available here.

Interview, Raspberry Pi Foundation, Video

Q&A with Raspberry Pi’s Upton and Hollingworth

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QA

 Matt Timmons-Brown (The Raspberry Pi Guy) visited Pi Towers this week and interviewed Eben Upton and Gordon Hollingworth. He had previously reached out to the community to get a pool of questions, which was a great move on his part, and these prove to be probing and the answers informative, with a lot of technical detail thrown in. If you want to hear direct from the horse’s mouth about things like the 2A+, the Compute Module 2, AstroPi and the roadmap for the software stack, have a look below. Make sure your speakers are turned up a fair way – Eben in particular is quite softly spoken and it sounds like the interview was conducted during lunchtime of Picademy! 🙂