David Sulpy over at Initial State has done a great tutorial in which he uses an Adafruit Ultimate GPS board to create a GPS tracker system. There is a quick set of instructions here and a more comprehensive set here. Really interesting project for those of us who like to communicate with satellites and actually use the incoming data for visualisation.
TONIGHT (3rd December) at 17:55 EST/22:55 GMT, two Astro Pi units containing Raspberry Pi computers and SenseHATs launch from Cape Canaveral, on their way to the International Space Station. You can watch the launch live via the Astro Pi website. Astronaut Tim Peake will join them on 15th December and start experiments written by school children. More information can be found on the Raspberry Pi website.
The “FiveNinjas” (James Adams and Gordon Hollingworth from Raspberry Pi, Jonathan Williamson and Paul Beech of Pimoroni, and Mo Volans) have written an excellent blog post over at the Raspberry Pi Foundation in which they describe the trials and tribulations of getting the Slice media player to market using the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. Well worth a read.
David Schneider lives in North Carolina, but used to live in California. Both States have suffered from water shortages to a lesser or greater extent and so he decided to implement a water meter system using an Arduino (to take the readings via a magnetometer) and a Raspberry Pi (to collate the data and provide a UI to the readings). Read more here.
Richard Hayler loves doing stuff with the SenseHAT, especially with the 8×8 matrix. This time, he’s coded an advent calendar using the matrix for display and the joystick for control. Take a look at his blog for more information. A bit of imagination is required for some of the pictures, but it’s a lovely idea! He’s even provided all the code on Github.
Terence Eden is a self-confessed tinkerer based in Oxford, UK. His wife picked him up a copy of The MagPi with a Zero on the front of it and he decided to embed it inside an XBox controller. He cut a few bits and pieces out of the controller and slotted the Zero in, hot-wiring the USB connection from the inside. He loaded up the RetroPie gaming emulator and lo and behold, he’d created a self-contained gaming machine/control device. Take a look on his blog for how he did it.
