Dave Honess has posted the technical specs of the Astro Pi HAT which is due to go up to the International Space Station. The Astro Pi project, which invites schools to suggest experiments to be conducted in orbit, will send two Raspberry Pi model B+s up into orbit with the HATs attached. Take a look at the technical specs here, which includes details of the various sensors on-board.
I’ve been playing around with a recently-purchased Unicorn HAT and I was just wondering if it was possible to do this! Lo-and-behold this blog post came up in a general search for Unicorn HAT stuff. Sandy MacDonald has used a pair of Black HAT Hack3r boards to allow him to daisy-chain the two HATs. A little bit of Gaussian programming later and he now has a fascinating little display that reacts to movement above the Skywriter. Read how he did it here. He’s also done a tutorial on using the Skywriter as a colour control for the Unicorn. You can find that here.
Founder of Make, and all-round nice chap, Dale Dougherty attended the Big Birthday Weekend last weekend and has done a lovely write-up of what he saw and heard during the event. Take a look here. Photo: Marshals give out Swag Bags after the party, by Dale Dougherty.
Roberto Marquez has written a tutorial over on the Adafruit site to generate ring tones on the Pi and play them via a simple piezo buzzer. Nice beginners project that anyone should be able to do. Read it here.
As announced at the Big Birthday Party, RealVNC is now available for the Raspberry Pi. The software allows you to remotely connect to the desktop of the Pi via a remote PC, Mac, Linux box, Android, iOS or Chrome device. There’s even a free version, although the paid-for version has some rather nice extras like encryption. Read more about the capabilities of the different licences here and read about how to install it here.
