Paul Bartek has done an extensive tutorial on using the PiTFT to display data from a car’s OBD-11 port and also a video which you can see below.
Winners of the Adafruit Raspberry Pi Photography Competition
Adafruit has announced the winners of the photography competition it held recently. First prize was won by Andrew Mulholland with the picture below
It’s a great shot and shows just what you can do with the Pi if you put your mind to it. Runners-up and more details can be found on the Adafruit website. A video detailing the winners can be viewed below.
Wooden handheld Raspberry Pi
Instructables user fernseher1 has written a full tutorial on creating a handheld Raspberry Pi using a wooden case and an analogue screen. Read it here.
Highlights from the Element 14 Raspberry Pi Webinar
I’ve just finished listening to a webinar starring the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Eben Upton. In it, he talked about the B+ and all the improvements made to the board during the development process. Afterwards he fielded questions from the audience and a few bits and pieces came up, some of which I’d previously heard, some of which I hadn’t, so I thought I’d share them with you just in case you were unable to attend the session yourself.
- The Compute Module is expected to be available for general purchase in late September/early October. The price is expected to be around $30.
- The Model A+ will essentially be a depopulated version of the B+ and will be available hopefully before the end of the year, but not before the end of September. It will have a single USB port and 256MB of RAM. It’s fairly easy to predict what the A+ will and will not have – so we can expect the ethernet port to be missing (hence the restriction on USB ports) but to retain the usual SOC.
- The Pi will not have USB 3.0 in it’s current incarnation. Eben has already previously said that this is the final version of the existing Raspberry Pi, so that’s not a surprise. The Pi simply doesn’t have a fast enough interface to deal with the protocol.
- The Foundation is developing one of the first HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) expansion boards but is keeping it under wraps at the moment (hence the piece of paper over the board).
- The competitive advantage of the Pi is maintained primarily through the established community that supports each other and also the amount of development done to the software stack. There are still plenty of places where obvious software improvements could be made so that is what the engineers at the Foundation are working on actively and that is what the Foundation is funding elsewhere.
- The B+ is the sum of requests for improvements from the community. Very few changes for the B+ haven’t come out of requests from the community. When speaking about the community Eben said, “It’s been a massive boon to us.”
- It’s expected that an upgrade to Java JDK 8 is coming very soon.
More on Raspberry Pi Model B+ HATs
James Adams, Director of Hardware at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, has posted to the Foundation blog some official information about HAT (Hardware Attached on Top) boards that will be compatible with the B+. I previously covered this announcement on the 23rd July when the specs were in progress. Read the Foundation’s blog here or view the specs on GitHub here.
Control the Raspberry Pi GPIO from Qt4
Hussam Al-Hertani on his blog Hertaville has written a tutorial and given sample code for controlling the GPIO from within the Qt4 programming language. You need to install Qt in order to do it, but all that’s covered by the tutorial. Read it here.