Zach Levine has taken an annoying toy (a Furby) and stuffed it with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a Pimoroni Speaker pHAT and a stepper motor driver board.
He has then installed the Amazon Alexa software on the Pi and programmed it to obey his commands, triggering the robotic behaviour of the Furby. You can read a complete account of the build here and see a video of it in action below:
Raspberry Pi have just announced issue 4 of HackSpace, the new magazine for makers. This issue focuses on wearables and features the usual mix of interviews, news and tutorials. Also of note is that they’ve just started to give a free gift away to subscribers – an Adafruit Circuit Playground Express (USA/UK – The Pi Hut / Pimoroni). So, there’s never been a better time to start reading or to subscribe. Read more about the issue here.
Roboberry, over at Raspberry Connect, has documented a way to automatically create a wifi hotspot on your Pi if your wifi connection to your router fails, or if there is no router to connect to. This is a great idea because it means you can connect to your Pi ‘on the road’ without worrying about needing to pre-set wifi credentials. Take a look here if this is what you’ve always wanted! Be warned! It’s extensive, and technical, but it has recently been updated to work with Raspbian Stretch. Obviously, this is ideal for Pi 3 or Pi Zero W owners, but will also work with compatible dongles on other models.
“anonteapot” on Imgur has created this lovely lookalike of an Amazon Echo Show. Using handcut MDF, he constructed a framework and then added some fabric purchased from John Lewis to complete the look. Into the back went a Raspberry Pi 3 and a 5″ screen. Of course, he needs to add voice control (maybe by using the Google AIY Project’s Voice HAT?) but it’s a great thing to display a dashboard on. You can see details of the build here.
Les Pounder‘s wife is a great fan of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (quite so, it’s my favourite, too!) So, Les decided to create an animated picture frame for her starring everyone’s favourite rogue Sirius Black. He found a cheap picture frame in Dunelm Mill and then took the back off. He then took a Pi Zero and a Pimoroni Hyper Pixel to drive the animated part of the project and laser cut a nice surround for the screen. A bit of start-on-boot scripting and he had his animated frame all working. Great fun! You can read more on Les’ blog and see a video of it in action below:
Neil Matthews has been in touch. He’s currently running a 20% discount offer on his Percheron e-paper HAT and other goodies. The Percheron e-paper HAT in particular is an excellent product – funded by Kickstarter back in December 2015 and reviewed here by me. So, get over to his shop to take advantage of the discount which is activated at the checkout by using code WIGIG2018.
