Competitions – win a blue #RaspberryPi and a Camera Module

Two exciting competitions have been launched this week.

The first is to win one of 1,000 blue Raspberry Pis (pictured below). To win one of these, you must come up with an idea of what you would do with a blue Pi and tweet it to RS Components. More information, and full instructions on how to enter can be found on the RS Components website.

The second competition is to win one of 10 early production camera modules. Again, to win one of these you need to come up with an idea of how you would use one. The Foundation is running this competition and they are particularly interested in any application that will stretch the capabilities of the camera. More information about how to enter is available here. The Foundation have graciously put aside one of the camera modules for Dave Ackerman whose high altitude balloon flights have been a shining example of the kind of thing you can do with a Raspberry Pi. The Foundation, in their competition post, have also stated that they expect to have production models to sell in April.

 

PicoBorg small motor controller for #RaspberryPi

Updated 5th March 2013 with an extra photo – thanks PiBorg!

Here’s a new board from PiBorg. It can turn on and off 4 devices including fans, motors solenoids and relays etc from the Raspberry Pi.

It comes in two flavours: a £5.99 basic model (top) and a £9.99 ‘with pre-soldered wires’ (bottom)

PicoBorg – Control small motors from your Raspberry Pi | PiBorg.

The website itself contains various pieces of information and a Getting Started guide. What would be nice is some kind of shopping list for which fans, motors, etc would work, but there are some voltage and amperage guides, so you should be able to work it out. I expect they are easily contactable too.

For that kind of money, it’s worth a gamble.

Bartendro – a cocktail dispensing robot using the #RaspberryPi

Party Robotics have launched a Kickstarter project to fund their cocktail-dispensing robot, the Bartendro. The Bartendro has, at it’s core, a Raspberry Pi.

In their effort to fulfil their goal of creating the perfect cocktail perfectly each time, they use Arduino clones (essentially) as control boards which are then linked to the Raspberry Pi which does all the UI and dispensing calculations. Peristaltic pumps then dispense the correct amount of the various liquids.
The whole project is made complete by the Pi running as a wifi hotspot that anyone can connect to to make a cocktail order.

Disclaimer: I have no connection to Party Robotics, I just thought this was cool.

Pibow launches #RaspberryPi Model A case

I guess it was only a matter of time before cases for the Model A started to be produced, and it’s not surprise that Pibow are the first.

This is a “slimmer, cheaper, more accessible Pibow” with various new openings and, most importantly, a reduction in the number of layers from 9 to 6 (thanks to the single USB and lack of ethernet port). This is a very svelte little case, though at £28 it’s very pricey. and at £8.50 it’s very cheap. You can get a Model A with case for £28. (Thanks to Andrew Oakley for spotting my mistake!)

Click here to see more details and, possibly, buy a case.

This is a very nice case for less than £10. It will be interesting to see what price the SB Components Model A case comes out at – I rated their Model B case at 9/10 in a previous post (no I’m not on their payroll, I just really like their case!)