Alex, over at RasPi.TV, has done an excellent overview of Pi Supply’s Pi Juice battery-on-a-HAT product. He’s put the battery through its paces and also tested out the solar panels. There’s a video review and also notes on his blog post.
Wireless games controller for the Raspberry Pi from The Pi Hut – use it with CamJam EduKit 3 and review
Recently, Jamie over at The Pi Hut sent me one of his new PS3-style controllers. I had a play, liked it and soon adapted Tom Oinn’s great Python ‘input’ library to accept commands from the controller. I also adapted one of Tom’s demo scripts to use GPIO Zero to control the CamJam EduKit 3 motor controller board. You can read how to use the controller with EduKit 3 here. All credit to Tom for making his library accessible, and thanks for accepting my changes for the new controller.
Mark Heywood has just written a review of the controller over on his blog, and you should take a read of that to find out more.
Free London Raspberry Pi Pioneers Hackathon – 28th-29th October, Notting Hill
Barclays Eagle Labs in Notting Hill is running a free, two-day hackathon for young makers aged 11-15 – hopefully it’s a success because we’re relying on these young people to save us from an Apocalypse!!! The hackathon is being run to generate an entry or entries for the Raspberry Pi Pioneers initiative which recently launched it’s third challenge – Only YOU Can Save Us!
The event runs from 28th-29th October from 11am-5pm both days and you can get free tickets from Eventbrite!
Unboxing of the PiJuice – power solution for the Raspberry Pi
Alex Eames over at RasPi.TV is the first of us reviewers to get his hands on the new PiJuice from Pi Supply. Alex has been sent a sample unit of the PiJuice itself plus a couple of solar panels and has done an unboxing video of them over at RasPi.TV – so take a look here. The first five minutes is an excellent piece on the (rather infamous) Kickstarter campaign that is well worth watching, and then he gets onto the components themselves.
Apologies for the lack of updates recently. The wind’s rather gone out of my sails and I’ve had a lot of Pi Wars prep to do in advance of releasing the names of the successful applicants.
Google AIY Voice Project Kit for the Raspberry Pi goes on sale at The Pi Hut
I’ve just noticed that The Pi Hut has just put on sale the Google AIY Voice Kit. This kit, which is the offspring of the famous MagPi issue 57, costs £25 and contains everything you need to put together your own artificial intelligence box, except the Raspberry Pi itself.
Instead of The MagPi issue, it comes with a special book (from the ‘Essentials’ range, pictured below) with the instructions necessary for assembly and operation. By my reckoning, and from a quick survey of the other resellers, The Pi Hut is the first to offer this kit for sale, so get yourself over there whilst stocks last! If you need the Raspberry Pi as well, get one from The Pi Hut at the same time to save postage!
Monitoring the environment of a snake with a Raspberry Pi – the Pivarium
Richard Hayler recently acquired a new pet snake which he’s called The Kernel. The Kernel is housed inside a tank and Richard wanted to monitor the temperature and humidity of the environment. So, he used a DS18B20 waterproof temperature sensor (like you might get in the CamJam EduKit 2) and also a DHT22 humidity sensor and hooked them both up to a Raspberry Pi. He added a second Pi with a camera to keep an eye on the snake and also connected one of the Pis up to a 3D-printed door mechanism to ensure that the door was always closed after tank/snake maintenance. All the data is uploaded to IoT service provider Initial State and he’s used a Pimoroni Inky pHAT to display the information locally. You can take a look at more information on Richard’s blog and see the code and 3D printer files on GitHub.
