MIT student Ian Reynolds has a fascination with the Greater Boston transit system, and more specifically MBTA’s T subway. So, he brought together a bunch of LED strips, an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi to create some wall art for his bedroom that shows the positions of trains. The Raspberry Pi reads data from MBTA’s public API and then plots the locations, via the Arduino, onto the wall-mounted LED strips. He has detailed the build and programming on his blog.
Martin O’Hanlon has created a Python class that interrogates the JSON feed data from Piaware (the Pi implementation of FlightAware), exposing that data to any Python script that you might care to write. The class, FlightData, is available to download from Martin’s GitHub repository. You can read more about the class and see an example script over on Martin’s blog.
The Donald Danforth Plant Science Center’s Maker Group in St. Louis is holding their second Raspberry Jam on Saturday, October 3, 2015 from 1-5pm. The event is free and is open to all ages, families, engineers, science and robot enthusiasts, and educators. During the event, demonstrations and activities by local makers and robotic groups will showcase and explore the use of the Pi. Other maker projects will also be there to provide a day of collaborative science and fun.
Initial State, who I’ve blogged about before, host an Internet of Things service that allows you to send data to it and then visualise that data using their dashboard tools. They have now written a course based around their service in which you use a Raspberry Pi and sensors to accumulate data and then send it to their website API. You simple provide them with your email address and they give you a link to the course on GitHub. Head over to their site to read more.
Grace Owolade-Coombes and her son Femi (who recently braved CamJam and did a talk about Festival of Code) are planning to hold a Raspberry Jam in South London on 17th October. This will be a very special Jam – it will be especially friendly for those with Autism and Tourette’s and will be aimed specifically at that group.
To put the Jam on, they will need some equipment. They’ve already had some sponsorship by way of Raspberry Pis, but now they need to raise money to source the rest. They are running an IndieGoGo campaign to raise the money. They’re doing pretty well so far, but they need your help to get the rest of the way. So, if you’d like to support this extremely worthy cause, please head over there now. They have plans for further Jams and Code Clubs, and they’ve got a real shot at doing something very special.
Charles Gantt has been blogging about his latest project, the Foginator 2000, over at Element 14. His latest instalment deals with taking readings from the SenseHAT and then sending them to the cloud via a service called Initial State. He’s written the whole thing as a tutorial so that you can replicate his experiments. Read it here. Initial State is a very nice way of publishing readings such as those you can get from the SenseHAT and has a load of built-in visualisation tools and dashboard elements. Best of all, it’s free! See the system in action below:
