The Raspberry Pi Foundation have just announced the next two sets of dates for their free training course for teachers, Picademy. The dates are:
- 29th & 30th September 2014
- 27th & 28th October 2014
TurtlTeck robotics kit from Ryan Walmsley
I don’t normally cover non-Raspberry Pi stuff, but this is one of those rare occasions.
Ryan Walmsley, creator of the RyanTeck Motor Controller Board for the Raspberry Pi, has just launched a Kickstarter campaign for his latest product: the TurtlTeck. The TurtlTeck is a pre-assembled blue circuit board containing buttons and circuitry that will help you build your own robot. I’ve got one of the beta boards to try out and, I have to say, I really like it. You press the direction buttons to program the robot and then hit the green button to make it move along it’s programmed course.
It reminds me a lot of the fun of Big Trak from when I was a kid but with more fun, and a lot of educational value, because you have to build the robot yourself out of the parts supplied. It’s great fun and it’s a great way to get into autonomous robot programming before looking at using an Arduino or a Raspberry Pi.
The price is really good, too – £16 (rising to £18) just for the board and £34 (which is a fantastic deal) for the board and the robot chassis, motors, wheels etc. Check out the Kickstarter campaign here and see the dedicated TurtlTeck website here. Highly recommended.
Canal Museum art installation with a Raspberry Pi
DesignSpark user Nye Thompson was invited to create a piece of artwork to be displayed at the Canal Museum in London. She took the Pi, added a camera module and a projector and created the installation, called SLURP!, so that it projected the captured images into the ice wells area of the museum. You can read more over at DesignSpark and see her code over at GitHub. The installation runs from 20th August to 12th September.
Raspberry Pi Junkbot made out of a drinks can
Hayden Tetley and Scott Turner have created a robot out of a drinks can, an electric motor and a Pi. They’ve used the PiRoCon motor board to control the motor and a lot of sticky tape! See the video below. You can read much more about it by visiting their blog, in particular this post.
Make a Raspberry Pi powered Big Trak
Leo White has written an article over at Linux User in which he takes a Big Trak, a few other components (like a motor driver board) and converts it to use a Raspberry Pi. Leo’s an expert on hacking Big Traks (I’ve seen some of his) so if you’ve ever wanted to know how to do it, read more here.
Turn a Raspberry Pi PiTFT into a digital frame with a USB stick
Spencer Organ has taken a Pi, the PiTFT and a USB stick, merged them all together and created a small digital photo frame. This is a great use for the PiTFT (although it doesn’t use the touchscreen… yet) and I think I might give it a go! Read about how he did it here.