Operating systems, Programming, Software

Flash and Scratch 2.0 working on Chromium on Raspberry Pi PIXEL

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Albert Hickey wondered if Chromium (being the new default browser for Raspbian) would support Flash. Most specifically, he wondered if Scratch 2.0 through the browser would work. To start with, it wouldn’t. However, following an update/upgrade, it suddenly did! Here’s what he has to say in his YouTube video:

I was playing with Scratch on a Windows PC earlier and thought with Chromium being the new default browser as part of Pixel whether Scratch now worked.
Ran Pixel and it didn’t work.
Decided to take the opportunity while the Pi was on to do an update/upgrade.
Lots of stuff for LibeOffice, NuScratch was installed and half way through I had to press enter to get Flash installed.
Returning to Chromium I again went to the Scratch website and this time when I enabled the plugin for Flash it worked perfectly.

We now have Scratch 2.0 in browser on the Raspberry Pi.
Not sure if/how it can interface with the GPIO but for now delighted Scratch 2.0 works on the Pi3. And from the video it works well.

Update: I received a comment on this post from Simon Long of the Raspberry Pi Foundation! Just in case you didn’t see the comment, here it is in full:

Yes, the Flash player was added today. (It’s in the package rpi-chromium-mods, which is already installed on PIXEL, so an apt-get dist-upgrade will pick up the Flash update.)

It is the latest version of the PepperFlash player from Adobe – we’ll be updating it every time Adobe do from hereon.

The PepperFlash binary is ARMv7 only, so it’ll only work on Pi2 and Pi3, but Scratch is pretty usable on Pi3.

This is great news. Flash may not be the most popular thing ever… HTML 5 and Javascript is probably the way to go for developing web apps… but Flash is used an enormous amount and adding it to the Pi just feels ‘right’. Thanks a lot Simon and the team! 🙂

3D printing, Cases, Games, Programming

Hack into the Pokemon API and make this clever little Raspberry Pi tracker

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pokemon_indicator

The Ruiz brothers over at Adafruit have found a way to create a Pokemon tracking device by hacking into the Pokemon API. Warning: make a separate account because this is definitely against their terms of service! They use a Raspberry Pi Zero and a special 3D-printed case which has three LEDs to indicate what type of Pokemon is nearby – common, rare or legendary. All the code is on Github and you can find instructions and the files for 3D printing over on the Adafruit tutorials hub.

 

Education, Programming

Rewarding good behaviour with the Raspberry Pi

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Stuart Harrison has a young son whose school awards (good behaviour) reward points and (bad) behaviour points. Frustrated with the school’s interface, Stuart set-up a screen scraper to get the data off their system and put it onto his own system. After a while, he realised that their method of points was flawed, at least in regards to how it awarded them with respect to his son. So, he decided to build his own reward system using a couple of Amazon Dash buttons and a Raspberry Pi 3. Programmed with a combination of Ruby and Node, the system runs on a 5″ display with the Dash buttons alongside which add points on. Ingenious, and highly effective according to Stuart. You can read about how he did it, and see the code, over on his blog.