Arkatechture previously linked their coffee machine and popcorn maker to their Slack instant messages group. Now, they’ve taken an old traffic light, wired up another Pi with relays to control it, and then hooked that up to the two machines as well. You can read more here and you can control the traffic lights yourself here!
Recently, Slashdot asked its readers for questions to be posed to Raspberry Pi Founder & CEO Eben Upton. They’ve now conducted the interview and Eben’s (very technical, in some cases) answers can be found on their site.
Nate Welch over at Arkatechture (bet that’s nice to have to spell every time! ;-)) has blogged about some integration they’ve done between instant messenger app Slack and one of their Raspberry Pis. The Pi is hooked up to sensors that detect when fresh coffee or popcorn is made and then uses the Slack API to generate a memo which is posted to everyone in the Slack group. The code is available on GitHub and you can read more on their blog.
Powering a Raspberry Pi from a LiPo battery isn’t a piece of cake. Fortunately, a couple of expert hackers have done the work for you by writing up the methods.
Building on Daniel Bull’s work to power a Raspberry Pi from a LiPo, Rob Jones has added an analog to digital converter chip to measure voltages and LED indicator lights. This means that you can not only build the power circuitry, you also have some health check indicators to go on.
Sorry, that English was a bit clumsy!
Anyway, if you want to check out Rob Jones’ new tutorial, it’s over on GitHub.
The new Raspbian image is over 4GB. This introduces some challenges when trying to write it to an SD card. In particular, unzipping it on Windows and Mac using their built-in tools will fail because they’re a bit naff. Alex Eames has blogged about a lesser-known (but actually quite lovely) tool called Etcher. Etcher is a piece of image writing software that is fully capable of taking a zipped > 4GB image and writing it to your card. That’s right… it’ll write it from the ZIP file. However, if you want to unzip it, Alex has also given ways that you can do this using a couple of extra pieces of software. Read his blog post here.
The MagPi has issue number 50 and boy is it a stonker! With a broad collection of news, views, reviews and projects (which doesn’t rhyme, but never mind) and a central feature on the top 50 Raspberry Pi projects, it’s essential reading for Pi owners. Myself and Tim were lucky enough to be asked to be guest judges for the robotics category and they’ve also done a lovely profile of us, which is lovely of them! You can buy The MagPi from all good newsagents and large supermarkets, via the Apps, or download a PDF for free from the website.
