Accessories, Arduino, Blinkies, Camera module, Crowdfunding, GPIO boards, Making, Programming, Robotics, Sensors

Kickstarter for terrific robot kit featuring Raspberry Pi, Arduino and loads of blinkies!

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spiritrover

Plum Geek have previously launched, and successfully funded a series of Arduino-powered robots on Kickstarter. Now, they’ve moved into the Raspberry Pi arena with the Spirit Rover. Inspired by the NASA/JPL Mars Rover, the full kit features a custom circuit board hosting an Arduino and PIC, blinkies, a pan-and-tilt kit, a Raspberry Pi and accompanying camera module. It’s been designed to teach you about robotics, movement, visual tracking (using the camera) and object avoidance/autonomous operation. The kit comes with a series of worksheets to teach and guide you and it all looks very well thought-out.

Brace yourself, though, this lovely kit does come at a cost with Early Birds starting at $189 for the basic kit (with some of the components not included), and $289 for the “Fully Loaded” kit which includes the Pi and camera. As I say, not cheap, but you can see from the picture at the top of the page that it’s a very pretty robot and beautifully designed.

You can see the (slightly over-long) campaign video below or take a look at the campaign and pledge levels here.

GPIO boards, Silliness

Using the Picap peripheral with the Raspberry Pi to take a Quality poll with conductive ink

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Picap is a new product from Bare Conductive. It gives an easy way to connect up wires to your Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins (via crocodile clips) and is designed to receive input from conductive sources. They sent me one recently, so I’ll be doing a review in a little while. Until then, here’s an example of it in use from Claire Garside. She’s used the Picap as a method for the family to choose which flavour of Quality Street sweet should’ve been replaced by something more tasty! Read a bit more about the project here.

Operating systems, Raspberry Pi Foundation, Software

Raspberry Pi announces the introduction of Pixel – a new look for the Raspbian desktop environment

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Simon Long has blogged over on raspberrypi.org about an upgrade to the desktop environment of Raspbian, the standard distro for the Raspberry Pi. There are loads of tweaks and lots of polish including, but not limited to, theme background photographs, new icons and changes to the main window style. Perhaps the biggest changes are those involving installed packages with both remote control software RealVNC and the Chromium browser now included by default. Full details and instructions for installing the updates onto existing images can be found here. To download a fresh copy, visit the Downloads page.

Accessories, Audio, GPIO boards, Shopping

Pi Supply launches JustBoom – a range of audio add-on boards for the Raspberry Pi

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JustBoom DAC HAT

Pi Supply have launched a massive range of audio add-on boards for the Raspberry Pi. Called JustBoom, the range includes the following:

  • DAC HAT – a plug and play, high resolution, digital-to-analog converter (£30).
  • Digi HAT – producing an unmodified, high quality, digital audio data stream for “bit-perfect transmission to your hifi system (£30).
  • Amp HAT – a high quality audio amplifier which also includes digital to analog conversion (£60).
  • DAC Zero pHAT – same as the DAC HAT but in the Pi Zero form-factor (£20).
  • Digi Zero pHAT – same as the Digi HAT but in the Pi Zero form-factor (£24).
  • Amp Zero pHAT – same as the Amp HAT but in the Pi Zero form-factor (£24).
  • Standalone Amp and DAC – for those who want to de-couple from the Pi (£60 and £35).
  • A range of cases that will take the Pi and add-on board (£13).

I haven’t got any of these to test out and I haven’t seen any reviews yet to compare it to the similar offerings by IQaudIO. Should be interesting to see what reviews come out once they start getting out in the wild.

Take a look at the JustBoom range on Pi Supply.