Richard Hayler & sons. Photo by Nic Hughes (@duck_star)
Richard Hayler, his sons and Nic Hughes launched the first Surrey-based Raspberry Pi HAB flight last Thursday. They took pictures on the Pi from almost 35km high:
and was successfully recovered from a churchyard in Itchen Abbas:
Taken from a fairly recent issue of Raspberry Pi magazine The MagPi, here is a review of the Drum HAT from the wizarding pirates of the North, Pimoroni. The overall opinion is 4/5 and the board receives a great reaction and appears to be a lot of fun! The Drum HAT is available from Pimoroni for £12 plus shipping.
Today sees the release of two brand new products, available exclusively from The Pi Hut and designed by Richard Saville (aka the Average Man).
The first is a very pretty new motor driver board called MotoZero. It allows you to control four DC motors independently, courtesy of two H-bridge chips. It is in the Zero-form factor (although it will fit any 40-pin Pi), comes in kit form (solder it yourself) and costs £10. In a crowded market of motor controller boards, it’s got a lovely aesthetic design and the price is very reasonable considering that you get two chips. You can buy it direct from The Pi Hut.
The second product is for the camera module and the Raspberry Pi Zero and it is called the Zero View. It is a long piece of circuit board onto which you attach the camera and comes with two ‘suckers’. These suckers can be used to attach the board to a window or piece of glass. It is ideal for the Zero because it mounts to the bottom of the Raspberry Pi, leaving the GPIO pins available. As you can see from the picture above, it attaches to the Zero with four screws, but it will attach to any other Pi with just the two at the top. Spacers and fixings are included so everything fits together very well. It costs £7 and is available from the Pi Hut.
I’ve been sent these boards by Jamie over at The Pi Hut and will get some time this coming weekend to try them out!
Pictures courtesy of The Pi Hut
Keith Ellis does a rather good line in tutorial videos over at pi-tutorials.co.uk. Recently, he wondered if it was possible to use the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins with the SenseHAT attached. At first glance, it seems that it’s not possible due to the surface-mount header (as you can see in the picture above). However, he found a way. Take a look at his video below and leave a comment on YouTube:
He found that the female header on the other side (pictured below) was removable, with care and a little patience.
Once removed, it leaves you with an underside full of holes. Get hold of an extended 40-way header and carefully poke the pins through the holes. The surface mount header on the front side of the board allows the pins through, and holds them securely, giving you full access to the GPIO! Fortunately, as Keith found out, the SenseHAT only uses two of the pins – all the sensors and the joystick are read over I2C, the shared two-pin protocol. (Take a look at the brilliant pinout.xyz to see this). Therefore, every single GPIO pin is available to you to use.
Thanks Keith for discovering this – the SenseHAT is so powerful and has so many sensors that it’s incredibly useful – it makes the board even more usable now!
The members of Noisebridge in San Francisco recently attended the Bay Area Maker Faire. They took with them Flaschen Taschen – a 10′ by 9′ display of 1575 clear bottles with WS2801/Neopixel strips embedded inside. Using a Raspberry Pi, these daisy-chained strips are controlled to display various effects (such as plasma etc) and even a game of Pong. It went down really well at the Maker Faire and you can read more about it here. You can also watch the Hackaday video below.
Dundee MakerSpace are holding Dundee’s first Raspberry Jam on 11th June from 10.30am-4.30pm at their premises in Greenmarket. Tickets are available from Eventbrite.
