Dum dum dum dum-de-dum dum-de-dum.
Leon Anavi has written an Instructable tutorial in which he takes a simple piezo buzzer, connects it up to his Pi and then uses C/wiringPi to play John Williams’ Imperial March. You can read the Instructable here.
A tutorial/demo video is available below:
Rasmus Hauschild from Denmark was 14 years old when I previously featured another build of his on the blog. This time he has gone small with a 3D-printed Gameboy case running RetroPie called Pi Zero Gameboy Nano. Inside is a Raspberry Pi Zero. You can print and assemble your own by downloading the files from Thingiverse or you can buy one customised to your requirements for $250 direct from Rasmus.
Jasper Ruben built his cats a ‘hamster wheel’ for exercise and just for general cat-happiness-quotient. He’s connected up some sensors to it and these feed data back to the Raspberry Pi which calculates speed and distance travelled. A gallery of how he built it is available as is a gallery of when he added the sensors and Pi and here is a Reddit thread if you’d like to ask questions or leave comments.
Jeff Geerling has discovered in his work on the Raspberry Pi Dramble cluster that Raspbian Jessie does networking a bit differently. Whereas before (with Wheezy) it was just a case of adding some lines to /etc/network/interfaces, now you need to add some lines to /etc/dhcpcd.conf to make dhcpcd5 set the static IP address. He’s blogged about it here but just for posterity (in case his blog disappears, as others have), here are the essentials for setting a static IP for your wired connection:
So, in /etc/network/interfaces, you add:
auto lo iface lo inet loopback iface eth0 inet static address 10.0.1.60/24 netmask 255.255.255.0 gateway 10.0.1.1 dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4
And then to /etc/dhcpcd.conf you add:
interface eth0 static ip_address=10.0.1.60/24 static routers=10.0.1.1 static domain_name_servers=8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4
This should give you a static IP of 10.0.1.60.
He has some other tips on his blog, so head over there if you want to read more.
Everyone’s heard of Sonic Pi, the programmer’s method of producing music on the Pi. Seth Kenlon wanted to use the Pi to produce electronic music the more traditional way – by using synths, trackers and other software in combination. You can read about the different packages he uses over at opensource.com.
Ed Rogers with Canute prototype (Photo: Andrii Degeler)
Bristol Braille Technology is working on a more affordable replacement for traditional Braille reading machines. Under the hood is a Raspberry Pi running C and Python, controlling off-the-shelf motors and plastic gears to create the Braille text. Traditionally, Braille machines can cost £1000-2000. The BBT version is coming in at around £440. They hope to have a positive effect on declining rates of Braille literacy. More information and an interview with BBT founder Ed Rogers, is available over at arstechnica.
