Andreas Jabs from Germany has taken an old GameCube and retro-fitted it with a Raspberry Pi 2. He has brought the Pi’s USB ports to the front of the case so that he can attach various controllers and has 3D printed some internal components to make the whole thing fit. He has installed Recalbox on the Pi’s SD card to run games under emulation. You can view more photographs on his site (which is in German, but that’s what Google Translate is for).
We don’t get a lot of humour around here, and James Mitchell from Berlin seeks to rectify that with his silly post on the top 10 things not to do with your Zero. Read it here.
Number 3 is a real danger over here in the UK. But number 10 is the most important!
British Science Week is coming up and the London Raspberry Pi community are holding a Raspberry Jam. The Jam is taking place in Seven Dials (42 Earlham St) on Saturday, 19th March from 2-4.30pm. There will be a variety of on-the-go workshops taking place including Minecraft programming with Python (using the O’Hanlon and Whale book), Robot building, Scratch, HTML/CSS and Sonic Pi. There will also be Show and Tell going on and it should be a very busy afternoon!
Tickets are free (although donations are gratefully accepted) are available from Eventbrite.
CamJam EduKit 3, which will soon be available again from The Pi Hut, is a cheap robotics kit for the Raspberry Pi. For £17 (plus delivery) you get everything you need to start experimenting with robotics. Add a chassis and a few more components, like a mobile phone charger battery and a PS3 controller, and you have a remote controlled wheeled robot you can drive all over the place. Now, well-known Cambridge-based hacker Brian Corteil has done just that, but with a specific reason in mind.
At the Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend which is taking place on 5th and 6th March in Cambridge, UK, Brian will be running a Show and Tell stand with a difference. Featured on the stand will be Micro Pi Noon. Taking it’s inspiration from Pi Wars (see picture below), robots will battle it out in an arena, attempting to pop a balloon mounted on the other robot.
Micro Pi Noon, however, will have a twist: robots must fit in the footprint of an A6 piece of paper (10x15cm). Brian is building two of the robots pictured at the top of the post so that you can try it out yourself at the Big Birthday Weekend. You’re also welcome to build your own. Brian’s made this a lot easier by creating a set of instructions and code that you can use to build your robot and then use a PS3 controller to drive it. So, head over to Brian’s blog to take a look at his great build instructions.
David Saul, who has previously run two successful Kickstarters, has just launched his latest crowdfunding campaign. This one is to raise funds to develop and supply a word clock with a customised PCB. The kit is designed to work with the Raspberry Pi Zero. A full kit starts at £19 (plus shipping) and you will need to assemble it yourself. (There is also a more expensive pledge level for a fully assembled kit). You can read more about the campaign and pledge here.
Dr Anders Lyhne Christensen, from BioMachines Lab of the Institute of Telecommunications in Portugal has developed a swarm of aquatic robots and they are all powered by Raspberry Pis. They communicate with each other over an adhoc wireless network. The boats themselves have CNC-milled foam hulls with some 3D-printed elements. It is an extraordinary project and you can find a lot more about the methods and computational elements used by watching the video below or by visiting the BioMachines Lab website. The code for the robots is all available on GitHub.
