Jeff Cartwright has put together a lovely Instructable for creating a portable Geiger counter using a Raspberry Pi. He’s used a MightyOhm Geiger Counter kit, which communicates over serial to the Pi, added a PiTFT to display things on and then fashioned a case out of Plexiglass. All in all, it’s a great project and very well-documented. Read more here.
A new version of the Raspbian Jessie operating system has been released. The following software packages have been updated:
Various UI bug fixes have also been implemented.
The big news, however, is the inclusion of an experimental OpenGL driver for the desktop which uses the GPU to provide hardware acceleration. This only works on the Pi 2 but should provide a big performance boost for 3D applications and games.
To update to the latest software from an existing Jessie image, do the following:
sudo apt-get update sudo apt-get dist-upgrade sudo apt-get install raspi-gpio
To add the experimental GL driver, you will also need to run
sudo apt-get install xcompmgr libgl1-mesa-dri
More information can be found on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog.
Apologies for getting to this late – Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend jobs have been stacking up, so priorities…
Raspberry Pi has released the STL files and a tutorial that will allow you to 3D-print your own version of the Astro Pi flight case. It’s been split into 4 parts to minimise the amount of scaffolding and, therefore, lowering the print time. More information, the files and the tutorial are available via this post on the RP website.
This crowdfunding campaign failed. This post is left here for historical reasons.
Pi2Design has come up with a very neat package for their latest crowdfunding campaign (campaign failed).
The Pi2Media Home Theatre One combines a Raspberry Pi 2 with two add-on boards to create a full surround-sound home media centre. It comes with the following features:
The system will use the OSMC operating system to deliver content. There are various pledge levels, so read carefully, and at the moment there is a rather attractive $199 earlybird deal for the streaming version of the box.
Richard Hayler has written an excellent tutorial on using this new add-on board from Pimoroni. You basically connect to the pHAT using minicom and then send old-style AT commands like you would with an old modem. He hasn’t quite gone so far as to show how it might be used practically as an IoT device, but I suspect that’s not far off. Read it here. To get hold of the pHAT, you can go to Pimoroni or The Pi Hut.
Niels Affourtit has put together a brilliant project, one of my personal ‘holy grails’ – a submersible drone controlled by a Raspberry Pi. He put the Pi together with some 3D printed parts, some sensors and an HD camera. According to a fan post on https://fpvfrenzy.com, the drone updates a web-page with the output from the sensors and is currently tethered with an Ethernet cable. You can see videos of the drone below:
