Adding wi-fi to your Zero has been done before but this is a really nice video, so I thought I’d feature it.
NODE has taken the innards of a wifi dongle, some thin wires and a Pi Zero. He’s then soldered the whole lot together to provide wi-fi to the Zero and then taped the innards to the Zero. I’m not sure about the idea of having the wires go over the GPIO, but it is a neat solution. Instructions including a wiring diagram are available in his video below.
Phil Atkin, who has previously done a lot with integrating synthesizers with the Raspberry Pi, has now pulled off a bit of a coup. He has installed and run his software on a Raspberry Pi Zero. He has then sequenced the Doctor Who theme on it and recorded it. Full technical details can be found on the Foundation’s blog here. Listen to the playback below:
or watch a video of it being played (which Phil had to put up to convince people that the Zero was actually playing it!) below:
Ted Hale has improved upon his Hot Tub Controller. The latest iteration is mounted directly next to the tub and does the following:
You can read more about the controller here.
Cat Lamin, who recently appeared on the big stage at the Bett conference during the TeachMeet (pictured), has announced lots of news surrounding Coding Evening, the brilliant initiative to bring together teachers and IT professionals and hobbyists. Here’s the roster of upcoming events:
So, if you’re a teacher eager to learn about teaching computing or an IT professional or hobbyist willing to share their time and knowledge with these teachers, book onto one of these events.
You can read up about the events, and the initiative, by heading over the Coding Evening website.
Apologies for the lack of blog posts this week. There are reasons, most of which are too boring to get into! Anyway…
The PaPiRus e-paper HAT for the Raspberry Pi was a pretty successful Kickstarter, raising over £36k. The screen comes in three sizes and you can now get the product from the Pi Supply website from £30 up to £65. Well, shipping of the Kickstarter pledges has now happened and, therefore, people are starting to get hold of them.
Both Pete Scargill and the writer for Makerspace have written about their experiences with the board. To summarise: the quality of the board is good but the documentation is lacking and the software needs a lot of work. Currently, people are having to follow these instructions from Frederick Vandenbosch to have any joy with it. Judging by the comments on the Kickstarter, everyone is having the same problem so hopefully mentioning Frederick’s work here will point people in the right direction.
Without being hyper-critical (with all the negative comments on the Kickstarter, it doesn’t need me to add to it) let me just say this: There’s no point in having a beautiful product if the software is no good.
Alex Eames recently announced a new reward level for his RasPiO Pro Hat Kickstarter – it includes an MCP3008 analog-to-digital chip and an analog temperature sensor (TMP36). Alex has now written a tutorial to show you how to use the chip and sensor to display temperature readings. The tutorial features the use of the GPIO Zero library and I think this is the first practical example of the MCP3008 functionality I’ve seen, so it’s well worth taking a look. Read the tutorial and see the code here.
