Competitions, Events, Pi Wars, Robotics

Pi Wars 2019 – dates announced – find out more and apply to enter our international Raspberry Pi Robotics Challenge Competition

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Tim Richardson and I are pleased to announce that our next Pi Wars competition will take place on 30th & 31st March 2019. The competition, which has grown substantially since its inception in 2014, last year attracted over 150 applicants for the 76 available places. We are hopeful that we will have a similar response for the 2019 event. 🙂

You can find out more information here and you can apply to enter here. If you have any questions about the competition, please contact us through the Pi Wars website.

Events, Raspberry Fields, Raspberry Pi Foundation

Summer digital making festival Raspberry Fields line-up teased by the Raspberry Pi Foundation

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Raspberry Pi has announced some more details about its summer Festival – Raspberry Fields.

The event, which is taking place on 30th June and 1st July, will feature an array of exhibits showcasing all kinds of digital making and there will be workshops to take part in as well as talks and showcases to attend. One of the bits I’m most looking forward to is the Ada.Ada.Ada. show which is all based around Ada Lovelace, a woman underappreciated in her time but explored in this live show. You can see a video trailer for the show at the bottom of this post.

For Raspberry Fields, get your tickets here and read more about the announced highlights here.

 

3D printing, Arduino, Artificial intelligence, Blinkies, Home automation, Making

Raspberry Pi and Amazon Alexa come together in this lovely Star Wars Story robot head build

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For those of you who don’t follow cinema avidly, I should first of all say: There’s a new Star Wars movie out. This one’s called ‘Solo‘ and is about the early day of everyone’s favourite smuggler Han Solo. By all accounts (though I haven’t seen it for myself), it’s a fast-moving, thoroughly entertaining caper movie. One of the features of a Star Wars movie is the fascinated “droid” (robot) concepts they have in there and Solo is no exception. One of the droids featured is called L3-37 and maker Patrick Stefanski has re-created the head of this robot using a Raspberry Pi. The articulated model uses the Pi plus an Arduino Nano, Neopixels, an audio amplifier and 3D-printed parts. He’s even painted his model to look distressed from its exploits! To finish it off, Patrick has installed the Amazon Alexa software so that the droid reacts to voice commands. It’s a really nice build and you can see it in action below and find out more in the description of the YouTube video.

Blinkies, GPIO boards

Using a UnicornHAT and a Skywriter gesture board together on a Raspberry Pi

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Johannes Bergs has taken a Pimoroni Skywriter board and a UnicornHAT and connected them, via a pHAT stack board to a Raspberry Pi. He has then programmed the Pi to change the colour of the Unicorn’s pixels based on the position of the hand above the Skywriter. Instructions on how to do it are over on his blog and you can see it in action below:

Blinkies, Making, Raspberry Pi Zero, Tutorials

Raspberry Pi-powered, Google Calendar-aware clock with added NeoPixels

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Sam VanHook has created this lovely Google Calendar-aware clock out of some birch plywood and then added diffused Neopixels. These Neopixels are lit up by a Raspberry Pi Zero W when Sam has appointments in his Google Calendar. He’s used a CNC router to cut the clock face (although I guess you could do it by hand or with a laser cutter) and the whole build has a lovely feel to it. You can read how he created CalClock over on this Instructable.

Accessories, Blinkies, Games, GPIO boards, Sensors, Tutorials

Create a Wheel of Fortune with RasPiO Inspiring, the Skywriter and a Raspberry Pi

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Simon Bugler has taken a Raspberry Pi, a Skywriter gesture-detection board and a RasPiO Inspiring circle and driver board and created this quite lovely Wheel of Fortune. By waving a hand over the Skywriter board, he can set the ‘Wheel’ going which is displayed on the circle. The software that he’s written even slows down the Wheel realistically as it comes to a stop. You can see a longer demo below and read the tutorial of how to make your own here.