Neil Matthews has been in touch. He’s currently running a 20% discount offer on his Percheron e-paper HAT and other goodies. The Percheron e-paper HAT in particular is an excellent product – funded by Kickstarter back in December 2015 and reviewed here by me. So, get over to his shop to take advantage of the discount which is activated at the checkout by using code WIGIG2018.
Hi everyone.
Myself and Tim Richardson are holding another of our Potton Pi & Pints events on 3rd March, as part of the Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend.
We’re hoping that plenty of people will bring their Pi (or Arduino, or micro:bit) projects along to show off and we’ll be bringing the pi-topCEED Raspberry Pi workstations along with plenty of worksheets and kit to keep learners occupied.
This is a family-friendly event that just happens to take place upstairs at our local pub. The Jam takes place from 1.30-5pm and then, if you’d like to, you can join us for a pub-grub meal afterwards. We’re going to grab some cakes and try to make it as much of a celebration as possible!
Potton is on the Cambridgeshire/Bedfordshire border and is only 30 minutes from Cambridge. So, if you’re in the area, come and join us! You can get free tickets from here.
Last year, Mozilla announced Project Things and now they’ve announced the release of an OS image for the Raspberry Pi which implements that idea. With the concept of bringing all your home IoT devices under one roof, and providing a web interface to control them, the project is sure to catch the eye of those experimenting with home automation. You will need dongles attached to your Pi to connect to things such as ZigBee modules, lights and that kind of thing, but the software is all ready to go in a if-this-then-that kind of way. You can access the image and find out more from the Mozilla IoT website and learn how to set the system up on their blog.
Opinion: This looks like a great idea for those with an interest in Home Automation and IoT devices. However, Mozilla could do with condensing their terminology. On the first page along they call it both Project Things and the Things Gateway, and the documentation seems to be split between their IoT website and their blog, which is just confusing. Still, it’s early days and they’ve got something there!
Emanuele Coletta and friends have created a physical representation of a Pac Man game. The game characters were 3D printed and the ‘pills’ collected by Pac Man were changed to LEDs which disappear as the character rolls over them. The friends, aided by their fathers, created the playing maze out of laser-cut sections of wood. A series of small controller boards with LEDs and reed switches attached were placed underneath the surface and each character was fitted with an Arduino Nano. Pac Man himself had a magnet installed which, as it travels across the reed switches, sends signals to the LED control boards to deactivate the relevant LED. A Raspberry Pi is used by receiving all the signals about the game state and other statistics. The ‘ghosts’ are, of course, in hot pursuit and players control both Pac Man and his adversaries by moving them manually, making it a highly physical game. You can read more over on the MagPi website.
Robert Prest has used a grandfather clock to house his latest project: a Bar Clock. The automated system can pour drinks with up to four spirits and four mixers and is controllable using voice, web GUI or keyboard. The platform onto which you place your glass is belt-driven and comes out via a spring-loaded door. Peristaltic pumps control the flow of the spirits while taps are opened via servos for the mixers. There’s a Raspberry Pi doing all the robotic control with an Arduino to switch on the lighting. You can see a quick run-through of a cocktail being made in the first video below, whilst a more in-depth walk-through is available via the second video.
Gosse Adema has created a 12-inch high 3D-printed lamp that tells you the weather forecast. He has used 288 WS2812 addressable LEDs to achieve a stunning effect which combines to tell you the temperature (vertically from blue to red) and other conditions such as rain and wind which are achieved using droplets falling from the top to the bottom, or a sideways movement. The software is written in Python on a Raspberry Pi Zero W.
He’s written the whole thing up as an Instructable, with bill of materials, and you can follow along here.
