James Behrens has written an extremely detailed tutorial in which he uses a HUB75 HAT (a special kind of LED interface board) together with a Raspberry Pi to drive an LED matrix. He then uses the OpenWeatherMap API to get weather data and then blits it to the matrix. The tutorial is here and you can see a video of the matrix in action below. You can get hold of a HUB75 HAT from Adafruit or from The Pi Hut.
Instructables user hamedtaha has written a tutorial and accompanying code to display a to-do list (from ToDoIst), calendar and weather display (from Weather Underground) on a 7.5″ e-paper display from Waveshare. Read more here and/or watch the video below.
Rene Richarz has written a great guide on installing RetroPie on top of pi-topOS on your pi-top or pi-topCEED. He goes through removing part of the pi-topOS and then installing RetroPie, giving all the necessary command line instructions to set-up for the RetroPie instructions, which are on a different site. He even tells you where to go to set-up a pi-topPULSE HAT as a battery indicator.
You can read the guide here.
If you’re looking to buy a pi-top or CEED, you can find them on the pi-top website or from The Pi Hut.
Happy New Year everybody!
The owner of FacelessTech wanted a small retro gaming console so he turned to the Raspberry Pi Zero. He designed a custom circuit board to house the control buttons, taking inspiration from Wonky Resistor’s ScoreZero. He even managed to add some shoulder buttons to give himself more options in the consoles he could emulate. The Zero is mounted to the bottom of the 3.2″ screen and custom PCB and has RetroPie installed on it’s SD card. You can read more about the build here and see a video of it below:
Our next Cambridge Raspberry Jam (CamJam) will be on Saturday, 27th January at Impington Village College (the same as last time). The event will run from 10.30am – 4pm and will again feature talks, workshops, show-and-tell and a Marketplace. In terms of workshops, the actual programme will be announced in the near future, once we’ve worked out which ones we’re going to run in addition to the drop-in room we ran last time.
Tickets are free, as last time, and can be registered through Eventbrite. As usual, please specify which age group you are in when registering.
To make the event the best it can be, we’re looking for people to contribute by giving a talk, helping with workshops, having a show-and-tell table or being a vendor in the Marketplace. When you register for your ticket(s), you can specify how you’d like to be involved. We encourage as many of you as possible to get involved because it is far easier to spread the jobs around Jam Makers if there are a decent number! 🙂
German electrical engineering student Tobias Lauxtermann has taken a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino MEGA and several other boards and bits and pieces and created a set of Christmas decorations that are controllable over the Internet. The Pi runs a Node.JS server which receives the commands and then sends them to the Arduino. There is feedback from the Arduino to the Pi to tell the Pi when it’s ready to receive data. There’s even a Telegram text service which you can use to send text to a dot matrix display. The video of the decorations is live-streamed onto YouTube. You can have a go at controlling a train, a Christmas tree full of LEDs and also, of course, a dancing Christmas tree. Visit the UI to the project here and read more about how the project was accomplished here.
