Accessories, Blinkies, GPIO boards, Making, Programming, Tutorials

Create a NodeRED-controlled, Raspberry Pi-powered Neopixel decoration for your Christmas Tree

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The inimitable Mr Les Pounder has written up a brilliant project in which he utilises a string of Neopixel-like lights to give his Christmas Tree some blinky cheer. Soldered up on a ProtoZero board, the circuit requires a few bits and pieces to work and is then placed on a Raspberry Pi Zero W. On the Pi itself, some NodeRED programming is required to control the lights and to provide a web interface. This excellent, achievable project, is documented here. You can see it in action in the video below:

Camera module, Making, Tutorials

Build an emotive SelfieBot camera with a Raspberry Pi and lots of maker skills

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Sophy Wong and her husband have built themselves a selfie booth using a Raspberry Pi. The booth has a camera (obviously) and a screen which displays a facial expression. The selfies taken are printed out by a thermal printer and the bot also emits sounds appropriate to what it’s doing. A full build log, including lots of photographs and all the files you’ll need to laser cut and/or 3D print the case are available over at Adafruit.

Media centre, Music, Programming, Tutorials

Making a radio with the Pimoroni Hyperpixel and a Raspberry Pi

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Giles Booth likes to make radios out of tech. This time, he’s taken a Pimoroni Hyperpixel and a Pi and installed on the SD card MPC and MPD which allows him to play streams or MP3 files. He’s then programmed the Pi using Python and the Tkinter library and made a touch-interface GUI to allow the user to select stations. Read how he did it here.

Medical, Sport

High school senior helps develop system for monitoring concussion risk with a Raspberry Pi

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A Boston high school senior has helped to develop a system to monitor the risk of concussion in contact sports. Tiana Rossi, working alongside employees of Envision, used a Raspberry Pi and an accelerometer/gyroscope sensor to monitor the amount of force encountered by players which are then relayed back to the coaching staff to determine the risk of concussion. Read more about this project here.

Blinkies, Crowdfunding

Control 12V RGB LED strips from your Raspberry Pi with the ANAVI Light pHAT

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Leon Anavi has just launched his latest crowdfunding campaign. This time, he’s created a Zero-sized ‘pHAT’ that allows you to control 12V RGB LED strips from your Raspberry Pi. Also on board are 3 x I2C breakouts to allow you to connect up I2C sensors, which means that you can make your LEDs change depending on environmental conditions such as light, temperature, humidity, etc. Pledges for the board start at $25 (with free Worldwide shipping) with various kits also available, starting at $35, which include the LED strip itself. You can pledge for the board or one of the kits on Crowdsupply.

Leon’s had successful campaigns before and his product quality is always excellent. I think he’s on to a winner with this one. He’s sent me and Tim a couple of samples so we hope to be able to give you an opinion review before the campaign finishes in 40 days time.

Bluetooth, GPIO boards, Science, Tutorials

Control a telescope and other sensors using a Raspberry Pi

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Gary Preston has developed the Astro Cat which:

is an auto GPIO configuring add-on board for the Raspberry PI 3 which provides additional hardware interfaces to communicate with and control a Meade Autostar, Moonlite focuser and temperature sensors.

Or, to the layman, it helps you to control your telescope and monitor the environment around it. He’s documented the process he took to develop the add-on board and open-sourced everything so, if you’d like to, you can reproduce his work. Follow his guide here.

Most interesting to me is that he’s documented the process for disabling the Pi’s Bluetooth functionality to re-activate UART on the default pins. You can find out how to do that on this part of his blog guide.