Exciting news for those of you still without a Google AIY Project Kit that came free with The Mag Pi 57. Micro Center in the USA and Pimoroni in the UK have announced that they will be stocking the kit in coming months. Micro Center are saying that it’s available for pre-order and will be available at the end of October. The situation with Pimoroni is less clear, but I’m going to assume a similar date. Check it out on Micro Center’s website and Pimoroni’s website.
Matt Brailsford (aka Circuitbeard) has taken an old motorised game, the Tomy Turnin’ Turbo Dashboard, embedded a Raspberry Pi inside and turned it into a fully-working Out Run games console. Here’s an excerpt from his blog post in which he describes the features:
Some key features are an integrated 3.5” TFT screen, fully usable steering wheel and gear shifter (dashboard turbo light comes on when in high gear), working ignition key for power, true MPH speed and rev counter displays, and a fuel gauge to represent the stage time remaining.
It’s a brilliant conversion and I’m well-impressed by the way that all the old controls work to control the game via the Pimoroni Picade PCB. I also really like the custom dashboard plate he’s worked up:
You can see the game in action below and read more about the build on his blog:
Just a quick one… it is my birthday after all!!! 🙂
Les Pounder has blogged a gardening project over at Element 14. The project uses a Raspberry Pi Zero W for connectivity and a RasPiO Analog Zero to read an analog input: a soil moisture sensor. He has also connected up an I2C Flora UV sensor and even links up to Gmail to send you email alerts. Take a look here.
I’ve just received sad news. After several years of operating in the commercial arena of the Raspberry Pi, Ryanteck Ltd is closing down. Ryan Walmsley, proprietor, just announced it via email. Ryan has been a leader of the Pi community, especially in the early days when he was a young programmer showing what the Pi could really do and developing one of the first motor controller boards that plugged directly into the GPIO pins. In recent times, he ran several Kickstarters culminating in the excellent RTk.GPIO board which gave you access to many more GPIO pins as well as bringing physical computing to PCs and Macs. Over the next few months, Ryan will be running a closing down sale so head over to his web store to pick up a bargain. He’s expecting to cease trading at the end of October.
James was trying to allocate a static IP address to his Pi. He did what he’d always done and allocated the static address to eth0 but was then bewildered as to why it wasn’t working. He discovered that the naming convention for network interfaces has changed in the new version of Raspbian (Stretch) to an amalgam that includes the MAC address of the Ethernet port. He’s written up his findings on his blog.
Update: This only effects brand new installs of Raspbian. So, if you upgrade your Jessie to Stretch using apt, the interface names stay the same. The interface names change, however, if you install Raspbian Stretch from scratch.
I personally think this is “a bit crap”. I know it’s becoming the ‘standard way of doing things’ but for goodness sake… To change something like this is in the “almost pointless” category in my eyes. But what do I know?
Update 6/11/2017 – Raspbian devs have listened!
The changes to the names of network interfaces has been reversed:
Changelog: Disable predictable network interface names for Ethernet devices
Tinkernut has taken a Raspberry Pi, a camera module, added an 2.8″ Adafruit mini-touchscreen and a mini USB microphone and created a YouTube-streaming box. He’s programmed a touchscreen interface to allow him to preview the video and then added another button to send the stream to YouTube. He’s written the whole thing up as a tutorial and covers various tricky things such as getting that touchscreen working with a Jessie-based operating system and setting up FFmpeg. Take a look how he did it here.
