Educator Amanda Haughs wanted to use the Raspberry Pi Zero in a wearable project and incorporate the use of her grandmother’s embroidery machine. She had the idea of a tote bag and, with a bit of sewing and some wiring-up, together with some GPIO Zero code, she created the Pi Tote. It features an embroidered Pi logo and multiple LEDs that pulse via GPIO Zero with PWM. You can read all about how she did it here and see a video of the finished product below:
Music artist otem rellik (Toby Hendricks) previously created a live performance music looper. This time, he’s focused on creating a touch-sensitive musical instrument and beneath the hood is a Raspberry Pi. You can see it in action above and hopefully he’ll do a tear-down of it at some future date. Thanks Adafruit for spotting the video!
US-based Raspberry Pi Certified Educator Amanda Haughs has been very busy developing resources involving the Raspberry Pi. Her latest set of resources are a series of Task Cards that aim to get children into physical computing using Scratch. The cards, which cover both Scratch 1.4 and Scratch 2.0 are available to browse and download here. I’ve also just noticed that there are Python GPIO Zero versions available too! These are outstanding resources – very colourful, very clear and just what is needed in the classroom and for workshops. Nice job, Amanda! Other resources and her personal education experiences can be found on her blog. These are all evolving resources, so check back occasionally to download the newest ones!
Interesting news from Ben Nuttall over at the Raspberry Pi Foundation this morning. For the 6th Birthday of the Raspberry Pi, the intention is to hold synchronised Raspberry Jams all over the world. On the weekend of 3rd-4th March, Raspberry Pi is calling for Jams to be held so that we can all celebrate the birthday at the same time. This is a fairly brave move by the Foundation to get the community involved but I think it’s a really interesting idea, especially if some live link-ups can be worked out. Obviously, there is some crossover (in terms of people) between Jams in proximity to each other, so that’s a small thing to be worked out.
The other piece of news that’s been released is that the traditional two-day event run by the Foundation will be in early Summer, specifically 30th June-1st July. Where this will be held has yet to be announced, but there are several venues in Cambridge that would suffice. It’ll be interesting to see if the new date flummoxes people or if it allows more people to attend!
Drew Wallace wanted a handheld gaming device that could stream games from a gaming PC, but that was totally portable. For this, he’s used a Raspberry Pi loaded with streaming software Parsec and added a Pi touchscreen, LiPo battery and an Adafruit Powerboost 1000C. Onto the sides, he added the Switch’s split JoyCon controllers and then surrounded everything with two 3D printed case parts. You can read a complete breakdown of what to do to create your own on GitHub and see more photos of the finished console here. See a video of it in action below:
Giles Booth decided to finally buy an SDR (software-defined radio) dongle and plug it into his Raspberry Pi. With the dongle and some software he installed, he was able to view live Freeview television stations and even record them on his Mac. He has now written everything up and posted it on his blog.
