Les Pounder has been having a play with Laura‘s GUI Zero Python library which makes it easy to create GUIs. He’s created a program which reads in news via RSS and then displays the top news stories inside a miniature GUI. It’s an interesting example of how to use publicly-available sources inside your project and it’s good to see Laura’s fine work being used in this way. Read more on Les’ blog here.
Alex Ellis decided to grow some cress and he wanted a way of monitoring the growth. To do this, he used a Raspberry Pi Zero, a Pi camera and a cheap plastic box to grow the cress in. The Pi and camera are mounted to the outside of the box, with a hole for the camera and then Alex uses some Python code to automatically take pictures of the cress’ progress and tweet out the image. You can read about how he did it here and see his code here. (I’ve got to say: I think the code is excellent – config files, proper classes – well done, Alex!)
I follow PJ Evans on Twitter and he posted up a picture of his latest project: an Atari 2600 console made out of a Raspberry Pi Zero embedded in an Atari game cartridge. He has since blog-posted an account of the building of the console. This is a great write-up of a great project, well in the capabilities of an intermediate maker. He used a craft knife and a rotary tool on the cartridge case and then embedded the Pi Zero inside. A couple of serial port connectors were added to allow the addition of the Atari joysticks and, of course, several buttons and toggle switches to mimic the original console. PJ has used RetroPie as the main operating system and then loaded Stella to emulate the Atari. He has then added Adafruit’s Retrogame library to the mix to handle the translation of GPIO triggers into keyboard commands. To read the full write-up, and see lots more photos, head over to PJ’s blog.
Simon Long has just posted on the Raspberry Pi website about an update to Raspbian that has just been released. The following changes have been implemented:
Also released is an x86 image of the update, allowing both live-booting from a USB stick and wipe-and-installation.
Simon also announced that software development is well under way for the new version of Raspbian, based on Debian Stretch.
Read more about the update here and download the new Raspbian image here.
Ranjib Dey loves his salt water aquarium which is home to a miniature, living, coral reef. It takes a lot of expertise and monitoring to keep this fragile ecosystem alive and to do it he has decided to bring in a little bit of Raspberry Pi know-how. The system, called reef-pi, which comprises the Pi, some relays and an analogue-to-digital converter to grab sensor readings, is growing all the time and currently has the following features:
You can read more about the system, which is written in Go, on his GitHub repository: there’s a full bill-of-materials and all the code on there.
Thanks to Make for spotting this one.
Swedish artist, Rebecka Tollens has collaborated with Playtronica to bring her “Connected Drawings” to life. As part of the Daydream / Darkness / Disgrace exhibition in Paris, Rebecka created drawings to represent her dreams. She then made them interactive by using Bare Conductive’s Touch Board and Pi Cap in ‘proximity mode’. When different areas of the drawings were touched by visitors, Rebecka’s voice would be played through headphones, describing the dreams (or, in many cases, nightmares). You can read more here on Bare Conductive’s site or view a video with Rebecka below:
