Accessories, Internet of things, Sensors, Tutorials

Build your own Fartometer with a Raspberry Pi and a Wemos D1

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Dr Lucy Rogers has taken inspiration from IBM’s IoT HQ and created an ambient air quality sensor that works using MQTT messages through the IBM Watson IoT Quickstart Platform. Readings of the air are taken using a Raspberry Pi Zero and a Rehau USB stick ambient air sensor and then transmitted through Watson to a DIY GlowOrb made out of a Wemos D1 board. The orb glows green if the air quality is ‘good’ and red if the air quality is ‘bad’ (this is just based on the numerical value returned from the sensor). Instructions and code are available on IBM’s Internet of Things blog.

Personal

The return from Cloud – Raspberry Pi Pod is back!

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Good afternoon/morning everyone! I’m pleased to say that, following a hectic couple of weeks, normal service is resuming. So, what has been taking my time up? One word: CLOUD. Cloud is a brand new musical written by a wonderful pair of creative brains for the brilliant Sharnbrook Mill Theatre. We performed the show last week to enthusiastic audiences and great response. It has been one of the great privileges of my life to be involved with this group of people. You can check out some of the music in the trailer below and we’re hoping to have a live cast recording (audio and video) available soon!

Events, Raspberry Jams

Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam – Saturday, 15th July

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PJ Evans is organising a Raspberry Jam in Milton Keynes on Saturday, 15th July. The event, which runs from 10am to 1pm will be held at The National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. It is billed as a ‘show and tell’ event to get things rolling. It’s been a good while since MK has had a Jam, and it’s great to see it returning. Free tickets to the Jam are available here and slightly more info is available on the MK Jam website.

CamJam EduKit, Making, Robotics, Tutorials

Building a K9 toy out of acrylic, a CamJam EduKit 3 and a Raspberry Pi Zero

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James West‘s son is a big Doctor Who fan. So, his dad decided to build him a classic series-inspired K9 toy. He purchased some acrylic sheets and some other material and then fitted inside a Raspberry Pi Zero W with attached Speaker pHAT (to play sound effects with). The robotic part of the build was provided by a CamJam EduKit 3. You can read about the build over on his blog and see more photos and videos on Flickr. He has also uploaded the code to GitHub so you can see a GPIO Zero version of the EduKit 3 code!

Camera module, Software, Tutorials

Easily stream to YouTube using a Raspberry Pi and Docker

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I’ve not had much experience with Docker – haven’t really seen the point until now. However, with his new tutorial, Alex Ellis makes a convincing argument. Docker is a way of packaging up software into an image, much like Raspbian is packaged. However, Docker images are installed on top of your operating system.

The tutorial helps you to get your Raspberry Pi and camera module streaming online to YouTube. Normally, there’s a lot of software set-up involved with this, but Alex has packaged it all up as a pre-built Docker image, saving you the bother. All the instructions are available on Alex’s blog.