Raspberry Pi Roundup - 29th April 2015

AstroPi

The primary school winners of the Astro Pi competition have been announced. They are:

• Cumnor House Girl’s School in Croydon, near London (idea by Hannah Belshaw) – Minecraft will be used to visualise data sent back from the ISS.
• Cranmere Primary School Code Club in Esher, Kent – the presence of nearby astronauts will be detected by sensors and then a photograph taken using the Pi Camera Module.

Other primary schools that were highly commended will receive class sets of the Astro Pi to continue experimenting.

Also announced were the secondary schools that will receive sets of Astro Pi boards with which to continue developing their entries into the second half of the competition. Details of these schools are available on the UK Space Agency site.

Write-o-Tron

Portland-based Giando Sigurani has created a portable word processing system from a Raspberry Pi 2 and a few other bits including a full-size keyboard and track pad, SD card reader and exposed USB port. The whole thing has been built into a varnished cigar box (complete with blood stain from when he was carving). It boots straight into LibreOffice and all other software has been removed to lessen the temptation of distrations. He has come up with two possible names: The Ambition Box and the Write-O-Tron. He has a tiny screen (looks like a 3″) attached but has configured everything so that text is clearly readible. He is currently using it to write his second novel! You can see a walk-around of the entire project in the video below:

Oculus

Torkel Danielsson has paired the Compute Module using two cameras with a PC and, with a friend, has developed a way of streaming the stereo images to an Oculus Rift 2. Above is a video of it in action.