Raspberry Pi Roundup - 7th October 2015

Lawnmower

A recent 24-hour StartFEST hackathon has awarded first prize to three brothers from Salt Lake City, Utah. Dan, Doug and David Leonard used a Raspberry Pi to control wheels connected to two drill motors that propelled a lawnmower across the garden. They have since posted the entire project up asan Instructable. Take a look here. You can read about some of their other hacking exploits at KSL.com.

Band

As part of the IoT Zone over at Dzone.com, Joost van Schaik has written up his ‘air conditioning’ project which uses the Microsoft Windows 10 Core IoT operating system to read the temperature in a room and then activate a fan if the temperature is above a certain threshold. The activity of the fan is relayed to his Microsoft Band device. Take a look here.

LISP

Lukas F. Hartmann decided that there simply weren’t enough operating systems available for the Raspberry Pi and endeavoured to write a brand new one from scratch. Using his past experience, he has managed to create an alpha build of InterimOS using the LISP language. You can read a lot of the technical background on his website, where you can also download the image to install on your Pi. Bear in mind this is an alpha release so your mileage may vary!

Kite

Richard Hayler recently attended the Skycademy training course to learn how to fly high-altitude balloons with Raspberry Pi payloads. He has now merged his experience with one of his hobbies – kite flying. Previously he used kites to aerial-map the local area but now he is using them to test-fly the equipment needed for a HAB flight. He has detailed how he’s done that on his blog.