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Raspberry Pi Roundup - 27th January 2016
Empathy Booth
Artist Joanna Hopkins and programmer Alanna Kelly have teamed up to create The Empathy Machine. The machine encourages people to enter the booth and then engage in conversation with a digital person who is shown on-screen. Questions are asked, responses are given, but the digital person is intentionally glitchy and doesn’t really listen at all. It has been designed to highlight the problems with new technology that is glitchy and not able to replace real human interaction. A Raspberry Pi is at the core of the programming. Find out more about the artist and her work here.
Sense Cave
Albert Hickey (@winkleink) got a Sense HAT for Christmas and wanted to create a game using it. What he came up with is Sense Cave. Sense Cave is a maze with 64 rooms (8×8) containing emeralds. Some of the exits/entrances to rooms are blocked off, some aren’t. It’s up to you to navigate through the maze and collect all the emeralds before finding the white dot that indicates the level exit. To control the player pixel, you tilt the Sense HAT and the built-in gyroscope kicks in, feeding data into the Pi to affect the player’s movement. It’s a great concept and Albert has got some great ideas for how he’s going to extend the game. You can read more about how he did it over on his blog. The code itself is available over on Github.
Dashboard
This is a nice tutorial from Adafruit. They’ve taken several of their own products (as they normally do) and created a physical dashboard with lots of digital numeric readouts and even a swingometer that uses a motor to move an indicator/pointer. Really nice use of technology. Read more here
Looper
Szymon Kaliski has put together a Raspberry Pi, some buttons and potentiometers and a lot of circuitry to build a four-track audio looper. You can record four eight-second loops and then adjust their playback with the buttons and potentiometers to achieve the sound you want. It’s all highly technical, but he’s written up what he can and placed it and the code onto Github.
