Raspberry Pi Roundup

Model Lighting There are many reasons why you might want to try out your ‘hacking’ or penetration-testing skills. These range from a simple proof-of-concept as to why systems should be locked down to more aggressive hacking to prove the vulnerability of parts of a system. There are, likewise, many ways of setting up a system to be vulnerable – but you really don’t want to do this to your family’s precious PC or Mac. Enter the Raspberry Pi: it’s cheap, it’s easy to re-image the SD card and now, thanks to security expert Re4son, it’s simple to set it up...

Canine Who? 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...

Weather Forecast Kirby has created this lovely weather-forecasting cloud from a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The cloud is made from wood and houses the Pi Zero W a strip of Neopixel-like LEDs. The software uses the Yahoo Weather API to collect data and then changes the colour of the LEDs accordingly. It’s a lovely project and you can read more about it over on Instructables. Camera Stream via Docker 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. Alex Ellis' tutorial helps...

EduKit update We are pleased to announce that there are brand new versions of the CamJam EduKit 1 worksheets now available from the CamJam website. In addition to the classic RPi.GPIO versions being revised to feature 40-pin Pis and various small typographical changes, we now have available worksheets that use the GPIO Zero Python library. For those of you who do not follow such things, GPIO Zero is a relatively new Python library developed by Ben Nuttall of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Dave Jones, who also created the picamera library, amongst other contributors. The library allows a much simpler way of programming the Raspberry...

Eurovision Tanya, from Sheffield maker company Pimoroni, wanted to celebrate the Eurovision Song Contest in style and decided to create a wearable. What she came up with was a Crown based on a headband, some cardboard and plenty of bits of glittery Christmas decorations. She added a Raspberry Pi Zero, a Flotilla dock, some Flotilla blinky sticks and a Scroll pHAT HD and then adapted existing software (as well as writing some of her own with the help of Sandy Macdonald) to allow her to set a rating with a Flotilla dial board and also display Eurovision tweets on the pHAT. A...