Raspberry Pi Roundup - 16th March 2016

Connect 4

David Pride decided he wanted to hack something both fun and complicated and so decided to build a motorised Connect 4 game. Called 4-Bot, the project allows a human player to play the Raspberry Pi at the popular game. The Pi works out what move to make based on image recognition and the mechanism is activated to pick-and-place a playing piece into the board. The mechanism is part-knackered 3D printer parts and part-MeArm. You can read about the build on David’s website and see it in action in the video below.

Whack!

Carl Monk brought along this great game to the Big Birthday Weekend. Basically, each large arcade button lights up and you hit it with your hand to score a point. With a Raspberry Pi detecting hits and playing the Mission: Impossible theme to time each game, it was one of the hits of the event. Carl’s written about the build on his blog.

Sweaty astronauts

Richard Hayler and his children spoke at the Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend about their AstroPi project – how it was developed and the story of how their code ended up in Space! Their experiment, which uses the SenseHAT’s built-in humidity sensor to detect the presence of an astronaut and then takes a picture, has begun to record data, and that data is now back on Earth. You can download the data and photographs yourself from Github and you can read the Haylers’ story on Richard’s blog, along with some analysis of the data.