Raspberry Pi Roundup - 31st May 2016

The Big News - micro:bit

As you may have seen, the BBC micro:bit is now available for pre-order from The Pi Hut! You can get the bare board for £13 and with a starter kit of accessories for £15. Take a look here. The micro:bit is expected to be available for delivery at the end of June/beginning of July.

Wizard Chess

Bethanie Fentiman is an 18-year old who, faced with delivering some A-level coursework, thought that she’d take inspiration from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s/Sorceror’s Stone and create a real-life version of Wizard Chess!

First of all, she used an Instructable to get her started. Then, she gathered together her materials: motors, wood, gears, an electromagnet, a chess set, a relay board and, of course, a Raspberry Pi. You can read more about the project here and you can see it in action below. Other videos are also available. It’s a tremendous achievement and Bethanie intends to carry on with it to get it to eventually play a full game!

Off-road

Ben Martin has used a Mantis robot kit (which is the main chassis, motors and wheels) and added a RoboClaw motor controller board, together with a Raspberry Pi control board to create a fantastic off-road robot. He has written it all up as a set of tutorials on Linux.com and you can read these here. You can see a short video of it in action on a BMX track below: