Raspberry Pi Roundup - 11th Nov 2014

The Big News

Photo credit: Alex Eames, RasPi.TV

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced the launch of the Raspberry Pi Model A+. See their blog post here.

It's cheaper, smaller and uses less power than the B+ (and the original Model A) and should find a home in embedded projects and those with low power requirements.

You can buy a Model A+ from The Pi Hut by visiting our shop.

Pottery

James Gao and his girlfriend, who is an enthusiastic potter, combined their know-how and skills and created a remote control propane regulator. The Pi has wi-fi so that they can adjust the temperature. Read more here.

Kitchen

Meltwater has just published information on Pi Kitchen, which is a way to pre-create your SD card images. You create ‘recipes’ which inject various settings and scripts into your SD card image when it boots up… at least I think that’s how it works!

Here’s a list of things it can do:

• Injection of network and WiFi settings so we can have full networking and remote access enabled immediately.
• Automatically enable the settings for a direct network cable link to use the Raspberry Pi with a laptop/PC
• An automated install script which we can trigger on the first power up of the Raspberry Pi following the NOOBS installation (so we can install SAMBA, VNC etc as needed)
• Enable a bluetooth keyboard to work on the first boot
• Automatically run background scripts to check for and respond to attached hardware (such as hardware buttons)
• Build stand-alone projects which can be quickly deployed by selecting a specific OS flavour
• Possibility to setup scripts which automatically run on start up
• Option to setup mapping of data and recovery partitions automatically
• We can create a range of different flavours which then can install a unique combination of ingredients (=a particular feature/setup). For example, you could create one flavour for a workshop and another flavour which runs an automated demonstration of the workshop as soon as it is switched on
• Create installations which can be run without a network but can be easily updated when required.
• Pre-load the installation with relevant data-sheets, resource materials or web-links.
• Ability to share and develop common ingredients with others.

Read more and get started with Pi Kitchen here.