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RPi Roundup – 27th October 2014
Spooky
Stuart Pemberton works at the Lost Gardens of Heligan in Cornwall and was set a project: create a visitor attraction with the Raspberry Pi for the upcoming Halloween event. It is now on display in the Gardens, detecting passers-by and emitting a sound effect. It originally made the sound of an owl, but it was too successful and was attracting real animals in search of a mate! So, now it makes the sound of wolf when people walk past. See a video of it in action below.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fkaAg4S1xG4&w=500Fox
During a Mozilla Festival held over this last weekend, developers showed more of the Firefox OS port for the Pi. They also listed some of the objectives of the project:
- Be at parity with Raspbian/RPi as a hobbyist environment. Users will be able to read from sensors and control motors, LEDs, solenoids, slave boards, etc. A modified Fx OS for Raspberry Pi will be able to fly a drone;
- Be competitive with other media player OSes available for Rpi;
- Be competitive with other IDEs for FxOS on Raspberry Pi targeted at beginning programmers, like IDLE and Scratch;
- Enable programmers (via DOM/CSS) to develop robotics etc. by building a declarative model of a reactive system. With one type of output device, the actual electronics could be interfaced with. With another type of output device, the model could be simulated on a client computer.
Volcano!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=beAR6SXovBw&w=500In order to understand how volcanic eruptions occur, Dr Carolyn Parcheta has developed a wall-climbing robot to map volcanic vents. Powered with a Raspberry Pi, the robot is attached with an umbilical for data and power and is then lowered into the vent. It then uses some kind of 3D mapping technology to build up a 3D picture of the vent. Thanks to the the Raspberry Pi Foundation for this story which it covered on their blog.
