Raspberry Pi Roundup - 18th Dec 2014

Pinball

Games specialists Liberty Games have taken an old Baby Doll pinball machine, refurbished it, and added a Raspberry Pi into the mix. When you activate certain features on the pinball (such as hitting a target), the signal travels to the Pi via a Pi Face and the Pi then plays an Internet Meme video on a small screen embedded in the upper display panel. Read more about it here.

Botswana

A team of National Geographic Explorers recently embarked on an expedition to the Okavango Delta in Botswana to gather environmental data using open hardware and software and the Raspberry Pi. Called the Okavango Wilderness Project, the expedition will create a portal to share the data openly, which wonderfully flies in the face of the usual practice of expeditions who collect their data and then protect it until they can publish.

Opensource.com has done a wonderful interview with Shah Selbe, who is part of the expedition, about how open source and the Raspberry Pi have helped them to collect and store the data. Read the interview here.

Beacon

Kate Mulcahy from The Royal Institution has developed a cool little beacon that lights up whenever the Twitter hashtag #XMASLECTURES is used. She’s done this to help someone at the Institution who has an obsession over checking the hashtag. All the instructions and code are available as a tutorial from The Royal Insitution website. You can see a video of Kate working on the project below: