Raspberry Pi Roundup - 27th Jan 2015

The Big News

At the BETT education conference in London last week, the Raspberry Pi Foundation officially launched the previously announced Astro Pi competition. Astro Pi will involve the launch of two Raspberry Pis into space with astronaut Tim Peake. Tim will take the Pis and SD cards onto the International Space Station where they will be set-up to carry out experiments submitted by schools. This is truly a unique opportunity for schools and I hope as many as possible submit their ideas and code for consideration. There are Primary and Secondary categories up for consideration – the first deadline for both is 3rd April, so get cracking! You can read more about Astro Pi on their website here.

Life

Ferran Fabregas has taken Peter Onion’s LED panel driver software and created a ‘life simulator’ in which different coloured plants evolve and spread throughout a digital ecosystem and are then rendered onto an LED panel. You can see the code here and view a video of it in action below. All the behaviour is parameterized so it’s easy to change the behaviour and experiment with it.

Stock

Sometimes it can just be fun to mess around with data! Scott Kildall has written a short Instructable which tells you how to obtain and print out data from the Yahoo Finance API. Interesting to those of you who like to have data sources with which to do interesting things. Read the Instructable here.