Raspberry Pi Roundup - 10th Feb 2015

Mushrooms!

Kyle Gabriel grows mushrooms and wanted to control the environment in which they grow to achieve a better yield. He’s now using a Pi to monitor temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide concentration. When the Pi detects an undesirable change in conditions, it triggers relays to control heaters and fans that return conditions to optimum. To read more about how he’s set this up, and to look at his code, take a look on his blog.

MeArm

Carl Monk has blogged about his experience building and using the MeArm. The MeArm is a kit made from plastic which, when assembled, gives you a robotic arm controlled using servos. Carl has developed a web interface using the Flash framework to control the arm and has also started to experiment using a PS3 controller. All his code is available here and you can read more about his experience on his blog.

You can buy a MeArm for £30 from The Pi Hut.

Kickstarter

Alex Eames has just launched a new Kickstarter - the RasPiO Duino. This is a great add-on board that plugs into the Pi's GPIO pins and puts the power of an Arduino at your disposal - analog inputs, lots of digital input/outputs and PWM, plus a prototyping area to add your own circuits to. You can get one of these great little boards for £9 at the moment (Earlybird offer). Head over to Kickstarter for more information.

Ping-Pong

JCR Matos has created a circuit layout in Fritzing for a ping-pong game that you can reproduce for a bit of fun with your Pi. You need several components, including driver chips for the seven-segment displays. He’s included all the code you need to run the game and published it over at Fritzing. Take a look here.