Raspberry Pi Roundup - 19th Feb 2015

The Big News

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced that sales of our favourite credit-card sized computer have just passed 5 million. This does not include any Pis given away to educational groups by the Foundation – these are bona fide sales!

Pianos

To celebrate the re-opening of the Maison de la Radio, France’s principal and historical radio building situated in the heart of Paris, a team developed a system, called Pianette, whereby two upright pianos could be used to play a game of Street Fighter! They used a combination of piezo pressure sensors and analog-to-digital converters to supply Raspberry Pis with a musical control signal which was then converted into movement inside the game. The build, which was restricted to 41 days (!) because of the re-opening date, was on an epic scale and much of the time the team only had one attempt to get it right. You can read more about the build on their blog. All of their code, and the design files for the various boards they created, are available here.

ISS

Carl Monk's created an ISS tracker using a Raspberry Pi and the 8×8 Neopixel matrix of a Unicorn HAT. The Pi reads in the current co-ordinates and then plots the position on the Unicorn which has a paper overlay of a map of the Earth. It uses a different colour when it’s on the ‘non-visible’ side of the Earth. Carl has open-sourced all the code and the paper overlay and has posted it to his blog with an explanation of the project. Read about it here.