Raspberry Pi Roundup - 6th March 2015

Finger trouble

Sandy MacDonald has used a pair of Black HAT Hack3r boards to allow him to daisy-chain a Unicorn HAT and a Skywriter HAT. A little bit of Gaussian programming later and he now has a fascinating little display that reacts to movement above the Skywriter. Read how he did it here.

Vision

Dean Walker’s grandfather-in-law is 92 and is gradually losing his sight. In particular, he has real problems reading the on-screen television guide. So, Dean has constructed a box and a controller, called EVA, using a Raspberry Pi that downloads the TV schedule from an internet API and then reads it aloud via Google Translate. You can read how he did it here.

Clock

Don and his wife have a two year old daughter. They’re trying to teach her the concept of time, and get her to understand that, perhaps, one o’clock in the morning is not the perfect time of day for play! To help with this, Don has taken an off-the-shelf clock, hacked it around with a Dremel and inserted a ShiftBrite bright LED as a backlight. He’s then hooked it up to a Raspberry Pi which is coded to tell the ShiftBrite what colour it should be depending on the time. Their daughter then knows to associate specific times of day with a colour, like red for sleep, yellow for play. It’s a lovely idea and you can find out more about it on his blog.