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Raspberry Pi Roundup - 24th March 2015
Oscilloscope
Steve Schuler wanted to build an oscilloscope. He used LEGO, an Erector set, a LittleBits motor and a Raspberry Pi which generates the PWM necessary to drive the motor. The motor is hooked up to a spinning mirror that sweeps the laser across some graph paper, creating a straight laser line. The motor control is programmed on the Pi using ScratchGPIO. You can read more about it on Steve’s blog post
Rail safety
Network Rail is to use a Raspberry Pi-powered device to monitor safety at level crossings. Currently, level crossing “black spots” are monitored 24-7 by CCTV. The Raspberry Pi solution, developed by pupils at Haberdasher’s Monmouth School for Girls (pictured above), monitors only when the safety barriers are in position. Anne Kavanagh, the head of the school’s physics department said:
“The clever part of the solution is that Network Rail will capture, and therefore be able to analyse, solely potentially unsafe behaviour that has activated the camera through breaking an invisible infrared beam when the barriers are in position.”
PiNet
Raspi-LTSP is an ingenious way to run a school Raspberry Pi laboratory. It allows the teacher (or IT manager) to set-up an old PC that hosts the full Raspbian operating system which then gets ‘pushed’ over the network to individual Raspberry Pis. This allows the administrator to maintain one copy of the OS rather than update dozens of SD cards. It also gives the ability for students to have individual logins to the system and to save their work to the master server rather than the individual SD card of the Pi they are working on.
Andrew Mulholland, the creator of the system, has now announced a name change. The system will now be known as PiNet, which I’m sure you’ll agree is a great improvement. With the change of name comes a new version of the software which you can download from here.
