Raspberry Pi Roundup - 27th March 2015

Bees

A Newcastle-based engineer has developed a system to track the flight paths and behaviour of bees at London’s Kew Gardens. A pack consisting of a tiny RFID tag and an aerial is glued to the back of each individual bee and the tags are then read by multiple Pis which are dotted around the hive and flower patch. You can read more about it on the BBC’s website.

NFC/Minecraft

Tony Dicola has written a great tutorial over on the Adafruit site in which he uses an NFC reader and tags together with a Raspberry Pi running Minecraft. The scripts he has written allows you to program different NFC tags to act as Minecraft blocks. You scan the tag and on the screen out pops the corresponding Minecraft block. It’s a great proof-of-concept that happens to be a lot of fun as well. Read more here

Vintage

Oscar is a great fan of the PDP range of computers, in particular the PDP 8/I. He decided that, instead of getting hold of an existing vintage model, he would build a brand new one by using the Raspberry Pi running the SIMH emulator. He went the whole hog and created a case and an acrylic panel for the front as well as wiring up the Pi’s GPIO pins to a collection of toggle switches and LED. It’s quite a project – you can read more here.