Raspberry Pi Roundup - 7th April 2015

Sphere

Cabe Atwell has posted about his latest project on the Element 14 website. It’s a hard, plastic, spherical ball inside which is mounted a Raspberry Pi, a couple of batteries, a Neopixel strip and an accelerometer. By rolling the ball, the accelerometer takes readings and when the ball is in a certain orientation the Neopixels light up and generally make things pretty. You can read how he did it and see a video of it in action here.

Cosmic

A 15 year old schoolboy won the Institute of Physics prize at the recent Big Bang Fair by using a Raspberry Pi to analyse sensor readings and prove part of Einstein’s theory of relativity. Pratap Singh, from The Perse School in Cambridge, used two Geiger-Muller tubes to detect cosmic ray muons which prove the existence of time dilation. He then created a mathematical model and statistical reports on the Pi to analyse the data. You can read more at the IOP site here.

Android?

Someone has been working on porting Android 5.1 (Lollipop) to the Raspberry Pi. It only runs on the Pi 2 (due to the different processor) and I’m not sure how much of it is functional. I’ve not had time to try it out myself, and the instructions are for Linux only, but it might be worth a try.Read all about it here.