Raspberry Pi Roundup -24th April 2015

LEGO rover

Xian has done a great job on this LEGO rover. It utilises Lego Power Functions and the Raspberry Pi and can be controlled via a web browser. He explains his build, with block diagrams and details on wiring and explains his use of the Navio board for controlling things. Read about it here.

Stepper Kickstarter

The guys at Canadian company Roboteurs are currently running a Kickstarter campaign to fund their new stepper motor driver board – the SlushEngine. It looks like a stunning piece of kit and has the following features:

• Controls up to 4 bi-polar stepper motors
• Max 7A / motor
• 9-35 V DC operating range
• 1-128 microstepping capabilities
• Integrated motion engine in stepper driver
• 4 limit switch inputs
• 4 general purpose industrial inputs
• 4 general purpose industrial outputs (3A / 24V)
• 8 additional logic level I/O
• Thermistor temperature sensing
• UEXT expansion connector
• Raspberry Pi fused power source

Take a look at the Kickstarter here if you’d like to find out more.

Drive

Over at Adafruit, Brennen Bearnes has written a great tutorial and helper script that will enable you to use an external drive as a “root partition”. This means that although your Pi still boots from the SD card, thereafter everything else is handled by the external drive. He’s used a full-sized drive here, but I guess the principle works for things like USB pen drives. Read the tutorial here.