Raspberry Pi Roundup - 2nd May 2015

The Big News - New CEO for the Foundation

A couple of months ago, the Raspberry Pi Foundation were advertising for a new CEO to replace Lance Howarth. Well, they have now found him in the shape of Philip Colligan. Philip, who comes from Nesta will start in July and oversee all the Foundation’s charitable activities, which includes outreach, education and that sort of thing. Nesta is all about encouraging young people to become makers, so Philip is well-suited to the role. I really hope he’s able to hit the ground running and take the Foundation’s activities to the next level. Read more here.

Bumps

George Mallingbury has taken a GPS serial device and an XLoBorg board (it’s got an accelerometer on it) and attached them to his Pi. He’s then used some Python and SQL commands to record the jolts, jiggles and bumps caused by rough road surfaces. His results are really good and really show the number of pot holes he’s driven over. He’s provided all the source code (linked from his blog page) so take a look here.

Greenhouse

Romilly Cocking and his wife own an allotment about half a kilometre from where they live. Romilly wanted to set up a wireless monitor between the greenhouse on the allotment and their home. To do this, he’s experimenting with a Wireless Things (previously Ciseco) XinoRF (which is a wireless-enabled Arduino compatible board) which will be battery powered and seeing if he can get the Raspberry Pi at his home to pick up the signal. This is just in the preliminary stages at the moment, and Romilly isn’t even sure if the signal will carry that far, but he’s blogged about it and posted up the code he’s using in his proof-of-concept. Read more here.