Raspberry Pi Roundup - 8th May 2015

Night-time

Matthew Mombrea had a problem. He provides hosting and runs his own servers and needs monitoring tools to let him know when they go down. Of particular concern was being notified at night without his wife being woken up. So, he took a Pibrella and wrote his own daemon script that cycled through all his servers, checking to make sure they were working and, after a certain number of failures, the Pibrella would light up and sound the buzzer. He’s written more about the process he went through to get it all working on his blog and he’s published his code on GIthub.

Neopixels

Stewart Watkiss, over at PenguinTutor.com has written some code in Python using the Tkinter library that produces a GUI for controlling NeoPixels with the MyPiFi NeoPixel controller board. The GUI has nice big buttons (so it’s good for touchscreen set-ups) and has plenty of options for standard sequences. It’s a work-in-progress and you can find out more and download his code over on his blog post.

PIN

Sandy Macdonald has taken a Pimoroni Explorer HAT and used it to create a PIN entry system. At the moment, the entry system lights up some LEDs and makes a buzzer sound, but obviously it could be extended to unlock a door, a box, or whatever you choose. He’s written it up as part of the Pimoroni learning portal but has done a brief write-up of it on his blog and linked from there to the Github repository containing the full write-up. Read the brief summary here or visit the full write-up here.