Raspberry Pi Roundup - 29th May 2015

Emotive Stuff

A few of the Raspberry Pi Creative Technologists attended the Art Hackathon in Greenwich on 16th-17th May and got together with some others to create a lovely art project called Emoti. The project takes a Twitter feed, analyses the tweets for keywords and assigns emotions to them. The amount of each emotion is then rendered on a web page. Wavy strips of clear plastic were then mounted on top of the screen (an HDMIPi) to give the rendering a 3D ‘feel’. Audio was also keyed to the emotional readings and the volume of different sound tracks altered according to how much a particular emotion was being expressed through Twitter. Yasmin Curren has written up her experience of the Hackathon on the Foundation’s blog. You can follow Yasmin on Twitterand read her blog here. Code for the project is available on Github.

Explorer

Sandy Macdonald has written an excellent explanation and tutorial for using a shift register with the Pimoroni Explorer HAT on top of the Raspberry Pi. It allows you to control 8 LEDs using just 3 output pins on the HAT, which sounds impossible, but is in fact entirely possible thanks to the way a shift register works! Read his tutorial here.

Movie Star!

Here’s a bit of silliness for you. It looks like two Raspberry Pis are destined to go BOOM in the trailer for the movie remake of Point Break. Here’s the video – it occurs around 1:28 in the trailer and you can see the Pis stuck to packs of C4. Apparently they are going to detonate the packs via the audio jack, which makes little sense but I suppose it’s just about feasible.