Raspberry Pi Roundup - 5th June 2015

Sci-Fi your desk

Frederick Vandenbosch is currently building a desk into which he will embed a Raspberry Pi. He’s basing his design on the console from Tron Legacy (see below). While I don’t expect it will be all-singing, all-dancing, he’s doing it in the right spirit! It’s certainly going to have plenty of blinkies, based on what he has written so far. His ongoing tutorial/guide to his build is on the Element 14 website.

Scanning and Shopping

Denis Papathanasiou has taken an off-the-shelf USB barcode scanner and plugged it into his Raspberry Pi. He’s then written some code to use barcode data stored at the Open Product Data (POD) project to tell the Pi what the product is and then plugged it into the Amazon API to let him re-order things with a quick scan. He’s provided all the code on Github. Read more here.

Marvel(lous)

The Raspberry Pi Foundation and Marvel, in association with the Ant-Man movie, have launched a competition in the US, the prizes for which include tickets for the Ant-Man premiere in California and also an engineering workshop at Disneyland. Ant-Man, of course, is all about how someone who is very small can make a difference. I guess they found a certain poetic satisfaction in teaming up with the tiny Raspberry Pi!

Here’s what the Foundation says about the competition:

We’re looking throughout the United States for girls ages 14-18 in grades 9-12 to create and share micro-technology-based DIY projects they have built using readily accessible and found materials. Upon completion of the contest, build instructions for the winning projects will be provided to a STEM-based girls program in the winners’ home community. Each winner will have the opportunity to lead a workshop in building her project for the selected program in her community.

You can read more on their blog here or visit the MicroTech Challenge website here.