Raspberry Pi Roundup - 12th June 2015

Beer!

The guys over at Initial State have written a comprehensive tutorial to create an Internet of Things Beer Fridge! By using a Raspberry Pi, some sensors and a Wii balance board (!), the software is able to determine how many beers are in the fridge, whether the door is open or closed and the temperature inside the fridge. The output is streamed to their online data service which you can then look at using a tablet/phone/browser. Read more here.

Duino

Alex Eames from RasPi.TV recently ran a very successful Kickstarter campaign for the RasPiO Duino – an add-on board for the Raspberry Pi. The Duino contains the same ATMEGA 328 chip that is on an Arduino and plugs directly onto the first 26 pins of the GPIO header. To complement the board, Alex has poured a ridiculous amount of effort into the documentation which comes in the form of an excellent book called Learning Arduino Programming with RasPiO Duino. The book is fantastic and takes you through a series of projects that you can do with your Duino board, explaining each step and concept as it goes along.

Following the official launch at CamJam on the 6th June, you can now purchase a RasPiO Duino for £12 plus P&P. If you haven’t got hold of one of these great little boards yet, I can thoroughly recommend it. It’s pretty simple to solder – you can view full instructions on how to do that here – and set-up and you’ll soon be learning how to do experiments and projects.

AstroPi

Richard Hayler and his Code Club are currently experimenting with the AstroPi board and were fascinated by the way you can display scrolling text and images on the 8×8 matrix display. Richard has created a little Python/Pygame app that will allow you to create an 8×8 image and then export it as a PNG or as a Python-ready list that can be pushed to the matrix. Read more here or download the code from Github here.