Raspberry Pi Roundup - 29th June 2015

Wildlife

This is a nicely thought-out Kickstarter which puts the Raspberry Pi Camera Module to good use to capture pictures of wildlife. The unit comes in a weatherproof case with holes in the front for the camera lens and a PIR module to detect movement. When movement is detected, software triggers the capture of an image which is stored to the SD card. They’re using a Raspberry Pi A+, which means much lower power-usage, and include an 8800mAh LIPO battery and Adafruit converter so that you can place the box in a location and run it without worrying about how you’re going to power it. You can get everything you need to run your very own wildlife camera for £95. Go to Kickstarter to read more. More information about the project is available on their website.

Chickens!

Darren Steele came back after a holiday to find that a fox had eaten all his chickens. Undeterred, Darren bought more chickens and decided to come up with a way to protect them from the predators. His solution? Hook a Raspberry Pi up to a winch system via some relays and lift the entire chicken coup several feet into the air. He programmed it all with some C code and added a simple Android phone app as a remote control. You can see a BBC report on his efforts below. Thanks to the Raspberry Pi Foundation for finding this story. You can read more about Darren’s escapades by paging through his blog.

RGB

Kevin Gleason has written a tutorial for wiring up an RGB LED to the Pi and then how to create an Android app to control it remotely, via the PubNub service. It’s a nice proof-of-concept piece, and will also introduce you to the world of Android programming via the clear code he’s written. Read more here.