Raspberry Pi Roundup - 27th July 2015

Hello everyone! My apologies for the lack of posts over the last week - I've been convalescing after a rather nasty bout of food poisoning. I'm back on my feet again now and am now playing catch-up on all the Raspberry Pi news. Here's just some of the fresh stories out and about the Pi world.

Punchcards

Gemma May Latham has been looking into ways that Minecraft can be used to explore artistic uses of textiles. With help from David Whale (co-author of the excellent book Adventures in Minecraft) she built a punchcard reader that is powered by an Arduino. The punchcard is fed into a slot in a laser-cut box, the holes are ‘read’ by the Arduino then the data is pushed through to the Raspberry Pi where it is converted into a CSV file and then fed into Minecraft Pi Edition. Read more here.

2048

Four students from Imperial College London have ported the game 2048 across to the Pi using Assembly language. Franklin Schrans, Jacek Burys, Saurav Mitra, Srikrishna Subrahmanyam teamed up for their first year final ARM project, coded the game and then added a GPIO-interfaced joystick to control it. There’s even an ‘artificial intelligence’ mode! They’ve released all the code on Github and set-up a website for it here.

Robotic Starters

The Pi Wars team has created a page on the Pi Wars website that should provide enough information for anyone to get started with Raspberry Pi robotics (and maybe even enter the competition!) It includes a list of things you need to build a robot, recommendations of kits to buy, a list of ‘skills videos’ from The Raspberry Pi Guy and details of an open source robot from Ipswich Makerspace. Read the guide here.

Stereo vision

Patrick Catanzariti has written a tutorial in which he streams the video output from a Raspberry Pi camera then splits it into a stereo view in Javascript. This enables him to view the page through Google Cardboard and get a Raspberry Pi-powered VR experience! Read more here.