Raspberry Pi Roundup - 31st July 2015
Plotter
Norbert Heinz cannibalised two optical drives for their parts, then hooked them up to a Raspberry Pi via a couple of H-bridge chips before adding an arm with a pen. This gave him a drawing mechanism that could be programmatically moved on the X and Y axis. He then added a stepper motor to enable the pen to be lifted on the Z axis and voila, he has managed to create a plotter. You can read more about his build, and perhaps replicate it, on his blog.
Retro
Spencer Organ has written up a great tutorial on creating a retro gaming machine from a Raspberry Pi and a small composite monitor. It adds a nice method for building the machine to some other tutorials and brings it all together. Read the tutorial here.
Bedside
Peter Roca has created a piece of bedside furniture and embedded a Raspberry Pi into it. He calls it Bedbot, a Daytime Initialization Assistant. This beautifully constructed table, made out of black walnut and maple, acts as an alarm clock and music player. It sounds very small-scale, but as you can see from the pictures above and below, it’s anything but. He’s done a full write-up of construction, hardware and software on his blog. The Raspberry Pi Foundation has done a nice write-up of the project here.
Radio
Gordon from IQAudIO has done a bang-up job at restoring his late grandmother’s vintage Roberts radio. He’s used one of IQAudIO’s own boards, the Pi-DigiAMP+ and a pair of small speakers to output music from a variety of online sources via Shairport Sync software (which is an AirTunes emulator). It really is a labour of love and he’s not done yet! Read more about the project over on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s blog.