Raspberry Pi Roundup - 20th August 2015

Bananas

The Raspberry Pi Foundation’s Carrie Anne Philbin was recently in Sydney giving talks and workshops to do with the Pi. As part of this, she set-up a slideshow tutorial at speakerdeck.com that tells you how to use the Pimoroni Explorer HAT Pro as a musical instrument by plugging it into bananas! All the code is included in the slideshow and this is a great way to make a start with physical computing. Take a look at the slideshow here.

Dongles

Alex Eames has conducted a series of field tests (okay, not in a field exactly) on three wi-fi dongles: the official Foundation dongle, a standard Edimax dongle and the dongle from The Pi Hut. He tried them out in different locations throughout his house in Poland and recorded the signal strength and power usage for each dongle in each location. He then carried out analysis on the results and has presented them in great style on his blog at RasPi.TV. The results are very interesting and really give you a sense of which dongle performs best and which dongle uses the least power. Read the blog post here.

Duck

Teenagers Ben Hope, Harri Bell-Thomas and Benedict Allen from Monmouth teamed up at Young Rewired State’s Festival of Code at the end of July to create Buoy. Buoy is a small, autonomous boat shaped like a duck which records environmental conditions on our waterways including temperature, humidity and UV readings. A live Pi Camera feed from the boat gives a first-duck viewpoint. You can read more at YRS here and a nice summary at Free Press here.