Raspberry Pi Roundup - 28th August 2015

Zoetrope

Brian Corteil has been working on his digital zoetrope for most of this year. At the recent Newcastle Maker Faire he showed off his creation. Later on, his brought it along to CamJam and showed the Raspberry Pi community what he’d been up to. The zoetrope uses 12 small Adafruit OLED displays connected to a single Raspberry Pi via SPI. By positioning yourself correctly at the edge of the zoetrope and giving it a swish with your hand (it doesn’t have motors, thus maintaining that true, historic zoetrope feel) the static images that pass by your eyes appear to be animated, thanks to “persistence of vision“. You can read more about how Brian put together the zoetrope here.

Cricket

Rohit Gupta wanted to monitor cricket scores while he was working in his office. The trouble is almost all the sites he would use to do this were blocked by his company’s web traffic filter. So, he turned to the Raspberry Pi and a piece of software called BeautifulSoup to create a web scraper which would poll an (unnamed) service once a minute and then display the results in summary form on an LCD from a Nokia 5510. The data displayed is as follows:

• Teams playing
• Currently batting team with overs underneath it
• The score in the largest font
• 4s/6s and Run Rate
• 1st Innings history if 2nd Innings is going on and 2nd innings PENDING if the first innings was underway.
• Match Status – Rains, Ended,In Progress etc

He has called the whole thing CricPi and you can read more here.

Basement

A basement full of old books but no way to monitor humidity and temperature. Enter a Raspberry Pi. This hacker has put together a DHT22 sensor and an LCD screen with the Pi in order to monitor environmental conditions in his basement. The collected data is then output to a .csv file so that he can see the results over time. He’s written the whole thing up as a walk-through tutorial. Read it here. It’s a great introduction to environmental sensors. A possible extension to this is to publish the results online with a stats service so that he can monitor trends in real time as the results are sent to the service.

Summit

Recently, some of the Foundation’s education team headed over to Bilbao, Spain for the EuroPython conference. Many of the talks were recorded and the Foundation have blogged about the ones that they presented. They are:

• Carrie Anne Philbin – Education: A Python solution
• Ben Nuttall – Physical computing with Python and Raspberry Pi
• James Robinson – Raspberry Pi Weather Station
• James Robinson – Pycon: a teacher’s perspective

These videos, along with a description of the weekend can be found here.