Raspberry Pi Roundup - 3rd September 2015

Fireflies

Making it’s debut in the Olympus Photography Playground in Vienna in February 2015, Neon Golden’s art installation “Swarm” mimics the behaviour of fireflies via LEDs which are strung from the ceiling at various different heights. Using both Raspberry Pi and Arduino control mechanisms, there are motion sensors which detect the movement of visitors and trigger lighting changes according to code which is based on the Boids algorithm by Craig Reynolds. It looks absolutely stunning and apparently really drew the crowds in at the OPP. You can see photographs of the build and the results on Neon Golden’s website. You can see more photographs on DeZeen.com.

Lizard

Roberto Marquez has set-up a Raspberry Pi to take pictures of his lizard. The Pi listens for a GPIO pin to change state, triggered by a capacitive touch sensor.All his Java code is available on GitHub.

Astro

Teacher Dan Aldred from Thirsk School has been telling Linux User and Developer all about his year 7 club’s winning entry into the Astro Pi competition. He covers everything from how the club was set-up, how they came up with their idea of tracking the ISS in orbit, how they split up the work and the collaborative process which helped their idea come to fruition.You can read the interview here. You can, of course, get hold of the SenseHAT (which is the board at the heart of the Astro Pi) from us.

Traffic

Over at MathWorks’ MakerZone, Eric Wetjen has written a tutorial/article in which he shows a way of using a webcam to count cars on a highway. The webcam captures images and then they use Simulink to analyse the images. The data is then sent to IoT service ThingSpeak and then analyse the data further using MATLAB. It’s quite complicated, and does have some (well-documented) flaws but it’s a good proof-of-concept. Read more here.