Raspberry Pi Roundup - 21st October 2015

Back to the Future

Happy Back to the Future Day! In honour of this momentous occasion, when we can expect Marty McFly to travel from the past and appear somewhere above Hill Valley, California, I’ve decided to re-post this excellent project from Carl Monk. In his extensive write-up, he explains how he built and coded the Delorean Time Circuit and Flux Capacitor from the movie. It’s great stuff, really in-depth and definitely worth a re-visit, whatever your time period. So head over to Carl’s blog to read more or view the video below:

Scratch with GPIO

When Raspbian Jessie was launched a week-and-a-bit ago, included in it was a new version of Scratch. In addition to an overall improvement in speed/performance, native GPIO support was introduced as well as the ability to control the Camera Module. This means that users now have an ‘officially supported’ way of integrating physical hardware using Scratch on the Pi. As well as basic GPIO control, several add-on boards have been integrated to make it easy to use them. You can read the official announcement from the Foundation here and you can see examples of the new commands available here.

Floating

Here’s an interesting open-source robot. It’s made up of 3D-printed parts and a tyre tube and uses a Raspberry Pi to control brushless motors beneath the water which propel it along. Take a look at the 3D printable parts here and the team’s (Spanish) discussion forum.

Next bus

Ismail Uddin has published a nice little tutorial on Science Exposure. In it, he uses a 16×2 HD44780 LCD screen and some Python to produce a next-bus tracking system. He’s uploaded the Python script to GitHub for easy download. Nice little project requiring quite a lot of wiring! Read it here. All you need to know is your bus stop number and you’re away.