Speed analyzer

Vincent Willcox has taken one of Percheron Electronics’ e-paper HATs and created an internet speed analyser. He has released all the code onto GitHub so that you can re-produce his work, even if you don't have one of these excellent HATs. Take a look here. The speed scan is triggered either by scheduled task (cron) or by pressing a button on the HAT.

Customization

Element 14 have just announced that they are to offer a customization service for the Raspberry Pi. A consultancy service is available for companies to tailor the Raspberry Pi to their needs including the ability to remove connectors, add components and re-configure the board layout. The minimum quantity for your proposed new board is 3000, so it’s quite a healthy investment (around £100k). More information about the service can be found here.

Hamsters!

Last year, Los Angeles-based software engineer Michelle Leonhart brought two Roborovski hamster puppies into her home. Since then, she read on the internet that the average Roborovski hamster runs four marathons every night. She decided to put that to the test. Enter the Raspberry Pi. She connected the hamster wheel to a VCR head to reduce friction and then attached a magnet. Then, she placed a hall effect sensor near the wheel and had the Pi record how many times the wheel turned. Some more mathematics later and she finally deduced how far her hamsters were running every night. I won’t spoil the ending by giving away the results – head over to the opensource.com blog to read the full story.

Ubuntu

Ubuntu MATE 15.10 for the Raspberry Pi has been released. You can download the image from this page. The guys over at Pi Podcast have covered the release on their latest podcast and gave it a big thumbs-up. GPIO even works on it.