Raspberry Pi Roundup - 9th December 2015

Raspberry Pi Roundup - 9th December 2015

Dog Day Afternoon

Matt Reed is blessed with working in a pet-friendly office. However, it has been known for him to completely lose track of his dog, Bean, and so he set about working out a method for tracking him. To do it, he attached a bluetooth beacon to his dog’s collar and then installed 3 Raspberry Pis to trianguate (or pi-angulate) the position of the beacon. It’s an ingenious system and he’s written an iOS app to visualise the floor plan and Bean’s position. Read more here.

Zero Wi-fi

Shintaro decided he wanted to add wi-fi to his Zero. Rather than mess about with converter cables and adapters, he has instead taken apart the dongle and soldered it directly to the correct lines on the Pi. He carefully kept the two USB data line wires the same length to avoid messing up the signal and then wrapped the whole thing in clear insulation. You can see from the picture above what he did to the dongle (which is an Edimax). Using the raw 5V output from the power supply can be a bit dodgy, so caution is advised.

Zero Controller

Terence Eden is a self-confessed tinkerer based in Oxford, UK. His wife picked him up a copy of The MagPi with a Zero on the front of it and he decided to embed it inside an XBox controller. He cut a few bits and pieces out of the controller and slotted the Zero in, hot-wiring the USB connection from the inside. He loaded up the RetroPie gaming emulator and lo and behold, he’d created a self-contained gaming machine/control device. Take a look on his blog for how he did it.

Advent

Richard Hayler loves doing stuff with the SenseHAT, especially with the 8×8 matrix. This time, he’s coded an advent calendar using the matrix for display and the joystick for control. Take a look at his blog for more information. A bit of imagination is required for some of the pictures, but it’s a lovely idea! He’s even provided all the code on Github.

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