Raspberry Pi Roundup - 16th December 2015

GPS tracker

David Sulpy over at Initial State has done a great tutorial in which he uses an Adafruit Ultimate GPS board to create a GPS tracker system. There is a quick set of instructions here and a more comprehensive set here. Really interesting project for those of us who like to communicate with satellites and actually use the incoming data for visualisation.

Zero Ethernet

This is a great little hack that doesn’t require much knowledge to do. Alex Eames had purchased a little ethernet breakout board from DealExtreme and, following a thread on the Raspberry Pi forums, connected it up to the Pi via the SPI bus. A little change to the /boot/config.txt to load the correct driver and voila, an ethernet connection! Having got it working on an A+, he transferred it over to a Zero. It’s a little slow, but it’s perfect for IoT applications. Find out how he did it here.

Headless boot

David Maitland has worked out the series of commands and edits that you need to carry out in order to automatically make your Raspberry Pi headless and available on your network from first boot-up. It involves using a Linux computer to edit files on the SD card before you put it in your Zero. There is still no way of doing this from Windows, however, so your actual ability to use this still relies on having a Linux computer at your disposal. Read more here.

Raspbian Jessie update

Simon Long has continued his great work on the base operating system for the Raspberry Pi. The latest update includes the following:

• The Node-RED visual development environment is installed by default. Especially great news for those who are into the “Internet of Things” as it’s a great language to use for that purpose.
• New graphical package manager – terrific stuff. Now you can install and uninstall all different kinds of software without issuing command-line instructions.
• New Python library GPIO Zero is installed by default.
• Scratch has been updated.
• Epiphany has been updated with better support for streaming video services.
• Updated configuration app – new wait-for-network option.