Raspberry Pi Roundup - 13th January 2016

Zero over USB

The Raspberry Pi Zero’s USB port is an OTG port, meaning that hardware-wise programming it over USB should be possible. Well, some clever people over on the Raspberry Pi forums have worked out how to get the software working. Andrew Mulholland has now documented the process so that more people can do it. It’s still not for beginners, and you might want to wait for a more user-friendly solution, but if you have an application for programming over USB, give it a shot. You can read the instructions over on Andrew’s blog.

High Tide

Richard Saville (aka Average Man) lives in Southend-on-Sea, which puts him on the East coast of England. He has taken one of his prototyping boards (theProtoPal) and the components contained in the RasPiO 7 segment display kit and created a high tide display. It uses a public API to get the next high tide time and then pushes that to the 7-segment display. He has also laser-cut a case to go around it. It’s a great little project and he has written it up into a tutorial with annotated code and everything you need to re-create it. Read how he did it here.

Half Life

A very clever chap over at SolderChips is currently designing and 3D-printing a scale replica of a Half Life 2 sentry gun/turret. A Raspberry Pi will be used to do facial image recognition and then tell an Arduino to control some servos to move the turret. Well worth keeping an eye on this project. Read more here.