A fire sculpture, a virtual forest, a chess board and an upcoming event in today's Raspberry Pi Roundup

Fire sculpture

Le Attrata is an innovative fire sculpture created by Therm, made up of three stainless steel moths with 12-foot wingspans, set on top of 18-foot high spires. The moths (turbine-driven blast furnaces) ignite, spark, pop, and whine, while three human musicians “play” them like instruments. Two thousand programmable LEDs are embedded in the sculpture and glow and shift, projecting incredible light patterns. These LEDs are controlled by a Raspberry Pi 3 and FadeCandy. Read more over at The Creators Project and see more photographs over at Therm’s own website. You can see a video of it in action at Burning Man 2016 below.

Upcoming event

At The Pi Hut, we're hoping to attend the next Cambridge Raspberry Jam which is on 3rd December in Cambridge, UK. They’ll have the usual mix of talks, Show & Tell, Marketplace and, of course, workshops. General tickets for the Jam are available now and tickets for workshops will be available soon. Get your tickets from Eventbrite here.

If a Pi takes a picture in a forest...

Koen Hufkens is a research associate at Harvard University and his research focuses on “understanding the relation between climate (change) and seasonal variability in vegetation growth”. He’s also a maker and software developer and he has brought all these interests together to create the ‘Virtual Forest‘. The project uses a Raspberry Pi 2 to capture, via a Ricoh Theta S USB camera, a forest-scape and then deliver that picture to the Internet over an ethernet cable. You can try it out yourself here or read a lot more about the project by visiting the Virtual Forest website.

Chess computer

Maxim has used a Raspberry Pi to create a chess computer and he’s documented the entire process.

(The game) runs from an Arduino which controls the board, connected to a Raspberry PI which runs the chess engine Stockfish and a chess rules library called Chessboard. It is completely self contained, just plug it in, press the green button and you are playing.

First of all, he helps you to understand the build concepts by getting you to manufacture a noughts-and-crosses (tic-tac-toe) board:

And then gives you the instructions you need to build the full board: