An OS for looping MP4s, a GPIO reference site and a Commodore 64 Slack hack in today's Raspberry Pi Roundup

Loop MP4s

Sometimes, you just want to be able to loop some videos with no muss and no fuss. Enter German artist Julius Schmiedel who has developed a downloadable OS image, called MP4Museum, based on Raspbian Lite and OMXPlayer which reads MP4 files from a USB drive and just plays them alphabetically, on a loop. And, oh yes, it’s read-only which means you can just yank the power from it without causing OS corruption! Get the OS here.

GPIO Boards reference

Phil Howard, who works for awesome maker firm Pimoroni, has a pet project he and others (including @RogueHal13) have been working on for a couple of years now: pinout.xyz. It is a fantastic database of add-on boards for the Raspberry Pi that shows you what GPIO pins are being used, what for, and which ones are, therefore, free. So, for instance, this is the link to the SenseHAT page which shows you that the only pins used are the I2C  pins. Here’s a picture of the interface, which you can see is really well done.

Commodore 64 Slack

Jeff Harris recently identified a severe problem with Slack: there isn’t a client for the Commodore 64. I know, crazy, huh? So, he decided to write one in 6502 assembly. Using a C64 Userport device, he’s connected the Commodore to a Raspberry Pi which is, in turn, connected to the Internet and the Slack API via NodeJS. You can read how he did it and get hold of the software here