Birds, Fireplaces and Training Courses feature in today's Raspberry Pi Roundup!

Tweet, Tweet

Elizabeth Demaray, in collaboration with computer scientist Ahmed Elgammal and Rutgers University’s Art and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, has developed a way to determine if music affects the moods and habits of birds. Masquerading as a bird table, PandoraBird plays music in the background while birds eat from the table. A Raspberry Pi plays the music and has a camera for monitoring how long the birds stay on the table. If the bird is still there when the music ends, the Pi queues up another from the same genre to see if the bird will stay to listen. Read more over at Elizabeth’s site.

Crackle, Crackle

Jaret Burkett from Texas has taken an old television and placed it behind a fire grate. He’s then hooked up a Raspberry Pi to the TV, downloaded a fireplace video from YouTube and then looped it on the Pi. The result is terrific – a Raspberry Pi Fireplace! See how he did it here.

Training... er... Training

The Raspberry Pi Foundation has just announced the imminent availability of two online training courses that will help you get started with the Raspberry Pi and get a certificate at the end of it. The courses are:

• Teaching Physical Computing with Raspberry Pi and Python
• Teaching Programming in Primary Schools – particularly for existing primary school teachers looking to broaden their abilities.

They are both four-week courses and they commence on 20th February.

I think this is a great idea. It gives the opportunity for qualifications to all those teachers who aren’t able to (or aren’t released to) attend a full-on Picademy. It’s also great news for people like myself who help to run Jams but aren’t used to delivering workshops in a ‘teachy’ way.

For the full announcement, go to the Foundation website.