Raspberry Pi Roundup - 15th June 2016

Sense HAT

Keith Ellis does a rather good line in tutorial videos over at pi-tutorials.co.uk. Recently, he wondered if it was possible to use the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins with the SenseHAT attached. At first glance, it seems that it’s not possible due to the surface-mount header (as you can see in the picture above). However, he found a way. Take a look at his video below:

Bottled Out

The members of Noisebridge in San Francisco recently attended the Bay Area Maker Faire. They took with them Flaschen Taschen – a 10′ by 9′ display of 1575 clear bottles with WS2801/Neopixel strips embedded inside. Using a Raspberry Pi, these daisy-chained strips are controlled to display various effects (such as plasma etc) and even a game of Pong. It went down really well at the Maker Faire and you can read more about it here.

Sliders galore

Richard Saville, aka The Average Man, has created a brilliant showpiece for Jams and other events. He’s taken a robot arm controlled by 6 servos and hooked it up to an ABelectronics servo controller board. He added a NiMH battery to power it and a step-down converter to reduce the voltage. Then the really clever part: he added 6 slider potentiometers and an Analog Zero board to control the servos and fastened it all to a base. A clever bit of coding, including help from our Pi community, enabled the arm to move smoothly. You can read a lot more about how he did it on his blog.