Raspberry Pi Roundup - 17th June 2016

MotoZero and ZeroView

Great news from our very own Jamie and partner-in-crime Richard Saville (aka Average Man) recently - they have launched two new products exclusively for The Pi Hut.

The first is a very pretty new motor driver board called MotoZero. It allows you to control four DC motors independently, courtesy of two H-bridge chips. It is in the Zero-form factor (although it will fit any 40-pin Pi), comes in kit form (solder it yourself) and costs £10. In a crowded market of motor controller boards, it’s got a lovely aesthetic design and the price is very reasonable considering that you get two chips. You can buy it direct from The Pi Hut.

The second product is for the camera module and the Raspberry Pi Zero and it is called the Zero View. It is a long piece of circuit board onto which you attach the camera and comes with two ‘suckers’. These suckers can be used to attach the board to a window or piece of glass. It is ideal for the Zero because it mounts to the bottom of the Raspberry Pi, leaving the GPIO pins available. As you can see from the picture above, it attaches to the Zero with four screws, but it will attach to any other Pi with just the two at the top. Spacers and fixings are included so everything fits together very well. It costs £7 and is available from the Pi Hut.

Balloon Launch

Richard Hayler, his sons and Nic Hughes launched the first Surrey-based Raspberry Pi HAB flight last Thursday. They took pictures on the Pi from almost 35km high and was successfully recovered from a churchyard in Itchen Abbas. You can read more about the preparations and the day of the flight, along with a video of the actual launch, over on Richard’s blog.

Spotify

George Cushen has written a rather good tutorial on creating an alarm clock using a Spotify playlist. It works on the Raspberry Pi (though any Linux-based computer running something like Ubuntu will also suffice) and involves installing several different packages and then linking an alarm scheduler to a Spotify plugin. Ingenious stuff and well worth checking out if your tastes are musical. Read more here.

CBE

Eben Upton, Chief Exec of Raspberry Pi Trading, driving force behind the Raspberry Pi and one of the nicest people I know has been named a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list. He was said to be “shell-shocked” at the news. I’m sure the entire Raspberry Pi community will join with me in congratulating him and his family! Here’s how the BBC covered the story.