Raspberry Pi Roundup - 22nd July 2016

Last week was a bit quiet in the Raspberry Pi world, so our Roundups have been a bit lacking. So, here is a bumper issue to get you in the mood for hacking at the weekend!

Dashboards

Initial State is one of the ever-growing list of sites that take data from your internet of things device and allow you to create dashboards displaying that data. It is one of the better ones, and they’ve certainly ploughed a lot of development time into creating a very tactile, attractive front end.

In their latest tutorial, they have taken readings from the Raspberry Pi’s internal system and process data and created a dashboard that gives you an idea of the internal health of your Pi. Take a look here.

micro:bit Bluetooth

Barry Byford is a bit of a Bluetooth nut and he has turned his attention to the micro:bit and its Bluetooth interface. In this example (in the video above) he shows us how a micro:bit button press can be detected by the Raspberry Pi and then used to trigger LEDs on the Ryanteck Traffic HAT. Details of the code and how to do it are contained in the YouTube description here.

Kickstarter

Alex Eames, of RasPiO and RasPi.TV fame has just launched his latest Kickstarter. This one is for a rather nice 30cm/12″ ruler filled with GPIO Zero reference code, as pictured above.

Alex previously did an RPi.GPIO reference ruler that was half the size so we know that the quality of this new one will be very high. The new ruler is, again, in black circuit board material with gold highlights and white & gold lettering and really looks the business.

Alex sent me a sample of the new ruler a couple of weeks ago and I must say I was very impressed. The lettering is clear, the code content is great and above all else, it’s sturdy and makes an excellent addition to your Pi toolbox.

Thoroughly recommended.

You can get hold of the new GPIO Zero ruler by visiting the Kickstarter page. Earlybirds are £4 plus postage for just the GPIO Zero ruler by itself, rising to £5 thereafter. There are other rewards as well, so it’s well worth checking it out.

Minecraft backup

Albert had a problem. He quite often corrupted or messed up his Pi’s SD card. Unfortunately, also on the SD card was lots of Minecraft work carried out by his kids. This meant that lots of work was being lost. Cue much tears before bedtime. To combat this problem, Albert has written some script that automatically FTPs the Minecraft worlds off-Pi. By changing the Minecraft shortcut to run his script, it means that whenever his kids now exit from Minecraft, their worlds are automatically backed up. See how he did it here.

Altoids

11-year old Elijah wanted to create a retro gaming machine that was tough enough to survive trips and being shoved into a bag, and cheap enough that he could give them away as gifts. To do this, he turned to the Raspberry Pi Zero and an Altoids tin. Together with some power circuitry and routing of the USB ports, this is a great mash-up of lots of the other Zero projects that you can find elsewhere online. Take a look at Elijah’s write-up.