Raspberry Pi Roundup - 28th June 2016

Whisperer

Recently at Moogfest, which is a music and technology festival set in North Carolina, artists Kyle McDonald and Surya Mattu exhibited an installation piece known as the WiFI Whisperer. The Whisperer was connected to the festival’s wifi network and sniffed out data contained on the mobile phones and devices that were also connected to the network. As people walked by, their devices would be monitored and accessed and the resultant data displayed on monitors. The Whisperer also ‘whispered’ the information out of attached speakers. The whole set-up used eight Raspberry Pis. You can read more from McDonald in this Wired article, along with suggested ways of preventing this kind of thing from happening.

McRoboFace

Our friend Gareth over at 4tronix has just launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund McRoboFace: 17 bright (Neopixel-type) RGB LEDs in a “friendly face” formation. The board is controllable from a Raspberry Pi, Crumble, Arduino and other base boards. Robin Newman got hold of an early version and has been using it to highlight sound effects from Sonic Pi (view the video here or below).

Conversation

Robin Newman, who managed to do far more with Sonic Pi than I ever could, has done it again. This time, he’s programmed Sonic Pi with some voice samples which sends commands, via a (pretty darned excellent) PiCon Zero controller board, to two 4tronix McRoboFaces. You can see the results and get some explanation in the video below:

Spider charts

Albert Hickey has taken inspiration from a tweet by Sway Grantham in which she wanted to create spider charts (radar charts) automatically. So, Albert worked out a CSV file format that worked, created a blank chart and wrote a script to read in the CSV, producing the custom chart. Read how he did it here.