Raspberry Pi Roundup - 30th August 2016

Apologies for the lack of posts! I've been busy turning 40 and helping out at our town's bi-annual celebration weekend!

Dinosaurs!

A couple of weekends ago, geeks, tinkerers and hobbyists gathered in Guildford for EMF Camp, a 3-day technology gathering for like-minded individuals. Talks ranged greatly in their topics but this one in particular caught my eye and I was lucky enough to catch it via live stream. Now, you too can listen to Dr Lucy Rogers talk about how the theme park Blackgang Chine, on the Isle of Wight, recruited her, some programmers and some engineers to bring their collection of animatronic dinosaurs up-to-date. Using some electronics wizardry and visual programming language Node-RED, they were able to program the dinosaurs to react to passers-by and make the theme park experience that much richer. You can watch a recording of Lucy’s talk here. If you want tobrowse the rest of the EMF Camp talks, visit this page.

Emulator

Dave Honess, over at the Foundation, has announced the availability of a SenseHAT emulator. It allows you to use a virtual SenseHAT and program it with the sense_hat Python library. Pretty neat! You can even manually alter the virtual sensor readings to see it affecting your program. You can access the emulator and see a variety of sample programs over at trinket.io and read a bit more about the development of it over at Raspberry Pi HQ.

Holiday snaps

Manoj Nathwani wanted to record his experiences on a holiday in which he would visit 4 countries in 5 days. So, he utilised a Raspberry Pi 3 and a Camera Module, sewing the camera directly into the strap. His photography results were mixed, but it’s a great example of how to use the Pi as an embedded, wearable device. You can see Manoj talk about the project on the EMF Camp recordings website and you can read about it on his blog.

Analog Zero

The MagPi has published their review of the Analog Zero from issue 48. It’s an extremely positive review and really highlights how usable the board is. I really like it (I covered it in a preview a few months ago) as it makes using analog inputs so easy. You can read the review here and buy the Analog Zero from The Pi Hut.