Raspberry Pi Roundup - 3rd August 2016

Clock

Kevin Uhlir has been in contact. He’s built a lovely clock by using a Raspberry Pi. Built into the screen of an old monitor, the Pi retrieves data from Weather Underground and maps from Google Maps. He’s built several of the units, including some for friends and family. It looks lovely! He’s even extended it with amblight effects on some of the units. You can read more over on his blog or at Hackaday. Full instructions and the code can be found here.

Umber-ella

An engineer over at Device Plus has come up with an over-engineered solution to the perennial problem of knowing when to take an umbrella with you. An ultrasonic sensor detects when someone has approached the front door, the Weather Underground API is used for forecasts and a Grove Pi board is used to hook everything up. If you’d like to do a similar project, take a look at their tutorial here.

Mobile GPS

Rachel Gibbs, over at Initial State, has written a great tutorial which gets a Pi Zero online via a mobile data connection. She’s added a GPS module to the FONA board and then powered the lot using a small LIPO battery. The system streams to their IoT service. You can read the full tutorial here. If you’re in the States, you’ll probably be looking to go to Adafruit for some of the bits. If you’re in the UK, Makersify is probably your best bet for everything except the LIPO.