Raspberry Pi Roundup - 9th September 2016

Button Game!

Albert Hickey wanted to create a game for kids which would get them running around. So, he conceived a button-pressing game where buttons, mounted on tubes, would light up and need to be pressed to score points. This was similar to other reactions games (such as the giant Raspberry game featured at the Big Birthday Weekend):

So, Albert got some NRF24L01 wireless transceivers and hooked them up to mini Arduinos. Battery powered, they were then placed inside Pringle tubes and staked to the ground using screws. The Raspberry Pi was then used to receive and send signals, run the game and keep score. You can see it in action below, a run of the game after the initial prototyping stage:

And here is the game fully mounted on the Pringles cans:

Spaced apart, and at the level of the Pringles cans, this will create an excellent challenge for active children! You can read more about the build and see the code over on Albert’s blog.

Plasma CNC

Will Baden from Nebraska has developed a plasma CNC machine (which is similar to a regular CNC router but uses plasma) to help him to build and make BIG things. The table controller is a GRBL shield attached to an Arduino and this is sent gcode commands from a Raspberry Pi 3 which is used as the visual interface. He’s entered it into the Hackaday prize competition. You can read a lot more about the project over on Hackaday.io and you can see the machine in action, including the Pi interface, above.

Egg Catcher

Dan Aldred wrote an article for MagPi issue 47 in which he creates a simple game using the SenseHAT and the Raspberry Pi. In the game, you play a red “basket” at the bottom of the screen which moves according to the SenseHAT’s accelerometer. You use the basket to catch yellow “eggs” which drop from the top of the screen. Read how to do it and get access to the code here. See it in action in the video above.