Raspberry Pi Roundup - a bendy lamp projector, a Pi-powered ISA card and an FTP server tutorial

Bendy Lamp

Nord Projects Lantern “transforms any surface into an ambient, smart interface.” It uses the Android Things OS and scripts written by Nord Projects to project different images onto surfaces, depending on the orientation of the lamp, which is detected by an onboard accelerometer. They are intending to bring out several scripts for the project including the delightful Space Porthole which projects the night sky onto the ceiling, as if you’d knocked a hole through! You can find out how to build your own over on Nord’s website where they’ve brought together a bill of materials and very clear instructions.

Thanks to Raspberry Pi for spotting this one.

You can see all about the project below:

ISA card

Scott Baker has a vintage computing habit! For his latest project, he wanted to solve the issue of transferring files between a PC/XT and a modern desktop. To do this, he created an ISA card PCB (seen above) which takes a Raspberry Pi Zero W, mounted by the GPIO pins. A 1kb RAM chip allows communication between the ISA interface and the Pi and the Pi runs a Python server that makes local files available to the shared memory on the ISA card. The PC/XT believes that it has a floppy connected, but what it actually has is the Pi server! You can read a lot more over on Scott’s blog and see a video of it in action, along with lots of details, below:

FTP Server

Matt Hawkins has written a great tutorial in which he deals with installing the necessary software, and configuring it, to create an FTP server. This is useful for file storage and file management. Take a look here.