Raspberry Pi Roundup - a furry Amazon Alexa device, a Pi-controlled laser cutter and in-depth with Raspbian Lite

Furby!

Zach Levine has taken an annoying toy (a Furby) and stuffed it with a Raspberry Pi Zero W, a Pimoroni Speaker pHAT and a stepper motor driver board.

He has then installed the Amazon Alexa software on the Pi and programmed it to obey his commands, triggering the robotic behaviour of the Furby. You can read a complete account of the build here and see a video of it in action below:

Laser Cutter

Alex Eames recently bought a K40 laser cutter to add to his workspace. After playing with the toolchain for a bit, he discovered a piece of software, called K40 Whisperer, which could be installed on Linux and was compatible with his cutter. So, he installed the software and reduced the number of hoops he needed to jump through to get a design from design software to actual cutting. You can read how he did it here.

Raspbian Lite

Dave Johnson has written up a great walk-through of a streamlined, lightweight installation of Raspbian Lite. He takes you through installing the image, setting up things like wifi and keyboard settings and then installs Samba so you can talk to your Pi over a network. Take a look here.