Raspberry Pi Roundup - a robotic spider, a rain sensor system and Christmas resources

Spider

Computer engineering student Shoyu has created a four-legged insect robot which uses a Raspberry Pi 3 and an IO Expander Board to control the servos. He’s added a Camera Module and then created a control interface that can be used from a mobile phone. He’s written the whole lot up as an Instructable and you can see that here. See it in action below:

Rain

Alex Eames, over at RasPi.TV has been experimenting with a rain sensor. He’s figured out how to use the digital-out of a breakout board to trigger a buzzing alert when water is detected. By tuning the breakout with a potentiometer, it can be configured to detect the first few drops of rain and let you know. That means that your worries about not bringing the washing in when it rains are gone! You can read a tutorial and see the code here and you can get hold of a small kit to do the project yourself here.

Christmas

Raspberry Pi’s Laura Sach has just announced that there are some new Christmas-themed resources available to get you into the festive spirit. I know, I know, it’s still November, but anyway!

The first project is in Scratch and shows you how to build a memory game using Christmas jumpers. Take a look at that one here.

The second uses a SenseHAT to create an advent calendar with lights you can ‘open’ each day using the Pi’s clock to control access. Take a look here. (Obviously, this will only be worthwhile from Friday onwards!)

The next project teaches you how to use Sonic Pi through coding the Twelve Days of Christmas carol. For this project, visit this page.

The last project is a bit more involved on the coding front and uses Python to help you to analyse a Twitter account for tweets made in the last year. By training a ‘classifier’, you can work out if the person who owns the account has been naughty or nice! Take a look here.

For their article on the resources, go to Raspberry Pi.