Raspberry Pi Roundup - a spiral speaker, an ESP8266 tutorial and a thermal printing camera

Spiral Speaker

Recently, I reviewed the JustBoom AmpHAT and found it to be an excellent piece of kit for those that like their audio ‘just right’. Well, now it’s little brother, the Amp Zero pHAT has been used in a project that looks really lovely. Frederick Vandenbosch has taken the pHAT, a Raspberry Pi Zero, a speaker, and a Pimoroni Scroll pHAT and created a beautiful ‘spiral speaker’ with built-in spectrum display. He’s written the whole thing up as a tutorial and it’s been posted on the Pi Supply blog here. You can view a speeded-up video of the build below. You can get hold of the Amp Zero pHAT here.

ESP8266

Rui Santos from Portugal has written an excellent, comprehensive tutorial for those who want to get into ESP8266 boards and control them from a Raspberry Pi. He uses Python on the Raspberry Pi, with imported MQTT libraries, and C code for the Arduino-like ESP8266. The ESP8266, which is on the same network as the Raspberry Pi, then 'subscribes' to a page on the Pi which is changed when a user clicks on a button on the Pi's web interface. And voila! You can click a web button and have an LED connected to the ESP8266 light up wirelessly! You can read the tutorial here.

Thermal Printing Camera

Over on Hackaday.io, Pierre Muth has documented his build of a Raspberry Pi Zero-based camera that prints photographs on an internal thermal printer. Called the PolaPi-Zero, it uses an Adafruit Nano Thermal Printer and some other parts as well as a 3D-printed case. The case files can be found here and the code for the project is on GitHub. You can read all about the build, and see more photos over on Hackaday. Watch a video of the project here: