Raspberry Pi Roundup - an exciting CamJam EduKit update, a heartbeat monitor and a SenseHAT email notifier

EduKit update

We are pleased to announce that there are brand new versions of the CamJam EduKit 1 worksheets now available from the CamJam website. In addition to the classic RPi.GPIO versions being revised to feature 40-pin Pis and various small typographical changes, we now have available worksheets that use the GPIO Zero Python library.

For those of you who do not follow such things, GPIO Zero is a relatively new Python library developed by Ben Nuttall of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Dave Jones, who also created the picamera library, amongst other contributors. The library allows a much simpler way of programming the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins and is much more suitable for beginners. It has become extremely popular in the Raspberry Pi community and is now the de-facto standard for GPIO coding. In fact, many intermediate and advanced level programmers also use it as it allows you to get straight into GPIO programming without some of the “messing around” you need to do with RPi.GPIO.

You can find the new worksheets here and you can buy the EduKit here. We’re hoping to do GPIO Zero versions of the EduKit 2 and 3 material in the next few months.

Heartbeat

Daniel Fernandez has taken a Raspberry Pi, a Polar H7 heart sensor and a 3.5″ screen and created a heart monitoring system. The system allows you to wear the sensor, which sends readings to the Raspberry Pi which then graphs the results in real-time. A 3D-printed case completes the project, along with the software which he’s made available on GitHub. Read more over at The MagPi.

SenseHAT email monitor

Gus over at PiMyLifeUp has written some excellent software and accompanying tutorial that enables you to turn your Pi and SenseHAT into an email-inbox-status device. The SenseHAT’s LED matrix is used as a readout to tell you how many unread emails you’ve got. You will need an IMAP-enabled email account for it to work (such as Gmail). Take a look at the tutorial here. You can buy a SenseHAT from us here.