Raspberry Pi Roundup - build your own VR goggles, hack a Chinese digger and give your wedding some Pi sparkle!

VR goggles

Caleb has put together this lovely hack which involves a Raspberry Pi Zero, an accelerometer breakout board, a 5″ TFT screen, some cables and a shedload of cardboard. It all comes together as a pair of VR goggles and uses the p3d library on the Pi to display a 3D image. Read how to do it yourself here.

Digger

Australian John Graves has a 5-year old son who loves to play with construction toys. So, John has taken a Dark Water 640 motor controller board, which allowed him to control all 6 motors on a Digger Toy at once, and a Raspberry Pi Zero to create a new control mechanism. He’s then paired a PS3 controller to the Pi over Bluetooth and written some code to tie everything together. He later added LEDs and a Pi camera to the toy, just for fun. You can read all about how John did it over on his blog and see a video of the final test below.

Wedding Sparkle

Brian Lough wanted to put his own stamp on his wedding. He admits his wife did most of the actual planning of the day, but Brian brought some electronics and wifi magic to the table centre decorations, pictured in action above. He used Ikea Grono lamps as the main structure of each lamp and then added a Wemos D1 mini and a Neopixel ring for illumination. Each lamp was powered by two 1200maH battery banks bought from Poundland. The Wemos boards are sent commands from a Raspberry Pi Zero via a cheap wifi router which connected everything together. The programming on the Pi was done with NodeRED. You can read how to do it yourself over on Instructables and you can also see how it all works in the video below: