Raspberry Pi Roundup - new products, a tweeting growbox, a news reader and a Giant Guitar

New products!

Just a quick FYI, we've launched some new products today - coloured GPIO headers and new Cameras: check out the shop homepage for more information.

Growbox

Speaking of cameras... Alex Ellis decided to grow some cress and he wanted a way of monitoring the growth. To do this, he used a Raspberry Pi Zero, a Pi camera and a cheap plastic box to grow the cress in. The Pi and camera are mounted to the outside of the box, with a hole for the camera and then Alex uses some Python code to automatically take pictures of the cress’ progress and tweet out the image. You can read about how he did it here and see his code here.

And now... the News

Les Pounder has been having a play with Laura‘s GUI Zero Python librarywhich makes it easy to create GUIs. He’s created a program which reads in news via RSS and then displays the top news stories inside a miniature GUI. It’s an interesting example of how to use publicly-available sources inside your project and it’s good to see Laura’s fine work being used in this way. Read more on Les’ blog here.

Guitar!

Chris Riebschlager and the Dimensional Innovations team came up with an over-sized build for the two-day Boulevardia music festival in Kansas City. They built an electric guitar for the event which weighs in at 500 pounds and is 12 feet in length. It is made out of MDF and steel and the strings are comprised of 16-gauge wire. They used a Bare Conductive Touch Board to sense the plucking of the strings. The Touch Board then sends messages to a Raspberry Pi which decides which sound sample to play. They added arcade buttons on the side of the guitar to allow the playing of chords (the ability to play chords on the strings somewhat difficult due to the size of the thing!) You can see the guitar in action in the video below and read more and see more of the build over on medium.com.