Raspberry Pi Roundup - news on security exploits, a blinky status display and a Google AIY project

Spectre/Meltdown

Two security vulnerabilities announced in recent days, Spectre and Meltdown, affect modern CPUs from Intel, ARM and AMD. There has been a fair amount of press coverage (Google it for more!) and, until a recent tweet from Raspberry Pi CEO Eben Upton, there were fears that the Raspberry Pi could be affected. We now know that the Pi is not susceptible to either threat. Eben has written a fascinating article over on raspberrypi.org that explains why the Pi isn’t affected in a great deal of detail. Head over there to read all about it.

Blinkies

James Behrens has written an extremely detailed tutorial in which he uses a HUB75 HAT (a special kind of LED interface board) together with a Raspberry Pi to drive an LED matrix. He then uses the OpenWeatherMap API to get weather data and then blits it to the matrix. The tutorial is here and you can see a video of the matrix in action below. You can get hold of a HUB75 HAT from Adafruit or from The Pi Hut.

Google AIY