Raspberry Pi Roundup - Pi Wars weekend, a Re-speaker pHAT tutorial, information about Pi 3B+ power management and a touch keyboard for Sonic Pi

Pi Wars this weekend!

It's Pi Wars weekend this Saturday and Sunday in Cambridge! Come and watch Raspberry Pi-powered robots tackle the 7 challenge courses: The Duck Shoot, Pi Noon, Straight Line Speed Test, Slightly Deranged Golf, The Minimal Maze, Somewhere Over the Rainbow and the fiendish Obstacle Course. We'll be there as part of the large Marketplace selling Raspberry Pi goodies including CamJam EduKit 3 with its brand new, redesigned motor driver board. You can still get tickets from here, or pay in cash on the day. Under-18s go free and adult tickets are just £5 per day or £7 for the whole weekend.

Re-speaker

Ivan Holland over at CPC Maker Space has done a great write-up of this little board that gives your Raspberry Pi ears. He takes you through the steps of installing the software necessary to use Google Voice Services. This makes the pHAT a great, smaller alternative to Google’s own AIY Voice kit. You can read the tutorial here. You can buy the pHAT from us here.

Power management

One for the hard-core techies. James Adams from Raspberry Pi Trading has written a fascinating article about the new power management chip on the 3B+, which is the MXL7704 from MaxLinear. There’s lots of technical detail here, but it’s quite accessible. You can read more here.

Touch Keyboard for Sonic Pi

Robin Newman has taken a Raspberry Pi, a RasPiO Pro HAT and an Adafruit MPR121 touch capacitive breakout and created a touch-sensitive keyboard for Sonic Pi. He’s documented the whole process over on his blog along with all the installation instructions and scripts you need to create your own. Read more here. As he points out, you can do this in a variety of ways. You can see it in action controlling Sonic Pi on a Mac below: