Raspberry Pi Roundup: Solderless headers, an artificial intelligence OS and a new French Pi site

Solderless GPIO headers

If you are scared to solder, or don’t want to go to the expense of buying one, there are a few things that you just can’t do with the Raspberry Pi. It’s true that many add-on boards come with their GPIO headers fitted, but some (like the Pi Zero and pHATs) need them soldering on. Well, Pimoroni to the rescue. They’ve developed GPIO Hammer Headers – you take the header, press it into the relevant holes, put a plastic jig around it and then… hit it with a hammer. The headers have special little “nubbins” that go through the holes and then grip the back side of them. Ingenious! You can now get these headers, and the jig, from us!

Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence software Mycroft was originally a Kickstarter. Designed as an open source alternative to Siri, Google Now, Cortana and Echo, it was originally developed for a Raspberry Pi 2 and is hosted on GitHub. Now, the Mycroft team has released an SD card image for the system for Raspberry Pi 2 & 3 so you can ‘talk to your Pi’ without needing to do anything apart from write a card. You can read more and download the image here and add a speaker and USB microphone to make your voice-processing artificial intelligence Pi come to life.

For our French visitors (but also for our English visitors)!

Pierre-Lin Bonnemaison has been in touch. For almost three years, he has been working on two websites for the Raspberry Pi. The first, Raspbian France is in the French language and has various tutorials and news as well as links to downloads and an active forum. The second, How To Raspberry Pi, is a translation of the first site into English. He’s done a really good job on putting the site together and it’s great to see resources written in a language other than English. So, if you speak French, head over to Raspbian France or How To Raspberry Pi if you speak English.