Raspberry Pi Roundup - the Christmas Tree returns, a low tide display and a Star Wars-themed MP3 player

Christmas comes early

Our circuit board Christmas Tree has gone on pre-order. This product comes in two flavours: a pre-soldered tree (for £15) and a soldering kit (for £12). The tree is three-dimensional, slotting together from push-out circuit board parts and features 25 LEDs tied to individual GPIO pins. Take a look here. Pre-orders are being taken until October 15th and will be shipped on November 15th following manufacture.

Low Tide

London-based educator Giles Booth has taken an Inky pHAT and placed it on top of his Raspberry Pi. He’s then used screen-scraping software Beautiful Soup to interrogate the MET office website and grab ride times. The script to do this is scheduled every morning and the output is then displayed on the Inky pHAT. Giles does point out that, being a screen-scraper based script, it is reliant on the MET office not changing their website in any way, so consider it a beta until he gets access to a more stable API. Read how he did it here. The Inky pHAT will be available soon from our store!

The Dark Side

Dan Aldred took a LEGO mini figure alarm clock in the shape of everyone’s favourite Sith Lord and turned it into an MP3 player. Using a Raspberry Pi Zero W, Pimoroni Speaker pHAT and some buttons, together with some Python code based on PyGame, he went to a great deal of trouble to fit it into the mini figure, cutting out various bits of plastic from the interior.

You can read more and see more photos of the build on his blog. See it in action in the video below: