Raspberry Pi Roundup with a home appliance monitor, a Rubik's cube solver and a trip to a Scouts camp

Good vibrations

Here’s a good little tutorial I found on GitHub. It uses an 801s vibration module and a Raspberry Pi Zero to detect vibrations from a home appliance, such as a washing machine. If it detects stillness for a specified amount of time, the appliance is assumed to have finished running and a tweet is sent to let you know. It’s a nice combination of hardware and software and can be found here on GitHub.

The cube... of Rubik

Francesco Georg has used a Raspberry Pi, a Camera Module, LEGO bricks, some EV3 motors and a BrickPi add-on board to create this Rubik’s Cube solving robot. He figured out how to use a two-phase algorithm developed by Herbert Kociemba via a Python library he found on GitHub (Open Source FTW). You can chat to him on the original Reddit thread and view a video of it in action below.

Scouting

Ben Nuttall of the Raspberry Pi Foundation recently attended Wintercamp, a Scouts activity camp run at Gilwell Park in Chingford, UK. He was there, along with a set of Pi-Top Ceeds, to run activities described as “a gentle introduction to creative tech and experimenting with sensors”. You can read more about his time at the camp here.