Skip to content
Tetris on a table, live streaming video from your Raspberry Pi, Australian space mission and PIXEL comes to desktops in today's Raspberry Pi Roundup
Table-Top Tetris
John Cooper from York Hackspace has created a tabletop Tetris game for their space. It uses a Raspberry Pi 2 to control strips of Neopixel-like LEDs which sit in little foam cube holes beneath the translucent tabletop surface. It’s low-resolution but it is, frankly, beautiful and it’s not limited to just playing Tetris either – a version of Snake is planned and the system is capable of two-player action too! He welcomes your pull requests on GitHub if you have any game ideas! The code is available here and you can read a little more in this blog post from York Hackspace.
Live Streaming
Christian Cawley over at makeuseof.com has done a great tutorial on using avconv together with a Raspberry Pi camera module to stream to YouTube. Take a look here.
Space adventures down under
Just picked up on this in NASA’s ISS update report for 19th December.Australia has just launched their first payload to the International Space Station. Onboard is a project called CubeRider, which appears to be a Raspberry Pi Model A+ attached to a sensor board with a non-official camera module. I daresay the actual package is more complicated than that (the ISS specifications being very strict, to say the least!) but I can’t find too much information on it. Here’s what the NASA report says about CubeRider:
CubeRider is an Australian educational module utilizing a Raspberry Pi, internal camera, sensors that monitors internal environment variables, some radiation, ISS dynamics and movement, and runs computer code written by 9th and 10th graders.
It appears, from the report, that the project isn’t entirely working at the moment.
You can read more about CubeRider on their website.
PIXEL on PC/Mac
The folks over at Raspberry Pi have announced that PIXEL/Raspbian is now available for x86 machines. This means that you can now run the new desktop environment on a regular PC or Mac. You can download it here as a live-booting ISO image. It will also be available tomorrow on the front of The MagPi, so if you want to wait until you have physical media in your hands, you can! The only things it doesn’t include are Mathematica and Minecraft Pi Edition (for reasons of licencing). So, if you want a unified experience across all your machines, this is the way to go!
