The Pi Hut relaunches with over 3,500 new products; a piece of Neopixel furniture and bacteria experiments in today's Raspberry Pi Roundup

The Pi Hut re-launch

We are excited to announce a re-launch of our web store. We have added over 3,500 maker products to our catalogue, so take a look and enjoy seeing all the new toys!

Light Furniture

James Poole has taken a string of Neopixels (buy it from us in the UK) and hooked it up to an Arduino. He’s then taken a Raspberry Pi and used it to control the Arduino via a web interface. James then mounted the whole lot on a block of wood and a metal strip to turn it into a rough piece of furniture. Much blinkiness, and he’s uploaded all the code so you can try it out yourself. Read more over at his blog and checkout the code here.

Bacteria

A Mexican team of Paloma López, Leslie García, and Emmanuel Anguiano (together, they are known as Interspecifics) have created a nature-driven musical instrument. Micro-ritmos is an art installation in which ‘music’ is generated by patterns formed by bacterial cells. The material is called Geobacter, which is an anaerobic bacteria found in sediment. All the code for the experiment can be found here. The comments are in Spanish, but careful use of Google Translate can help there.

The hardware is based around a Raspberry Pi B+ and camera module with an Arduino. The music synthesis is done by SuperCollider. The bacteria triggers lights to be activated and variations in the cells produce patterns. The Python program ‘learns’ as the patterns are watched and that information is sent into the synthesizer. It’s live coding created by a biological process.

You can see a video of it in action above. The subtitles are in Spanish.