POV | Raspberry Pi

Thursday grab bag

I’m in a bit of a rush today; we’re driving down to Wales with Pete in an hour or so to visit the UK factory, which is celebrating a special anniversary tomorrow. So here’s a grab bag of stuff from around the internet that people have been doing with their Pis. You guys have been having a busy week.

Beer Church, a group attached to the hackspace at Pumping Station:One in Chicago, have been brewing the good stuff using Raspberry Pis to control cooling.

This isn’t the only brewing project we’re aware of, but it’s the first we’ve seen pictures from. If you’re using your Raspberry Pi to control fermentation (bread, beer or kimchee), please drop us a line; we’d love to hear from you.

Rob’s hackspace tour of the US continues, and the photos that are emerging make the rest of us wish we were there with him – it looks brilliant. Our friends from Adafruit dropped by last night’s event at NYCResistor. A couple of photos below: you can see more on Adafruit. Rob has added an extra stop today: if you’re in the CS Lounge at Colombia University at 5.30pm, he’ll be there to talk about Pi.

Lady Ada demonstrates Adafruit’s Raspberry Pi PoV wand

Rob, capturing hearts and minds.

Back in the UK, Chris Roffey got in touch to tell us about a series of Coding Club books he’s writing for kids. You can read more about the series by clicking on the image, and there’s a PDF you can preview of the introduction to the Python Basics book, due next month.

One of my favourite projects this week has been this face recognition security camera from Kean Walmsley. He says: “Here’s the elevator pitch: Facecam is a security camera that recognises a resident’s Facebook friends when they come to their front door and allows for tailored communication both to the resident and the visitor.” Read more about it here and here.

Not all projects have to have productive value, though: here’s a Raspberry Pi missile launcher for your office from itr8r.

Raspberry Pi Retaliation. Click to visit site and download source code.

Heather heard someone call their Raspberry Pi a “Raspberry Pee Eye”, and was inspired to make this crocheted raspberry complete with Tom Selleck moustache.

Click to visit Heather’s blog.

And here’s a bit of video: aaa801 has got open webOS, HP’s mobile/tablet operating system, running on the Raspberry Pi. He says:

“This video shows the first public build of open webOS running on the Raspberry Pi. There is no GUI at this point in time for ARM builds, there should be one within a month or so. When the GUI is up and running I will release a ROM to the community.” Thanks aaa801 – we’re looking forward to it!

Right. I’m off to Wales. Wish me luck with the caravans.

Painting with light (and a Raspberry Pi)

Our friends at Adafruit just mailed me something remarkably cool. Click the picture to visit their project pages and learn how to do this yourself.

Sing along: "And it burns, burns, burns..."

The picture you see above is the result of a Raspberry Pi persistance of vision (POV) project similar to the Magic Wand we featured here a few weeks back, where moving lights are photographed at a slow shutter speed to produce a still image. This one’s more sophisticated and requires a bit more kit (a 3-colour LED rope, hula hoop and bicycle in particular – you can buy all the electronics you’ll need to make your own, including the LED rope, from Adafruit, but you’re on your own for the hula hoop and the bike) – and the results are outstanding. There are instructions and code at Adafruit’s project pages, along with some more pictures.

A python drawn using Python

Phillip Burgess, who put the whole thing together, says: “Total project time, starting from zero Python experience to having a working demo, photographs and a tutorial, was about two days.” Brilliant stuff.

On a related note, Limor “LadyAda” Fried, the founder of Adafruit, is currently up for Entrepreneur Magazine’s Entrepreneur of the Year award. Please head over and vote for her; she’s doing simply amazing things for electronics, hacker and maker education, and we’re very proud to know her.

Mike Cook’s Magic Wand

Mike Cook, electronics Superman, swapped some emails with us after we last posted about one of his projects. Eben and I both wanted to talk to him about a feature from Mike’s Body Building column in Micro User from 1989, where Mike made a magic wand that wrote letters in the air.

BBC Micro User, July 1989

I read the magazine and lusted after the thing; but at my girl’s boarding school in rural Bedfordshire, where we didn’t have an electronics lab (although we did have a huge domestic science suite), mercury switches and leds were about as easy to get your hands on as unicorn poo – you could buy a kit from the magazine, but I’d spent all my money on bubble gum and cello rosin. Eben had a very lucid memory of that particular column too, and hadn’t been able to get the parts either. We both mentioned that it was our favourite design from the Body Building column while thanking him for the projects he’s done with a Raspberry Pi so far. (Mike, ever self-effacing, says that similar projects have been done a million times since then, but he does believe that this was the first time such a thing ever appeared in print.)

So Mike went quiet for a couple of weeks, and then came back with this: a magic wand controlled by his Raspberry Pi. I have been scampering around the study like a schoolgirl since I got his email. He has, as always, written exhaustive instructions if you want to make one yourself, complete with software you can edit on your Raspberry Pi, tips on font design, and notes about the legality of mercury switches (which, as it turns out, are still available and can be used legally as long as you’re not going to sell your magic wand).

Of course, these days, we’re probably supposed to call this a persistance of vision project. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s still a magic wand. Thanks so much, Mike; this is quite a lot like having a rock star you worshipped as a kid re-write a song for you. And I’m sorry about the beating your shoulder took during testing.

A housekeeping note: I’m away for a couple of days travelling to and setting up for ~~DEF CON 20 in Las Vegas, which we’ll be attending as vendors~~. Bugger. Unforeseen circumstances and all that; we are no longer attending, because a problem with liability for Nevada sales tax came up at the last minute. Really sorry if you were hoping to see us.