Obviously, you can use Scratch on many different platforms, including the Pi, but never before have I seen a video in which Scratch is taught in about 10 minutes!
Roehampton University’s Miles Berry has created a video tutorial which does just that!
Affordable HDMI high definition screen for the #RaspberryPi
Alex Eames of RasPi.TV and Dave Mellor of Cyntech have teamed up to create a new Kickstarter for a cheap HDMI-capable screen, primarily for the Raspberry Pi.
This is one of the best campaigns for Pi hardware I’ve seen – mostly because the two guys behind it are a) trustworthy, b) driven to get this product to market, c) genuinely ‘nice’ and d) have a wealth of experience and technical know-how.
The HDMIPi screen is a 9-inch 1280×800 screen which is powered by a 12V power supply. I’ll let the guys explain more in their video:
The screen can be got for £65 at the moment (limited to the first 250 backers). This is a bargain considering the nearest competitor (Lilliput) is priced at over £200 for a 7″ screen.
Based on the info on Kickstarter, I can highly recommend this screen (the pictures of it and the quality you get are amazing for the price!)
HDMIPi Affordable 9″ High-Def screen for the Raspberry Pi by Alex Eames – RasPi.TV — Kickstarter.
New product found: @4tronix_uk PiRoCon robot controller for #RaspberryPi
eBay vendor 4tronix, (@4tronix_uk) who have proved themselves to be very good at customer service (just ask @gadgetoid or myself!) and super-fast on delivery have just released the PiRoCon – a GPIO robot controller plugin board.
It has the following features:
- 5V 1.5A regulator to power the robot and the Pi from 6V to 9V batteries
- LED indication of 5V and 3.3V power status
- Dual H-Bridge driver to drive 2 DC motors (or 2 sets of 2 if using paired motors on each side of the robot)
- 8 bi-directional level-shifted GPIO signals
- All GPIO signals have 3-pin connectors (power, ground and signal)
- 4-pin male header to directly plug in an Ultrasonic distance sensor. Only uses a single pin on the Raspberry Pi GPIO
- If you don’t like the default pin allocations for anything, simply remove the relevant jumper and use jumper wires to connect to your preferred signal
- 2 of the GPIO connectors can be used as servo drivers
- Expansion board support. This is provided via the I2C bus and the expansion boards can be stackable – add as many as you like!
- Currently available is a 16-channel servo/PWM driver board
- Coming soon: analogue I/O expansion, 16/32 digital I/O expansion, LED indicator board, LCD Display
- Includes mounting pillar and screws so it can be securely mounted to your Raspberry Pi (rev B only) – no more expansion boards flapping in the breeze!
- All of this is directly supported in Scratch GPIO 3.0 onwards – many thanks to Simon Walters (@cymplecy) for some excellent work
The board will set you back just under £20 which is excellent value for a robot board. I can’t afford one myself right now but I would buy one if I could as the feature set alone makes it worth the money, in my opinion.
It does require some soldering (as you can see from the contents picture above) but nothing you should worry about too much as all the surface-mounting is done for you already.
Read more and order from eBay here
I have no affiliation with 4tronix aside from being a satisfied customer!
#RaspberryPi Pi NoIR camera filming in the dark
Alex Eames from RasPi.TV has started what is probably a series of experiments with the Pi NoIR. He’s using an IP cam to provide an IR light source for the camera and has created a video that shows you the kinds of results you can get.
Simple C++ API for the #RasperryPi camera module
As the title says, Chris Cummings has developed a C++ API for the camera module.
New product found – Pi Wingman GPIO expander for the #RaspberryPi
Ciseco have brought out something called the Pi Wingman. The Wingman is a GPIO expander that can be used in a variety of different ways to breakout the GPIO pins, even if there is already something sitting on top of them. It’s easier to let the pics speak for themselves:
The Wingman costs all of £2 including VAT.
I’m not affiliated with Ciseco, I’ve just met them a few times at the Cambridge Raspberry Jam!