Tickets for the Pi Wars robotics competition are now available.
Competitor tickets are currently sold out. However, we hope to increase this number so please do join the waiting list. Competitor tickets are £5 when available.
Tickets for spectators are also available, at £3 each (children aged 16 and under, as always, go free).
More details and links to Eventbrite to register are available on piwars.org.
Richard Saville, aka The Average Man, has just launched his first Kickstarter campaign.
The ProtoCam is a prototyping board that plugs into the Pi’s GPIO pins and has a mounting space for the camera module.
There are loads of different applications for this board – simply put, anything you want to do with your camera module from adding a flash (lots of ultra-bright blinkies!) to adding a countdown timer to… well, anything you can come up with, basically.
Richard has put together a fantastic Kickstarter page, with lots of detail, and his promotional video (below) is also excellent.
The board costs £8 (rising to £9 post-Earlybird) and comes with all the fixings you need, including a GPIO header and a shorter camera ribbon cable. It’s great value. I’ve already pledged, and I recommend you do too if you’ve got, or are thinking of getting, a camera module.
Just a quickie this one. Dave Featherston has taken a Pi, a couple of stepper motors (with driver boards), some wood, some toothpicks and some straws, soldered up a couple of bits of perfboard, added a buzzer and created this rather neat level crossing.
Neil Brown from the University of Kent has interviewed Alan O’Donohoe about Raspberry Jams, including discussing the upcoming York Jam, and has just published it online. Read it here.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a new version of Raspbian is now available, as well as a new version of NOOBS containing that new release. The following features are included in the update:
Berkeley professor Joshua Bloom is part of the beta-testing team for ShakeAlert, an earthquake early warning system. He has used a Raspberry Pi to tap into the data source of the system to provide him with a 5-second warning should a large earthquake occur. You can read more here. The data source is not currently available to the public, but it is hoped that the use of a low-cost board to demonstrate the feasibility of personal warning systems could be used to get the project funded fully.
