They produce a lot of good material over at Penguin Tutor and it’s well worth keeping an eye out for new stuff.
This tutorial is a bit of fun – they’ve taken a reindeer head decoration from HobbyCraft and outfitted it with flashing LEDs, a speaker and a Pi. A PIR sensor detects movement, flashes the LEDS and plays a pre-recorded sound. Great fun.
No doubt others have found this before but I don’t think I’ve seen it done as neatly as this.
Using bindings for WiringPi, it’s possible to control the Pi’s GPIO pins through Ruby. Blogger “Mika” has worked out how to do it and has written about it here.
Carrying on from my previous post, you can now contribute to the general festive feeling in my house by controlling my PiRingo Christmas decoration.
If you go to: http://109.151.115.130:8081/index.html you should get an interface to fire off various effects.
Please comment on this post to say you’ve done it! Be great to hear from everyone over the Christmas period!
If I’ve got it turned off, of course, you won’t get any response, but it’ll be on during the evenings and weekends!
You should be able to see streaming video of the PiRingo board (which might be a bit out of focus until I can figure out a way to suspend the camera above the Pi) here:
Merry Christmas!
Alan O’Donohoe (@teknoteacher) has written a blog post in which he shares one of his favourite methods for teaching programming. Called “Play, Hack & Share”, the method works best with pairs of young programmers (Navigator & Driver) who look at an existing piece of programming and share their ideas with the wider group about how to improve upon what’s there.
Well worth a read if you’re branching out into teaching, for instance with Code Club or at a Raspberry Jam.
Darren Christie, who came to the Cambridge Raspberry Jam on 7th December as one of our fantastic Jam Makers, has written a great blog post with equally great photographs from his time at the event. With permission, I’ve snaffled some of the pics for my own write-up. 🙂
Linux User & Developer magazine writer Gareth Halfacree has written a review for the new Gertduino board which has now been published on the magazine’s website. Although praising the board for features and the pure fact that it sits nicely on top of the Pi, Gareth heavily criticises the inadequate and confusing documentation that comes with the board. This is a shame because mating an Arduino to a Pi improves it’s abilities greatly.
