Long read written by Pimoroni’s Paul Beech, best enjoyed over a cup o’ grog.

Every couple of years, I’ve done a “State of the Fleet” update here on the Raspberry Pi blog to tell everyone how the Sheffield Pirates are doing. Half a decade has gone by in a blink, but reading back over the previous posts shows that a lot has happened in that time!

TL;DR We’re an increasingly medium-sized design/manufacturing/e-commerce business with workshops in Sheffield, UK, and Essen, Germany, and we employ almost 40 people. We’re totally lovely. Thanks for supporting us!

We’ve come a long way, baby

I’m sitting looking out the window at Sheffield-on-Sea and feeling pretty lucky about how things are going. In the morning, I’ll be flying east for Maker Faire Tokyo with Niko (more on him later), and to say hi to some amazing people in Shenzhen (and to visit Huaqiangbei, of course). This is after I’ve already visited this year’s Maker Faires in New York, San Francisco, and Berlin.

Pimoroni started out small, but we’ve grown like weeds, and we’re steadily sauntering towards becoming a medium-sized business. That’s thanks to fantastic support from the people who buy our stuff and spread the word. In return, we try to be nice, friendly, and human in everything we do, and to make exciting things, ideally with our own hands here in Sheffield.

Handmade with love

We’ve made it onto a few ‘fastest-growing’ lists, and we’re in the top 500 of the Inc. 5000 Europe list. Adafruit did it first a few years back, and we’ve never gone wrong when we’ve followed in their footsteps.

The slightly weird nature of Pimoroni means we get listed as either a manufacturing or e-commerce business. In reality, we’re about four or five companies in one shell, which is very much against the conventions of “how business is done”. However, having seen what Adafruit, SparkFun, and Seeed do, we’re more than happy to design, manufacture, and sell our stuff in-house, as well as stocking the best stuff from across the maker community.

Product and process

The whole process of expansion has not been without its growing pains. We’re just under 40 people strong now, and have an outpost in Germany (also hilariously far from the sea for piratical activities). This means we’ve had to change things quickly to improve and automate processes, so that the wheels won’t fall off as things get bigger. Process optimization is incredibly interesting to a geek, especially the making sure that things are done well, that mistakes are easy to spot and to fix, and that nothing is missed.

At the end of 2015, we had a step change in how busy we were, and our post room and support started to suffer. As a consequence, we implemented measures to become more efficient, including small but important things like checking in parcels with a barcode scanner attached to a Raspberry Pi. That Pi has been happily running on the same SD card for a couple of years now without problems 😀

Going postal?

We also hired a full-time support ninja, Matt, to keep the experience of getting stuff from us light and breezy and to ensure that any problems are sorted. He’s had hugely positive impact already by making the emails and replies you see more friendly. Of course, he’s also started using the laser cutters for tinkering projects. It’d be a shame to work at Pimoroni and not get to use all the wonderful toys, right?

Employing all the people

You can see some of the motley crew we employ here and there on the Pimoroni website. And if you drop by at the Raspberry Pi Birthday Party, Pi Wars, Maker Faires, Deer Shed Festival, or New Scientist Live in September, you’ll be seeing new Pimoroni faces as we start to engage with people more about what we do. On top of that, we’re starting to make proper videos (like Sandy’s soldering guide), as opposed to the 101 episodes of Bilge Tank we recorded in a rather off-the-cuff and haphazard fashion. Although that’s the beauty of Bilge Tank, right?

Such soldering setup

As Emma, Sandy, Lydia, and Tanya gel as a super creative team, we’re starting to create more formal educational resources, and to make kits that are suitable for a wider audience. Things like our Pi Zero W kits are products of their talents.

Emma is our new Head of Marketing. She’s really ‘The Only Marketing Person Who Would Ever Fit In At Pimoroni’, having been a core part of the Sheffield maker scene since we hung around with one Ben Nuttall, in the dark days before Raspberry Pi was a thing.

Through a series of fortunate coincidences, Niko and his equally talented wife Mena were there when we cut the first Pibow in 2012. They immediately pitched in to help us buy our second laser cutter so we could keep up with demand. They have been supporting Pimoroni with sourcing in East Asia, and now Niko has become a member of the Pirates’ Council and the Head of Engineering as we’re increasing the sophistication and scale of the things we do. The Unicorn HAT HD is one of his masterpieces.

ALL the HATs!

We see ourselves as a wonderful island of misfit toys, and it feels good to have the best toy shop ever, and to support so many lovely people. Business is about more than just profits.

Where do we go to, me hearties?

So what are our plans? At the moment we’re still working absolutely flat-out as demand from wholesalers, retailers, and customers increases. We thought Raspberry Pi was big, but it turns out it’s just getting started. Near the end of 2016, it seemed to reach a whole new level of popularity—and still we continue to meet people to whom we have to explain what a Pi is. It’s a good problem to have.

We need a bigger space, but it’s been hard to find somewhere suitable in Sheffield that won’t mean we’re stuck on an industrial estate miles from civilisation. That would be bad for the crew—we like having world-class burritos on our doorstep.

The good news is, it looks like our search is at an end! Just in time for the arrival of our ‘Super-Turbo-Death-Star’ new production line, which will enable to make devices in a bigger, better, faster, more ‘Now now now!’ fashion o/

Spacious, but not spacious enough!

We’ve got lots of treasure in the pipeline, but we want to pick up the pace of development even more and create many new HATs, pHATs, and SHIMs, e.g. for environmental sensing and audio applications. Picade will also be getting some love to make it slicker and more hackable.

We’re also starting to flirt with adding more engineering and production capabilities in-house. The plan is to try our hand at anodising, powder-coating, and maybe even injection-moulding if we get the space and find the right machine. Learning how to do things is amazing, and we love having an idea and being able to bring it to life in almost no time at all.

This is where the magic happens

Fanks!

There are so many people involved in supporting our success, and some people we love for just existing and doing wonderful things that make us want to do better. The biggest shout-outs go to Liz, Eben, Gordon, James, all the Raspberry Pi crew, and Limor and pt from Adafruit, for being the most supportive guiding lights a young maker company could ever need.

A note from us

It is amazing for us to witness the growth of businesses within the Raspberry Pi ecosystem. Pimoroni is a wonderful example of an organisation that is creating opportunities for makers within its local community, and the company is helping to reinvigorate Sheffield as the heart of making in the UK.

If you’d like to take advantage of the great products built by the Pirates, Monkeys, Robots, and Ninjas of Sheffield, you should do it soon: Pimoroni are giving everyone 20% off their homemade tech until 6 August.

Pimoroni, from all of us here at Pi Towers (both in the UK and USA), have a wonderful birthday, and many a grog on us!

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Unless you’re planning to fit your Raspberry Pi inside a build, you may find yourself in need of a case to protect it from dust, damage and/or the occasional pet attack. Here are some of our favourite 3D-printed cases, for which files are available online so you can recreate them at home.

TARDIS

TARDIS Raspberry PI 3 case – 3D Printing Time lapse

Every Tuesday we’ll 3D print designs from the community and showcase slicer settings, use cases and of course, Time-lapses! This week: TARDIS Raspberry PI 3 case By: https://www.thingiverse.com/Jason3030 https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2430122/ BCN3D Sigma Blue PLA 3hrs 20min X:73 Y:73 Z:165mm .4mm layer / .6mm nozzle 0% Infill / 4mm retract 230C / 0C 114G 60mm/s —————————————– Shop for parts for your own DIY projects http://adafru.it/3dprinting Download Autodesk Fusion 360 – 1 Year Free License (renew it after that for more free use!)

Since I am an avid Whovian, it’s not surprising that this case made its way onto the list. Its outside is aesthetically pleasing to the aspiring Time Lord, and it snugly fits your treasured Pi.

Pop this case on your desk and chuckle with glee every time someone asks what’s inside it:

Person: What’s that?
You: My Raspberry Pi.
Person: What’s a Raspberry Pi?
You: It’s a computer!
Person: There’s a whole computer in that tiny case?
You: Yes…it’s BIGGER ON THE INSIDE!

I’ll get my coat.

Pi crust

Yes, we all wish we’d thought of it first. What better case for a Raspberry Pi than a pie crust?

While the case is designed to fit the Raspberry Pi Model B, you will be able to upgrade the build to accommodate newer models with a few tweaks.

Just make sure that if you do, you credit Marco Valenzuela, its original baker.

Consoles

Since many people use the Raspberry Pi to run RetroPie, there is a growing trend of 3D-printed console-style Pi cases.

So why not pop your Raspberry Pi into a case made to look like your favourite vintage console, such as the Nintendo NES or N64?

You could also use an adapter to fit a Raspberry Pi Zero within an actual Atari cartridge, or go modern and print a PlayStation 4 case!

Functional

Maybe you’re looking to use your Raspberry Pi as a component of a larger project, such as a home automation system, learning suite, or makerspace. In that case you may need to attach it to a wall, under a desk, or behind a monitor.

Coo! Coo!

The Pidgeon, shown above, allows you to turn your Zero W into a surveillance camera, while the piPad lets you keep a breadboard attached for easy access to your Pi’s GPIO pins.

Functional cases with added brackets are great for incorporating your Pi on the sly. The VESA mount case will allow you to attach your Pi to any VESA-compatible monitor, and the Fallout 4 Terminal is just really cool.

Cute

You might want your case to just look cute, especially if it’s going to sit in full view on your desk or shelf.

The tired cube above is the only one of our featured 3D prints for which you have to buy the files ($1.30), but its adorable face begged to be shared anyway.

If you’d rather save your money for another day, you may want to check out this adorable monster from Adafruit. Be aware that this case will also need some altering to fit newer versions of the Pi.

Our cases

Finally, there are great options for you if you don’t have access to a 3D printer, or if you would like to help the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s mission. You can buy one of the official Raspberry Pi cases for the Raspberry Pi 3 and Raspberry Pi Zero (and Zero W)!

As with all official Raspberry Pi accessories (and with the Pi itself), your money goes toward helping the Foundation to put the power of digital making into the hands of people all over the world.

You could also print a replica of the official Astro Pi cases, in which two Pis are currently orbiting the earth on the International Space Station.

Design your own Raspberry Pi case!

If you’ve built a case for your Raspberry Pi, be it with a 3D printer, laser-cutter, or your bare hands, make sure to share it with us in the comments below, or via our social media channels.

And if you’d like to give 3D printing a go, there are plenty of free online learning resources, and sites that offer tutorials and software to get you started, such as TinkerCAD, Instructables, and Adafruit.

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Many of us have created basic forts in our childhood bedrooms using pillows, sheets, and stuffed toys. Pete Dearing’s sons, meanwhile, get to play and sleep in an incredible spaceship bunk bed.

A spaceship bunk bed with functional lights, levers, buttons, and knobs.

I’m not jealous at all.

Not. At. All.

All the best beds have LEDs.

Building a spaceship bunk bed

Pete purchased plans for a spacecraft-shaped bunk bed online, and set out to build its MDF frame. Now, I don’t know about you, but for young me, having a bunk bed shaped like a spaceship would have been enough – tiny humans have such incredible imagination. But it wasn’t enough for Pete. He had witnessed his children’s obsession with elevator buttons, mobile phones, and the small control panel he’d made for them using switches and an old tool box. He knew he had to go big or go home.

While he was cutting out pieces for the bed frame, Pete asked the boys some creative input, and then adjusted the bed’s plans to include a functional cockpit and extra storage (for moon boots, spacesuits, and flags for staking claims, no doubt).

Wiring a spaceship bunk bed

After realising he hadn’t made enough allowance for the space taken up by the cockpit’s dials, levers, and switches, Pete struggled a little to fit everything in place inside the bunk bed.

“Ground Control to Major Sleepy…”

But it all worked out, and the results were lights, buttons, and fun aplenty. Finally, as icing on the build’s proverbial cake, Pete added sound effects, powered by a Raspberry Pi, and headsets fitted with microphones.

“Red Leader standing by…”

The electronics of the build run on a 12V power supply. To ensure his boys’ safety, and so that they will actually be able to sleep, Pete integrated a timer for the bed’s ‘entertainment system’.

Find more information about the spaceship bunk bed and photos of the project here.

So where do I get mine?

If you want to apply to be adopted by Pete, you can head to www.alex-is-first-in-line.com/seriously_me_first. Alternatively, you could build your own fantastic Pi-powered bed, and add lights and sounds of your choosing. How about a Yellow Submarine bed with a dashboard of Beatles songs? Or an X-Wing bed with flight and weapon controls? Oh, oh, how about a bed shaped like one of the cars from Jurassic Park, or like a Top Gun jet?

Yup…I definitely need a new bed.

While I go take measurements and get the power tools out, why not share your own ideas with us in the comments? Have you pimped your kid’s room with a Raspberry Pi (maybe like this)? Or do you have plans to incorporate lights and noise into something wonderful you’re making for a friend or relation? We want to know.

And I want a spaceship bunk bed!

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The team at Code Club Australia set a world record last year by gathering 10,207 Australian kids together to participate in their coding event Moonhack. But they are not going to rest on their laurels: this year, they’ve set their sights even higher with their event on 15 August.

What is Moonhack?

In honour of the Apollo 11 landing, Code Club Australia created a series of space-themed coding activities for their Moonhack event in July 2016. Their aim? To bring together as many kids as possible from all over Australia, to get them to code and have fun, and to hopefully establish a world record along the way.

Code Club Australia #MoonHack

Watch the Sunrise coverage of Code Club Australia World Record ‪#‎Moonhack‬ event – Launching Wed 20th July 2016 18:00 AEST – Register Now: www.moonhack.com.au

And they did exactly that! 10,207 kids completed Moonhack projects, which constitutes the largest number of children coding on one day ever recorded.

Moonhack 2017

With the success of the 2016 event spurring them on, the Code Club Australia team have scaled up their efforts this year. By opening Moonhack to kids across the globe, they want to spread enthusiasm for coding everywhere. And why not break their own world record in the process? Every kid in the world can take part in the event, as the website explains:

“Moonhack is for everyone. Moonhack is inclusive, not exclusive, because coding is for everyone, no matter their skill level or age – kids new to code, coding whizz kids, and anyone who wants to try out coding for the first time, or coding pros who want to get creative.”

Participants between the ages of 8 and 18 are invited to form teams and create their own space-themed project – or use one of the provided examples in Scratch, ScratchJr, or Python. If you’re outside the age range, don’t worry – you can still take part, but your project won’t be counted toward the world record attempt.

The sky is no longer the limit…

Participating teams submit their complete project to the Moonhack website as a link, screenshot, or file upload. All successful participants will receive a certificate to print and hang proudly on their wall. Woohoo!

How do we take part?

Teams will need to be registered on the website by a facilitator. Registering will give the facilitator access to a whole host of helpful tips for how to help their team out. Then, on Moonhack day, 15 August, the facilitator can upload the team’s completed project. If you can’t host an event for your team on 15 August, don’t worry – simply get the kids to complete the project beforehand. For more information go to the Moonhack website, where you can also find coding projects in several human and programming languages.

So what are you waiting for? Get together with the code-loving young people in your life, put your thinking hats on, get programming, and have the chance to set a new world record!

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For the last few years, we have held a big Raspberry Pi community event in Cambridge around Raspberry Pi’s birthday, where people have come together for a huge party with talks, workshops, and more. We want more people to have the chance to join in with our birthday celebrations next year, so we’re going to be coordinating Raspberry Jams all over the world to take place over the Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend, 3–4 March 2018.

Big Birthday fun!

Whether you’ve run a Raspberry Jam before, or you’d like to start a new Jam in your area, we invite you to join us for our Big Birthday Weekend, wherever you are in the world. This event will be a community-led, synchronised, global mega-Jam in celebration of our sixth birthday and the digital making community! Members of the Raspberry Pi Foundation team will be attending Jams far and wide to celebrate with you during the weekend.

Jams across the world will receive a special digital pack – be sure to register your interest so we can get your pack to you! We’ll also be sending out party kits to registered Jams – more info on this below.

Need help getting started?

First of all, check out the Raspberry Jam page to read all about Jams, and take a look at our recent blog post explaining the support for Jams that we offer.

If there’s no Jam near you yet, the Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend is the perfect opportunity to start one yourself! If you’d like some help getting your Jam off the ground, there are a few places you can get support:

• The Raspberry Jam Guidebook is full of advice gathered from the amazing people who run Jams in the UK.
• The Raspberry Jam Slack team is available for Jam organisers to chat, share ideas, and get help from each other. Just email jam [at] raspberrypi.org and ask to be invited.
• Attend a Jam! Find an upcoming Jam near you, and go along to get an idea of what it’s like.
• Email us – if you have more queries, you can email jam [at] raspberrypi.org and we’ll do what we can to help.

Get involved

If you’re keen to start a new Jam, there’s no need to wait until March – why not get up and running over the summer? Then you’ll be an expert by the time the Raspberry Jam Big Birthday Weekend comes around. Check out the guidebook, join the Jam Slack, and submit your event to the map when you’re ready.

Like the idea of running a Jam, but don’t want to do it by yourself? Then feel free to email us, and we’ll try and help you find someone to co-organise it.

If you don’t fancy organising a Jam for our Big Birthday Weekend, but would like to celebrate with us, keep an eye on our website for an update early next year. We’ll publish a full list of Jams participating in the festivities so you can find one near you. And if you’ve never attended a Jam before, there’s no need to wait: find one to join on the map here.

Register your interest

If you think you’d like to run a Jam as part of the Big Birthday Weekend, register your interest now, and you’ll be the first to receive updates. Don’t worry if you don’t have the venue or logistics in place yet – this is just to let us know you’re keen, and to give us an idea about how big our party is going to be.

We will contact you in autumn to give you more information, as well as some useful resources. On top of our regular Raspberry Jam branding pack, we’ll provide a special digital Big Birthday Weekend pack to help you celebrate and tell everyone about your Jam!

Then, once you have confirmed you’re taking part, you’ll be able to register your Jam on our website. This will make sure that other people interested in joining the party can find your event. If your Jam is among the first 150 to be registered for a Big Birthday Weekend event, we will send you a free pack of goodies to use on the big day!

Go fill in the form, and we’ll be in touch!

PS: We’ll be running a big Cambridge event in the summer on the weekend of 30 June–1 July 2018. Put it in your diary – we’ll say more about it as we get closer to the date.

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Hey folks, Rob from The MagPi here! It’s the last Thursday of the month, and that can only mean one thing: a brand-new The MagPi issue is out! In The MagPi 60, we’re bringing you the top troubleshooting tips for your Raspberry Pi, sourced directly from our amazing community.

The MagPi #60 comes with a huge troubleshooting guide

The MagPi 60

Our feature-length guide covers snags you might encounter while using a Raspberry Pi, and it is written for newcomers and veterans alike! Do you hit a roadblock while booting up your Pi? Are you having trouble connecting it to a network? Don’t worry – in this issue you’ll find troubleshooting advice you can use to solve your problem. And, as always, if you’re still stuck, you can head over to the Raspberry Pi forums for help.

More than troubleshooting

That’s not all though – Issue 60 also includes a disc with Raspbian-x86! This version of Raspbian for PCs contains all the recent updates and additions, such as offline Scratch 2.0 and the new Thonny IDE. And – *drumroll* – the disc version can be installed on your Windows PC. The last time we had a Raspbian disc on the cover, many of you requested a version for Windows, so here you are! There is an installation guide inside the mag, so you’ll be all set to get going.

On top of that, you’ll find our usual array of amazing tutorials, projects, and reviews. There’s a giant guitar, Siri voice control, Pi Zeros turned into wireless-connected USB drives, and even a review of a new robot kit. You won’t want to miss it!

I wasn’t kidding about the giant guitar

How to get a copy

Grab your copy today in the UK from WHSmith, Sainsbury’s, Asda, and Tesco. Copies will be arriving very soon in US stores, including Barnes & Noble and Micro Center. You can also get the new issue online from our store, or digitally via our Android or iOS app. And don’t forget, there’s always the free PDF as well.

Subscribe for free goodies

Some of you have asked me about the goodies that we give out to subscribers. This is how it works: if you take out a twelve-month print subscription of The MagPi, you’ll get a Pi Zero W, Pi Zero case, and adapter cables absolutely free! This offer does not currently have an end date.

Alright, I think I’ve covered everything! So that’s it. I’ll see you next month.

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In an effort to create a robot that can teach itself to navigate different terrains, scientists at Arizona State University have built C-Turtle, a Raspberry Pi-powered autonomous cardboard robot with turtle flippers. This is excellent news for people who live in areas with landmines: C-Turtle is a great alternative to current landmine-clearing robots, since it is much cheaper, and much easier to assemble.

Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU Now

Why turtle flippers?

As any user of Python will tell you*, turtles are amazing. Moreover, as the evolutionary biologist of the C-Turtle team, Andrew Jansen, will tell you, considering their bulk** turtles move very well on land with the help of their flippers. Consequently, the team tried out prototypes with cardboard flippers imitating the shape of turtle flippers. Then they compared their performance to that of prototypes with rectangular or oval ‘flippers’. And 157 million years of evolution*** won out: the robots with turtle flippers were best at moving forward.

Field testing with Assistant Professor Heni Ben Amor, one of the C-Turtle team’s leaders (Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU Now)

If it walks like a C-Turtle…

But the scientists didn’t just slap turtle flippers on their robot and then tell it to move like a turtle! Instead, they implemented machine learning algorithms on the Pi Zero that serves as C-Turtle’s brain, and then simply let the robot do its thing. Left to its own devices, it used the reward and punishment mechanisms of its algorithms to learn the most optimal way of propelling itself forward. And lo and behold, C-Turtle taught itself to move just like a live turtle does!

Robotic C-Turtle

This is “Robotic C-Turtle” by ASU Now on Vimeo, the home for high quality videos and the people who love them.

Landmine clearance with C-Turtle

Robots currently used to clear landmines are very expensive, since they are built to withstand multiple mine explosions. Conversely, the total cost of C-Turtle comes to about $70 (~£50) – that’s cheap enough to make it disposable. It is also more easily assembled, it doesn’t need to be remotely controlled, and it can learn to navigate new terrains. All this makes it perfect for clearing minefields.

BBC Click on Twitter

Meet C-Turtle, the landmine detecting robot. VIDEO https://t.co/Kjc6WxRC8I

C-Turtles in space?****

The researchers hope that robots similar to C-Turtle can used for space exploration. They found that the C-Turtle prototypes that had performed very well in the sandpits in their lab didn’t really do as well when they were released in actual desert conditions. By analogy, robots optimized for simulated planetary conditions might not actually perform well on-site. The ASU scientists imagine that C-Turtle materials and a laser cutter for the cardboard body could be carried on board a Mars mission. Then Martian C-Turtle design could be optimized after landing, and the robot could teach itself how best to navigate real Martian terrain.

There are already Raspberry Pis in space – imagine if they actually made it to Mars! Dave would never recover…

Congrats to Assistant Professors Heni Ben Amor and Daniel Aukes, and to the rest of the C-Turtle team, on their achievement! We at Pi Towers are proud that our little computer is part of this amazing project.

Photo by Charlie Leight/ASU Now

* Check out our Turtley amazing resource to find out why!

** At a length of 7ft, leatherback sea turtles can weigh 1,500lb!

*** That’s right: turtles survived the extinction of the dinosaurs!

**** Is anyone else thinking of Great A’Tuin right now? Anyone? Just me? Oh well.

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After Tijuana Rick’s father-in-law came by a working 1969 Wurlitzer 3100 jukebox earlier this year, he and Tijuana Rick quickly realised they lacked the original 45s to play on it. When they introduced a Raspberry Pi 3 into the mix, this was no longer an issue.

1969 Wurlitzer 3100

Restored and retrofitted Jukebox with Arduino and Raspberry Pi

Tijuana Rick

Yes, I shall be referring to Rick as Tijuana Rick throughout this blog post. Be honest, wouldn’t you if you were writing about someone whose moniker is Tijuana Rick?

Wurlitzer

The Wurlitzer jukebox has to be one of the classic icons of Americana. It evokes images of leather-booth-lined diners filled with rock ‘n’ roll music and teddy-haired bad boys eyeing Cherry Cola-sipping Nancys and Sandys across the checkered tile floor.

image courtesy of Ariadna Bach

With its brightly lit exterior and visible record-changing mechanism, the Wurlitzer is more than just your average pub jukebox. I should know: I have an average pub jukebox in my house, and although there’s some wonderfully nostalgic joy in pressing its buttons to play my favourite track, it’s not a Wurlitzer.

Americana – exactly what it says on the tin jukebox

The Wurlitzer company was founded in 1853 by a German immigrant called – you guessed it – Rudolf Wurlitzer, and at first it imported stringed instruments for the U.S. military. When the company moved from Ohio to New York, it expanded its production range to electric pianos, organs, and jukeboxes.

And thus ends today’s history lesson.

Tijuana Rick and the Wurlitzer

Since he had prior experience in repurposing physical switches for digital ends, Tijuana Rick felt confident that he could modify the newly acquired jukebox to play MP3s while still using the standard, iconic track selection process.

In order to do this, however, he had to venture into brand-new territory: mould making. Since many of the Wurlitzer’s original buttons were in disrepair, Tijuana Rick decided to try his hand at making moulds to create a set of replacements. Using an original button, he made silicone moulds, and then produced perfect button clones in exactly the right shade of red.

Then he turned to the computing side of the project. While he set up an Arduino Mega to control the buttons, Tijuana Rick decided to use a Raspberry Pi to handle the audio playback. After an extensive online search for code inspiration, he finally found this script by Thomas Sprinkmeier and used it as the foundation for the project’s software.

More images and video of the build can be found on Tijuana Rick’s website.

Fixer-uppers

We see a lot of tech upgrades and restorations using Raspberry Pis, from old cameras such as this Mansfield Holiday Zoom, and toys like this beloved Teddy Ruxpin, to… well… dinosaurs. If a piece of retro tech has any room at all for a Pi or a Pi Zero, someone in the maker community is bound to give it a 21st century overhaul.

What have been your favourite Pi retrofit projects so far? Have you seen a build that’s inspired you to restore or recreate something from your past? Got any planned projects or successful hacks? Make sure to share them in the comments below!

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Tijuana Rick’s 1969 Wurlitzer Jukebox revitalisation

You’re watching the new episode of Game of Thrones, and suddenly you hear your children, up and about after their bedtime! Now you’ll probably miss a crucial moment of the show because you have to put them to bed again. Or you’re out to dinner with friends and longing for the sight of your sleeping small humans. What do you do? Text the babysitter to check on them? Well, luckily for you these issues could soon be things of the past, thanks to Bert Vuylsteke and his Pi-powered Sleepbuddy. This IoT-controlled social robot could fulfil all your remote babysitting needs!

IoT Sleepbuddy – babyphone – Design concept

This is the actual concept of my robot and in what context it can be used.

A social robot?

A social robot fulfils a role normally played by a person, and interacts with humans via human language, gestures, and facial expressions. This is what Bert says about the role of the Sleepbuddy:

[For children, it] is a friend or safeguard from nightmares, but it is so much more for the babysitters or parents. The babysitters or parents connect their smartphone/tablet/PC to the Sleepbuddy. This will give them access to control all his emotions, gestures, microphone, speaker and camera. In the eye is a hidden camera to see the kids sleeping. The speaker and microphone allow communication with the kids through WiFi.

The roots of the Sleepbuddy

As a student at Ghent University, Bert had to build a social robot using OPSORO, the university’s open-source robotics platform. The developers of this platform create social robots for research purposes. They are also making all software, as well as hardware design plans, available on GitHub. In addition, you will soon be able to purchase their robot kits via a Kickstarter. OPSORO robots are designed around the Raspberry Pi, and controlled via a web interface. The interface allows you to customise your robot’s behaviour, using visual or text-based programming languages.

The Sleepbuddy’s components

Building the Sleepbuddy

Bert has provided a detailed Instructable describing the process of putting the Sleepbuddy together, complete with video walk-throughs. However, the making techniques he has used include thermoforming, laser cutting, and 3D printing. If you want to recreate this build, you may need to contact your local makerspace to find out whether they have the necessary equipment.

Assembling the Sleepbuddy

Finally, Bert added an especially cute touch to this project by covering the Sleepbuddy in blackboard paint. Therefore, kids can draw on the robot to really make it their own!

So many robots!

At Pi Towers we are partial to all kinds of robots, be they ones that test medical devices, play chess or Connect 4, or fight other robots. If they twerk, or are cute, tiny, or shoddy, we maybe even like them a tiny bit more.

Do you share our love of robots? Would you like to make your own? Then check out our resource for building a simple robot buggy. Maybe it will kick-start your career as the general of a robot army. A robot army that does good, of course! Let us know your benevolent robot overlord plans in the comments.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – IoT Sleepbuddy, the robotic babysitter

When we released the Google AIY Projects kit with Issue 57 of The MagPi in May, we could hardly wait to see what you in the community would build with it. Being able to add voice interaction to your Raspberry Pi projects opens up a world of possibilities for exciting digital making.

One such project is maker Martin Mander‘s Google Pi Intercom. We love this build for its retro feel and modern functionality, a combination of characteristics shared by many of Martin’s creations.

1986 Google Pi Intercom

This is a 1986 Radio Shack Intercom that I’ve converted into a Google Home style device using a Raspberry Pi and the Google AIY (Artificial Intelligence Yourself) kit that came free with the MagPi magazine (issue 57). It uses the Google Assistant to answer questions and perform actions, using IFTTT to integrate with smart home accessories and other web services.

Inter-com again?

If you’ve paid any attention at all to the world of Raspberry Pi in the last few months, you’ve probably seen the Google AIY Projects kit that came free with The MagPi #57. It includes a practical cardboard housing, but of course makers everywhere have been upgrading their kits, for example by creating a laser-cut wooden box. Martin, however, has taken things to the next level: he’s installed his AIY kit in a wall-mounted intercom from 1986.

The components of the Google Pi Intercom

It’s all (inter)coming together

Martin already had not one, but three vintage intercoms at home. So when he snatched up an AIY Projects kit, there was no doubt in his mind about how he was going to use it:

The moment I scooped the Google AIY kit, I knew that one of these old units would be a perfect match for it – after all, both were essentially based on a button, microphone, and loudspeaker, just with different technology in between.

Preparing the intercom housing

First, Martin gutted the intercom and ground away some of the excess plastic inside. This was necessary because integrating all the components was going to be a tight fit. To overhaul its look, he then gave the housing a good scrub and a new paint job. For a splash of colour, Martin affixed a strip of paper in the palette of the Google logo.

BUBBLES!

Building the Google Pi Intercom

The intercom’s speaker wasn’t going to provide good enough sound quality. Moreover, Martin quickly realised that the one included in the AIY kit was too big for this make. He hunted down a small speaker online, and set about wiring everything up.

Assembling the electronics

Martin wanted the build to resemble the original intercom as closely as possible. Consequently, he was keen to use its tilting bar to activate the device’s voice command function. Luckily, it was easy to mount the AIY kit’s button behind the bar.

Using the intercom’s tilting bar switch

Finally it was only a matter of using some hot glue and a few screws and bolts to secure all the components inside the housing. Once he’d done that, Martin just had to set up the software of the Google Assistant, and presto! He had a voice-controlled smart device for home automation.

A pretty snazzy-looking build, isn’t it? If you’d like to learn more about Martin’s Google Pi Intercom, head over to the Instructables page for a complete rundown.

Awaiting your command

The AIY Projects Kit

Didn’t manage to snap up an AIY Projects kit? Find out how to get your hands on one over at The MagPi.

Or do you have an AIY kit at home? Lucky you! You can follow our shiny new learning resource to get started with using it. There are also lots of handy articles about the kit in The MagPi #57 – download the PDF version here. If you’re stuck, or looking for inspiration, check out our AIY Projects subforum. Ask your questions, and help others by answering theirs.

What have you built with your AIY Projects kit? Be sure to share your voice-controlled project with us in the comments.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Google Pi Intercom with the AIY Projects kit

Education is our mission at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, so of course we love tools that help teachers and other educators use Raspberry Pis in a classroom setting. PiNet, which allows teachers to centrally manage a whole classroom’s worth of Pis, makes administrating a fleet of Pis easier. Set up individual student accounts, install updates and software, share files – PiNet helps you do all of this!

Caleb VinCross on Twitter

The new PiNet lab up and running. 30 raspberry pi 3’s running as fat clients for 600 + students. Much thanks to the PiNet team! @PiNetDev.

PiNet developer Andrew

PiNet was built and is maintained by Andrew Mulholland, who started work on this project when he was 15, and who is also one of the organisers of the Northern Ireland Raspberry Jam. Check out what he says about PiNet’s capabilities in his guest post here. Andrew has recently released a stable and well tested update of PiNet for Raspbian Jessie.

PiNet running in a classroom

PiNet, teacher’s pet

PiNet has been available for about two years now, and the teachers using it are over the moon. Here’s what a few of them say about their experience:

We wanted a permanently set up classroom with 30+ Raspberry Pis to teach programming. Students wanted their work to be secure and backed up and we needed a way to keep the Pis up to date. PiNet has made both possible and the classroom now required little or no maintenance. PiNet was set up in a single day and was so successful we set up a second Pi room. We now have 60 Raspberry Pis which are used by our students every day. – Rob Jones, Secondary School Teacher, United Kingdom

AKS Computing on Twitter

21xRaspPi+dedicated network+PiNet server+3 geeks = success! Ready to test with a full class.

I teach Computer Science at middle school, so I have 4 classes per day in my lab, sharing 20 Raspberry Pis. PiNet gives each student separate storage space. Any changes to the Raspbian image can be done from my dashboard. We use Scratch, Minecraft Pi, Sonic Pi, and do physical computing. And when I have had issues, or have wanted to try something a little crazy, the support has been fabulous. – Bob Irving, Middle School Teacher, USA

Wolf Math on Twitter

We’re starting our music unit with @deejaydoc. My CS students are going through the @Sonic_Pi turorial on @PiNetDev.

I teach computer classes for about 600 students between the ages of 5 and 13. PiNet has really made it possible to expand our technology curriculum beyond the simple web-based applications that our Chromebooks were limited to. I’m now able to use Arduino boards to do basic physical computing with LEDs and sensors. None of this could have happened without PiNet making it easy to have an affordable, stable, and maintainable way of managing 30 Linux computers in our lab. – Caleb VinCross, Primary School Teacher, USA

More for educators

If you’re involved in teaching computing, be that as a professional or as a volunteer, check out the new free magazine Hello World, brought to you by Computing At School, BCS Academy of Computing, and Raspberry Pi working in partnership. It is written by educators for educators, and available in print and as a PDF download. And if you’d like to keep up to date with what we are offering to educators and learners, sign up for our education newsletter here.

Are you a teacher who uses Raspberry Pis in the classroom, or another kind of educator who has used them in a group setting? Tell us about your experience in the comments below.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Teaching with Raspberry Pis and PiNet

To everyone’s surprise, the sun has actually managed to show its face this summer in Britain! So we’re not feeling too guilty for having asked the newest crop of Pioneers to Make it outdoors. In fact, the 11- to 16-year-olds that took part in our second digital making challenge not only made things that celebrate the outdoors – some of them actually carted their entire coding setup into the garden. Epic!

The winners

Winners of the second Pioneers challenge are…

We asked you to make it outdoors with tech, challenging all our Pioneers to code and build awesome projects that celebrate the outside world. And we were not disappointed! Congratulations to everyone who took part. Every entry was great and we loved them all.

We set the challenge to Make it outdoors, and our theme winners HH Squared really delivered! You best captured the spirit of what our challenge was asking with your fabulous, fun-looking project which used the outdoors to make it a success. HH Squared, we loved Pi Spy so much that we may have to make our own for Pi Towers! Congratulations on winning this award.

Watching all the entry videos, our judges had the tricky task of picking the top of the pops from among the projects. In additon to ‘theme winner’, we had a number of other categories to help make their job a little bit easier:

• We appreciate what you’re trying to do: We know that when tackling a digital making project, time and tech sometimes aren’t in your favour. But we still want to see what you’ve got up to, and this award category recognises that even though you haven’t fully realised your ambition yet, you’ve made a great start. *And*, when you do finish, we think it’s going to be awesome. Congratulations to the UTC Bullfrogs for winning this award – we can’t wait to see the final project!

• Inspiring journey: This category recognises that getting from where you’ve started to where you want to go isn’t always smooth sailing. Maybe teams had tech problems, maybe they had logistical problems, but the winners of this award did a great job of sharing the trials and tribulations they encountered along the way! Coding Doughnuts, your project was a little outside the box IN a box. We loved it.

• Technically brilliant: This award is in recognition of some serious digital making chops. Robot Apocalypse Committee, you owned this award. Get in!

• Best explanation: Digital making is an endeavour that involves making a thing, and then sharing that thing. The winners of this category did a great job of showing us exactly what they made, and how they made it. They also get bonus points for making a highly watchable, entertaining video. Uniteam, we got it. We totally got it! What a great explanation of such a wonderful project – and it made us laugh too. Well done!

The Judges’ Special Recognition Awards

Because we found it so hard to just pick five winners, the following teams will receive our Judges’ Special Recognition Award:

• PiChasers with their project Auqa (yes, the spelling is intentional!)

• Sunscreen Superstars, making sure we’re all protected in the glorious British sunshine

• Off The Shelf and their ingenious Underwater Canal Scanner

• Glassbox, who made us all want Nerf guns thanks to their project Tin Can Alley

• Turtle Tamers, ensuring the well-being of LEGO turtles around the world with their project Umbrella Empire

Winners from both our Make us laugh and Make it outdoors challenges will be joining us at Google HQ for a Pioneers summer camp full of making funtimes! They’ll also receive some amazing prizes to help them continue in their digital making adventures.

Massive thanks go to our judges for helping to pick the winners!

And for your next Pioneers challenge…

Ha, as if we’re going to tell you just yet – we’re still recovering from this challenge! We’ll be back in September to announce the theme of the next cycle – so make sure to sign up for our newsletter to be reminded closer to the time.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Pioneers winners: Make it outdoors challenge

We at the Raspberry Pi Foundation find it incredibly rewarding to help people make and share things they love. It’s amazing to be part of an incredibly creative community of makers. And we’re not the only ones who feel this way: for this year’s Maker Faire UK, the team over at NUSTEM created the Heart of Maker Faire, a Pi-powered art installation that is a symbol of this unique community. And to be perfectly frank, it’s bloody gorgeous.

The Heart of Maker Faire

NUSTEM’s new installation for Maker Faire UK 2017, held on 1st & 2nd April at the Centre for Life, Newcastle-upon-Tyne. Visitors wrote notes about things they love, and sealed them in jars. They then read their heart rates, and used the control boxes to associate their jar and heart rate with a space on the shelves.

A heart for the community

NUSTEM is a STEM outreach organisation from Northumbria University, and the makers there are always keen to build interactive projects that get people excited about technology. So at this year’s Faire, attendees passing their installation were invited to write down something close to their heart, put that note in a jar, and measure their heart rate. Then they could connect their heart rate, via a QR code, to a space on a shelf lined with LEDs. Once they placed the jar in their space, the LEDs started blinking to imitate their heart beat. With this art piece, the NUSTEM team wants to say something about “how we’re all individuals, but about our similarities too”.

NUSTEM on Twitter

Still beating. Heart of #MakerFaireUK

Making the heart beat

This is no small build – it uses more than 2,000 NeoPixel LEDs, as well as five Raspberry Pis, among other components. Two Pi 3s are in charge of registering people’s contributions and keeping track of their jars. A Pi Zero W acts as a central hub, connecting its bigger siblings via WiFi, and storing a MySQL database of the jars’ data. Finally, two more Pi 3s control the LEDs of the Heart via a script written in Processing. The NUSTEM team has made the code available here for you “to laugh at” (their words, not mine!)

The heart, ready to be filled with love

A heart for art

Processing is an open-source programming language used to create images, graphs, and animations. It can respond to keyboard and mouse input, so you can write games with it as well. Moreover, it runs on the Pi, and you can use it to talk to the Pi’s GPIO pins, as the Heart of Maker Faire team did. Hook up buttons, sensors, and LEDs, and get ready to create amazing interactive pieces of art! If you’d like to learn more, read Matt’s blog post, or watch the talk he gave about Processing at our fifth birthday party earlier this year.

Matt Richardson: Art with Processing on the Raspberry Pi – Raspberry Pi Birthday Event 2017 – Talks

Matt Richardson: Art with Processing on the Raspberry Pi Sunday 5th March 2017 Raspberry Pi Birthday Event 2017 Filmed and edited by David and Andrew Ferguson. This video is not an official video published by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. No copyright infringement intended.

To help you get started, we’re providing a free learning resource introducing you to the basics of Processing. We’d love to see what you create, so do share a link to your masterworks in the comments!

World Maker Faire

We’ll be attending World Maker Faire in New York on the 23rd and 24th of September. Will you be there?

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Source: Raspberry Pi – The Heart of Maker Faire

This column is from The MagPi issue 58. You can download a PDF of the full issue for free, or subscribe to receive the print edition in your mailbox or the digital edition on your tablet. All proceeds from the print and digital editions help the Raspberry Pi Foundation achieve its charitable goals.

About five years ago was the first time I unboxed a Raspberry Pi. I hooked it up to our living room television and made space on the TV stand for an old USB keyboard and mouse. Watching the $35 computer boot up for the first time impressed me, and I had a feeling it was a big deal, but I’ll admit that I had no idea how much of a phenomenon Raspberry Pi would become. I had no idea how large the community would grow. I had no idea how much my life would be changed from that moment on. And it all started with a simple first step: booting it up.

Matt Richardson on Twitter

Finally a few minutes to experiment with @Raspberry_Pi! So far, I’m rather impressed!

The key to the success of Raspberry Pi as a computer – and, in turn, a community and a charitable foundation – is that there’s a low barrier to the first step you take with it. The low price is a big reason for that. Whether or not to try Raspberry Pi is not a difficult decision. Since it’s so affordable, you can just give it a go, and see how you get along.

The pressure is off

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux operating system kernel, talked about this in a BBC News interview in 2012. He explained that a lot of people might take the first step with Raspberry Pi, but not everyone will carry on with it. But getting more people to take that first step of turning it on means there are more people who potentially will be impacted by the technology. Torvalds said:

I find things like Raspberry Pi to be an important thing: trying to make it possible for a wider group of people to tinker with computers. And making the computers cheap enough that you really can not only afford the hardware at a big scale, but perhaps more important, also afford failure.

In other words, if things don’t work out with you and your Raspberry Pi, it’s not a big deal, since it’s such an affordable computer.

In this together

Of course, we hope that more and more people who boot up a Raspberry Pi for the first time will decide to continue experimenting, creating, and learning with it. Thanks to improvements to the hardware, the Raspbian operating system, and free software packages, it’s constantly becoming easier to do many amazing things with this little computer. And our continually growing community means you’re not alone on this journey. These improvements and growth over the past few years hopefully encourage more people who boot up Raspberry Pis to keep exploring.

The first step

However, the important thing is that people are given the opportunity to take that first step, especially young people. Young learners are at a critical age, and something like the Raspberry Pi can have an enormously positive impact on the rest of their lives. It’s a major reason why our free resources are aimed at young learners. It’s also why we train educators all over the world for free. And encouraging youngsters to take their first step with Raspberry Pi could not only make a positive difference in their lives, but also in society at large.

With the affordable computational power, excellent software, supportive community, and free resources, you’re given everything you need to make a big impact in the world when you boot up a Raspberry Pi for the first time. That moment could be step one of ten, or one of ten thousand, but it’s up to you to take that first step.

Now you!

Learning and making things with the Pi is incredibly easy, and we’ve created numerous resources and tutorials to help you along. First of all, check out our hardware guide to make sure you’re all set up. Next, you can try out Scratch and Python, our favourite programming languages. Feeling creative? Learn to code music with Sonic Pi, or make visual art with Processing. Ready to control the real world with your Pi? Create a reaction game, or an LED adornment for your clothing. Maybe you’d like to do some science with the help of our Sense HAT, or become a film maker with our camera?

You can do all this with the Raspberry Pi, and so much more. The possibilities are as limitless as your imagination. So where do you want to start?

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Taking the first step on the journey

At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we love a good music project. So of course we’re excited to welcome Andy Grove‘s ultrasonic piano to the collection! It is a thing of beauty… and noise. Don’t let the name fool you – this build can do so much more than sound like a piano.

Ultrasonic Pi Piano – Full Demo

The Ultrasonic Pi Piano uses HC-SR04 ultrasonic sensors for input and generates MIDI instructions that are played by fluidsynth. For more information: http://theotherandygrove.com/projects/ultrasonic-pi-piano/

What’s an ultrasonic piano?

What we have here, people of all genders, is really a theremin on steroids. The build’s eight ultrasonic distance sensors detect hand movements and, with the help of an octasonic breakout board, a Raspberry Pi 3 translates their signals into notes. But that’s not all: this digital instrument is almost endlessly customisable – you can set each sensor to a different octave, or to a different instrument.

The breakout board designed by Andy

Andy has implemented gesture controls to allow you to switch between modes you have preset. In his video, you can see that holding your hands over the two sensors most distant from each other changes the instrument. Say you’re bored of the piano – try a xylophone! Not your jam? How about a harpsichord? Or a clarinet? In fact, there are 128 MIDI instruments and sound effects to choose from. Go nuts and compose a piece using tuba, ocarina, and the noise of a guitar fret!

How to build the ultrasonic piano

If you head over to Instructables, you’ll find the thorough write-up Andy has provided. He has also made all his scripts, written in Rust, available on GitHub. Finally, he’s even added a video on how to make a housing, so your ultrasonic piano can look more like a proper instrument, and less like a pile of electronics.

Ultrasonic Pi Piano Enclosure

Uploaded by Andy Grove on 2017-04-13.

Make your own!

If you follow us on Twitter, you may have seen photos and footage of the Raspberry Pi staff attending a Pi Towers Picademy. Like Andy*, quite a few of us are massive Whovians. Consequently, one of our final builds on the course was an ultrasonic theremin that gave off a sound rather like a dying Dalek. Take a look at our masterwork here! We loved our make so much that we’ve since turned the instructions for building it into a free resource. Go ahead and build your own! And be sure to share your compositions with us in the comments.

Sonic is feeling the groove as well

* He has a full-sized Dalek at home. I know, right?

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Ultrasonic pi-ano

Everything’s bigger in Texas, including the 2017 ISTE Conference & Expo, which saw over 20,000 educators convene in San Antonio earlier this summer. As a new Raspberry Pi Foundation team member, I was thrilled to meet the many Raspberry Pi Certified Educators (RCEs) in attendance. They came from across the country to share their knowledge, skills, and advice with fellow educators interested in technology and digital making.

This is the only GIF. Honest.

Meet the RCEs

Out of the dozens of RCEs who attended, here are three awesome members of our community and their ISTE 2017 stories:

Nicholas Provenzano, Makerspace Director at University Liggett School and the original nerdy teacher, shared his ideas for designing innovative STEAM and maker projects. He also knocked our socks off by building his own digital badge using a Raspberry Pi Zero to stream tweets from the conference.

Andrew Collins on Twitter

What’s up w/ @Raspberry_Pi & digital making? Serious knowledge dropping at #ISTE17 #picademy

Amanda Haughs, TOSA Digital Innovation Coach in Campbell Union School District and digital learning champion, shared her ideas for engaging elementary school learners in technology and digital making. She also went next level with her ISTE swag, creating a wearable Raspberry Pi tote bag combining sewing and circuitry.

Amanda Haughs on Twitter

New post: “Pi Tote– a sewing and circuitry project w/the @Raspberry_Pi Zero W” https://t.co/Fb1IFZMH1n #picademy #Maker #ISTE17 #PiZeroW

Rafranz Davis, Executive Director of Professional and Digital Learning for Lufkin ISD and edtech leader extraordinaire, shared her vision for making innovation and digital learning more equitable and accessible for all. She also received the ISTE 2017 Award for Outstanding Leadership in recognition of her efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion for learners across learning environments.

EdSurge on Twitter

At #iste17, @rafranzdavis speaks about the privilege of access. How do we make innovation less privileged? #edtechc… https://t.co/6foMzgfE6f

Rafranz, Nicholas, and Amanda are all members of our original Picademy cohorts in the United States. Since summer 2016, more than 300 educators have attended US Picademy events and joined the RCE community. Be on the lookout later this year for our 2018 season events and sign up here for updates.

The Foundation at ISTE 2017

Oh, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation team was also at ISTE 2017 and we’re not too shabby either : ). We held a Raspberry Jam, which saw some fantastic projects from Raspberry Pi Certified Educators — the Raspberry Pi Preserve Jar from Heidi Baynes, Scratch student projects from Bradley Quentin and Kimberly Boyce, and Sense HAT activities with Efren Rodriguez.

But that’s not all we got up to! You can learn more about our team’s presentations — including on how to send a Raspberry Pi to near space — on our ISTE conference page here.

Raspberry Pi on Twitter

Our #ISTE17 crew had a PACKED day in San Antonio. If you didn’t catch them today, see where they’ll be: https://t.co/Rt0ec7PF7S

Join the fold

Inspired by all this education goodness? You can become a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator as well! All you need to do is attend one of our free two-day Picademy courses held across the US and UK. Join this amazing community of more than 1,000 teachers, librarians, and volunteers, and help more people learn about digital making.

If you’re interested in what our RCEs do at Picademy, check out our free online courses. These are available to anyone, and you can use them to learn about teaching coding and physical computing from the comfort of your home.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Raspberry Pi Certified Educators shine at ISTE 2017

While the rest of us are forced to leave the house to obtain a tasty brew, beer master Christoper Aedo has incorporated a Raspberry Pi into his home brewing system for ultimate ‘sit-back-and-relax’ homebrew home brew.

KEG! KEG! KEG! KEG!

I drink and I know things

Having brewed his own beer for several years, Christopher was no novice in the pursuit of creating the perfect pint*. He was already brewing 10 gallons at a time when he decided to go all electric with a Raspberry Pi. Inspiration struck when he stumbled upon the StrangeBrew Elsinore Java server, and he went to work planning the best setup for the job:

Before I could talk myself out of the project, I decided to start buying parts. My basic design was a Hot Liquor Tank (HLT) and boil kettle with 5500W heating elements in them, plus a mash tun with a false bottom. I would use a pump to recirculate the mash through a 50 foot stainless coil in the HLT (a “heat exchanger recirculating mash system”, known as HERMS). I would need a second pump to circulate the water in the HLT, and to help with transferring water to the mash tun. All of the electrical components would be controlled with a Raspberry Pi.

Homebrew hardware setup

First, he set up the electrical side of his homebrew system using The Electric Brewing Company‘s walkthrough, swapping out the 12V solid-state relays for ones that manage the 3V needed by the Pi. Aedo then implemented the temperature sensors and controls of these relays. He used Hilitchi DS18B20 Waterproof Temperature Sensors connected to a 1-Wire bus and learned how to manage the relays in this tutorial.

Christopher wanted to be able to move his system around his property. Therefore, he squeezed all the electrical components of the build into a waterproof project box. For cooling purposes, he integrated copper shims and heat sinks.

Among the wires, wires, and more wires sits a Raspberry Pi, bottom left.

A brew-tiful build

With the hardware sorted, he took on the project’s software next. Although he had been inspired by it, Christopher decided to move away from the StrangeBrew Elsinore project in favour of the Python-based CraftBeerPi by active repo maintainer Manuel Fritsch.

The CraftBeerPi dashboard

This package allowed him to configure his chosen GPIO pins and set up the appropriate sensors. In fact, the setup process was so easy that Christoper also implemented a secondhand fridge as a fermentation chamber.

Duff Beer for me, Duff Beer for you…

In his recently released article on opensource.com, Aedo goes into far more detail. So if you want to create your own brewing kit, it offers all the info you need to get going.

Christoper attributes a lot of his build to the Hosehead, Electric Brewery, and CraftBeerPi projects. Using their resources and those of StrangeBrew Elsinore, any home brewer can control at least part of their system via a Raspberry Pi. Moreover, they can also keep track of their brewery stock levels via the wonderfully named Kegerface display.

We love seeing projects like this that take inspiration from others and build on them. We also love beer.

How about you? Have you created any sort of beer brewing system, from scratch or with the help of an existing project? Then make sure to share it with us in the comments below.

*Did you know the British pint is larger than the American pint?

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Source: Raspberry Pi – A homebrew Pi kit for home brewing

Raspberry Pis, blinking lights, and APIs – what’s not to love? It’s really not surprising that the NYC Train Sign caught our attention – and it doesn’t hurt that its creators’ Instagram game is on point.

NYC Train Sign

NYC Train Sign. 158 likes · 2 talking about this. Live MTA train wait times signage.

Another transport sign?

Yes, yes, I know. Janina wrote about a bus timetable display only the other day. But hear me out, I have a totally legitimate reason why we’re covering this project as well…

…it’s just a really pretty-looking build, alright?

Public transport: a brief explanation

If you’ve been to New York City, or indeed have visited any busy metropolis, you’ll probably have braved the dread conveyor belt of empty-eyed masses that is…dundunduuun…public transport. Whenever you use it, unless you manage to hit that off-peak sweet spot (somewhere between 14.30 and 14.34) where the flow of human traffic is minimal, you are exposed to a hellish amalgam of rushing bodies, yells to ‘hold the door’, and the general funk of tight-packed public situations. Delicious.

To be fair, Kramer has bad train etiquette

As APIs for public transport websites are becoming increasingly common and user-friendly, we’re seeing a rise in the number of transport-related builds. From Dr Lucy Rogers’ #WhereIsMyBus 3D-printed London icon to the VästtraPi bus departure screen mentioned above, projects using these APIs allow us respite from the throng and save us from waiting for delayed buses at drab and dreary stations.

image c/o Dr Lucy Rogers

We’ve seen a lot of bus builds, but have we seen train builds yet? Anyone? I’ll check: ‘Train your rat’, ‘Picademy teacher training’, ‘How to train your…’ Nope, I think this is the first. Maybe I’m wrong though, in which case please let me know in the comments.

NYC Train Sign

Let me see if I can get this right: the NYC Train Sign-building team at NYC Train Sign has created a real-time NYC train sign using a Raspberry Pi, LED matrix, and locally 3D-printed parts at their base in Brooklyn, NYC (…train sign – shoot!)

The NYC Train Sign…so so pretty

The team, headed by creator Timothy Wu, uses the official NTA server API to fetch real-time arrival, departure, and delay information to display on their signs. They also handcraft the signs to fit your specifications (click here to buy your own). How very artisanal!

Do the BART(man)

As a result of the success of the NYC Train Sign, the team is now experimenting with signs for other transport services, including the San Francisco BART, Chicago CTA, and Boston MBTA. APIs are also available for services in other cities around the world, for example London and Los Angeles. We could probably do with a display like this in our London office! In fact, if you commute on public transport and can find the right API, I think one of these devices would be perfect for your workplace no matter where it is.

Using APIs

Given our free resources for a Tweeting Babbage and a…location marker poo (?!), it’s clear that at the Raspberry Pi Foundation we’re huge fans of using APIs in digital making projects. Therefore, it’s really no surprise that we like sharing them as well! So if you’ve created a project using an API, we’d love to see it. Pop a link into the comments below, or tag us on social media.

Now back to their Instagram game

Honestly, their photos are so aesthetically pleasing that I’m becoming a little jealous.

making of real-time nyc mta signs with raspberry pi in bushwick . as seen @kcbcbeer @fathersbk @houdinikitchenlab @dreammachinecreative @hihellobk . 3d-printing @3dbrooklyn vectors @virilemonarch . . #nyc #mta #subwaysystem #nycsubway #subway #metro #nycsubway #train #subwaysigns #3dprinting #3dmodel #3dprinter #3dprinting #3dprints #3d #newyorkcity #manhattan #brooklyn #bushwick #bronx #raspberrypi #code #javascript #php #sql #python #subwayart #subwaygraffiti

121 Likes, 4 Comments – @nyctrainsign on Instagram: “making of real-time nyc mta signs with raspberry pi in bushwick . as seen @kcbcbeer @fathersbk…”

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Source: Raspberry Pi – NYC Train Sign: real-time train tracking in New York City

Plane spotting, like train spotting, is a hobby enjoyed by many a tech enthusiast. Nick Sypteras has built a voice-controlled plane identifier using a Raspberry Pi and an Amazon Echo Dot.

“Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it’s Superm… hang on … it’s definitely a plane.”

What plane is that?

There’s a great write-up on Nick’s blog describing how he went about this. In addition to the Pi and the Echo, all he needed was a radio receiver to pick up signals from individual planes. So he bought an RTL-SDR USB dongle to pick up ADS-B broadcasts.

Alexa Plane Spotting Skill

Demonstrating an Alexa skill for identifying what planes are flying by my window. Ingredients: – raspberry pi – amazon echo dot – rtl-sdr dongle Explanation here: https://www.nicksypteras.com/projects/teaching-alexa-to-spot-airplanes

With the help of open-source software he can convert aircraft broadcasts into JSON data, which is stored on the Pi. Included in the broadcast is each passing plane’s unique ICAO code. Using this identifier, he looks up model, operator, and registration number in a data set of possible aircraft which he downloaded and stored on the Pi as a Mongo database.

Where is that plane going?

His Python script, with the help of the Beautiful Soup package, parses the FlightRadar24 website to find out the origin and destination of each plane. Nick also created a Node.js server in which all this data is stored in human-readable language to be accessed by Alexa.

Finally, it was a matter of setting up a new skill on the Alexa Skills Kit dashboard so that it would query the Pi in response to the right voice command.

Pretty neat, huh?

Plane spotting is serious business

Nick has made all his code available on GitHub, so head on over if this make has piqued your interest. He mentions that the radio receiver he uses picks up most unencrypted broadcasts, so you could adapt his build for other purposes as well.

Boost your hobby with the Pi

We’ve seen many builds by makers who have pushed their hobby to the next level with the help of the Pi, whether it’s astronomy, high-altitude ballooning, or making music. What hobby do you have that the Pi could improve? Let us know in the comments.

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Source: Raspberry Pi – Plane Spotting with Pi and Amazon Alexa

When I was a teacher, a question I was constantly asked by curious students was, “Can you teach us how to hack?” Turning this idea on its head, and teaching the techniques behind some of our most important national cyber security measures, is an excellent way of motivating students to do good. This is why the Raspberry Pi Foundation and GCHQ have been working together to bring you exciting new resources!

More computing power with the OctaPi

You may have read about GCHQ’s OctaPi computer in Issue 58 of the MagPi. The OctaPi is a cluster computer joining together the power of eight Raspberry Pis (i.e. 32 cores) in a distributed computer system to execute computations much faster than a single Pi could perform them.

Can you feel the power?

We have created a brand-new tutorial on how to build your own OctaPi at home. Don’t have eight Raspberry Pis lying around? Build a TetraPi (4) or a HexaPi (6) instead! You could even build the OctaPi with Pi Zero Ws if you wish. You will be able to run any programs you like on your new cluster computer, as it has all the software of a regular Pi, but is more powerful.

OctaPi at the Cheltenham Science Festival

Understanding cryptography

You probably use public key cryptography online every day without even realising it, but now you can use your OctaPi to understand exactly how it keeps your data safe. Our new OctaPi: public key cryptography resource walks you through the invention of this type of encryption (spoiler: Diffie and Hellman weren’t the first to invent it!). In it, you’ll also learn how a public key is created, whether a brute force attack using the OctaPi could be used to find out a public key, and you will be able to try breaking an encryption example yourself.

These resources are some our most advanced educational materials yet, and fit in with the “Maker” level of the Raspberry Pi Foundation Digital Making Curriculum. The projects are ideal for older students, perhaps those looking to study Computer Science at university. And there’s more to come: we have two other OctaPi resources in the pipeline to make use of the OctaPi’s full capabilities, so watch this space!

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Source: Raspberry Pi – OctaPi: cluster computing and cryptography