Table of contents for Practical Raspberry Pi Projects 2nd Edition in Practical Raspberry Pi Projects

What you’ll need ■ Raspbian (latest release) ■ Minecraft-Pi tarball ■ Keyboard & mouse ■ Internet connection Minecraft is probably the biggest game on the planet right now. It’s available on just about any format you can imagine, from PCs to gaming consoles to mobile phones. It should probably come as no surprise that it’s also available on the Raspberry Pi. While at first glance Minecraft-Pi is a simplified version of the Pocket Edition (designed for tablets and smartphones), the Raspberry Pi edition is very special, in that it’s the only version of Minecraft to gives users access to its API (application programming interface). In this project we’re going to show you how to set up Minecraft-Pi and configure it so you can interact with Minecraft in a way you’ve…

What you’ll need ■ Internet connectivity ■ Latest version of Raspbian www.raspberrypi.org/downloads Twitter is a useful way of sharing information with the world and it’s our favourite method of giving our views quickly and conveniently. Many millions of people use the microblogging platform from their computers, mobile devices and possibly even have it on their televisions. You don’t need to keep pressing that retweet button, though. With a sprinkling of Python, you can have your Raspberry Pi do it for you. Here’s how to create your own Twitter bot… 01 Installing the required software Log into the Raspbian system with the username Pi and the password raspberry. Get the latest package lists using the command sudo apt-get update. Then install the Python Package installer using sudo apt-get i nstall python-pip.…

What you’ll need ■ Latest version of Raspbian www.raspberrypi.org/downloads ■ Pillow https://github.com/python-imaging/Pillow ■ SimpleGUITk https://github.com/dholm/simpleguitk/ The Raspberry Pi is a fantastic way to start learning how to code. One area that can be very rewarding for amateur coders is game programming, allowing for a more interactive result and a greater sense of accomplishment. Game programming can also teach improvisation and advanced mathematics skills for code. We’ll be using the fantastic SimpleGUITk module in Python, a very straightforward way of creating graphical interfaces based on Tkinter. 01 Python module preparation Head to the websites we’ve listed in ‘What you’ll need’ and download a zip of the source files from the GitHub pages. Update your Raspbian packages and then install the following: 02 Install the modules Open the terminal and use cd…

Components list ■ Raspberry Pi ■ Camera module ■ 3D printer ■ 5 CAD files to print bit.ly/1wfl9a8 ■ White venting duct ■ Small square of aluminium ■ Focusing knob ■ Meccano pieces ■ Tripod Tell us how you began your project Mark Wrigley I run this small company called Alternative Photonics and like to find out about new technologies. When Sheffield’s Festival of the Mind came along I thought of what could we put together in terms of things that are new and disruptive, and that’s how the whole project started. The two things I was interested in were using Raspberry Pis for photography and 3D printing. With 3D printers you’ve got a device in the ballpark of £500, putting it amongst the price you’d pay for consumer items,…

What you’ll need ■ A RasPi car, ready to go ■ An internet connection ■ A reasonably modern smartphone/tablet ■ Pi car source code github.com/shaunuk/picar Now we have our fantastic Raspberry Pi-powered car all wired and charged, it’s time to make it come alive. We’re using the best web technologies that the JavaScript programming language offers, to harness the natural movement of your hand and wirelessly drive the vehicle. Each little movement will trigger an event that calculates what the car should do and then sends it over a socket connection up to 20 times a second. 01 Download and install the software To get the I2C connectivity working, you can follow the steps from pages 64-65. Next we’ll need to find a home for our new project code –…

Flooding saw hundreds of homes right across the world underwater this year, and many would have benefited from having just that little bit extra warning. In order to be better prepared for floods, we’re going to show you how you can prototype your own wireless flood sensor in less than ten minutes. Building it might give you just enough warning to dash home from work, move valuable items upstairs and take the lawnmower, caravan and motorbike to higher ground. Handily, it can also be used to detect toilet flushes, water butt levels or any liquid level rise or fall at all – so it’s not just something fun to try out, it’s practical too! Sending tweets Sending a tweet used to be really easy, if a little on the insecure…

What you’ll need ■ Raspberry Pi Model B ■ HDMIPi kit ■ Class 10 SD Card ■ 5.25V Micro USB power supply ■ USB keyboard ■ Wi-Fidongle ■ Internet connection Digital signage is a huge market in modern times, and increasingly we are seeing digital advertising in the public space – be it on street billboards, shopping centres and even in some city taxis. Screenly is an exciting piece of software from Wireload Inc that has set out to reduce the barriers to entry of the digital signage market by employing a Raspberry Pi as its main hardware component for the individual signage nodes. With the powerful VideoCore IV graphics processor at the heart of the Pi and its low electrical power consumption, using it as a digital signage platform…

The Raspberry Pi was designed to provide several ways to interact with the world through sensors and activators. In the past, we have looked at using the GPIO interface pins to communicate with several devices at once. This is not the only way to work with the world at large, however. This month, we will look at one of the other mechanisms available, the I2C bus. I2C (Inter-Integrated Circuit) bus was invented by Philips Semiconductor, with version 1 having come out in 1992. The design is for short connection paths, and supports multiple masters and multiple slaves where messages on the bus are delivered using device addresses. Messages have a START section and a STOP section, wrapped around the core of the message. The three types of messages that you…

Offload tasks You can offload the audio data processing to Google, accessing the API directly over HTTP by posting your audio data to the appropriate URL. First install the Python module SpeechRecognition: pip install SpeechRecognition Now create an instance of the Recognizer object. A Helper object, called WavFile, will take an audio file and prepare it for use by the Google API. Then process it with the record() function and hand this processed audio in to the function recognize(). When it returns, you will get a list of pairs of possible texts, along with a percentage confidence level for each possible text decoding. Be aware that this module uses an unofficial API key to do its decoding, so for anything more than small personal testing you should request your own…

The Raspberry Pi is an exciting prospect for people interested in an Internet of Things – size, power and flexibility make it perfect for powering any Internet-connected device around the home or office. Setting up a Raspberry Pi to be the brain of an IoT network isn’t exactly a case of selecting the right software in Raspbian, though; there’s a lot of custom work you need to do to get one going. This is where Dizmo comes in, enabling you to control IoT objects using an online API that you can then access remotely. To show you how it works, we’re going to have it track the Raspberry Pi’s core temperature. In this tutorial we are going to work entirely over SSH, but you can easily do this straight on…

What you’ll need ■ Latest Raspbian image r aspberrypi.org/downloads ■ USB printer ■ USB wireless card Wireless printing has made it possible to print to devices stored in cupboards, sheds and remote rooms. It has generally shaken up the whole process of printing and enabled output from smartphones, tablets, laptops and desktop computers alike. But you don’t have to own a shiny new printer for this to work; old printers without native wireless support don’t have to end up in the bin, thanks to the Raspberry Pi. The setup is simple. With your Raspberry Pi set up with a wireless USB dongle, you connect your printer to a spare USB port on the computer. With Samba and CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) installed on the Raspberry Pi, all that is…

What you’ll need ■ Raspberry Pi 2 ■ USB sound card (we used a Behringer UCA202) We are going to take you through the basics of wavetable synthesis theory and use that knowledge to create a realtime synthesiser in Python. At the moment, it is controlled by the computer keyboard, but it could easily be adapted to accept a MIDI keyboard as input. The Python implementation of such a synthesiser turns out to be too slow for polyphonic sound (ie playing multiple notes at the same time) so we’ll use Cython, which compiles Python to C so that you can then compile it to native machine code to improve the performance. The end result is polyphony of three notes, so this is not intended for use as a serious synthesiser.…

Cars are getting clever. These days, with smart navigation interfaces built into new cars, you don’t need to go out and buy yourself a TomTom to get help with directions. But if you’ve got a Raspberry Pi then you don’t even need to buy that – let alone a new car! In this project we will show you how to build your own car computer with your Pi, a quality touchscreen like the 9-inch model from SainSmart that we’re using here, and a few other bits like a GPS module and USB 3G modem. Your CarPi will be able to use open source navigation software Navit to show your route map on screen, plus speech synthesis to read out directions, and it will also be able to check your location…

Requiring no external power source, the BitScope Micro is also water resistant The Raspberry Pi has been used in a plethora of applications in hardware, software and some quite unbelievable combinations of the two. From record-breaking space flights to automated bartending devices and much more, there are thousands of Raspberry Pi projects that, over the last two and a half years, have shown what a capable little Linux box this is. The BitScope Micro is certainly no exception and when you couple it with your Raspberry Pi you have a very powerful, pocket-sized oscilloscope that also features a whole host of other functionalities, such as a waveform and clock generator as well as a spectrum and logic analyser. Best of all though, the whole setup (including the Raspberry Pi itself)…

What you’ll need ■ Breadboard & wires ■ 16x16 LED Matrix ■ 2x 74HC238 ■ 2x 74HC244 ■ 16x 220 Ohm Resistor Driving LEDs in an efficient fashion is a science of its own. The common availability of single-board computers has put the necessary technology within reach of everyone. When dealing with LED displays, two different systems must be considered. We will focus on traditional matrixbased systems made up of one or more LEDs. Their affordable nature makes them ideally suited to classic display applications: they communicate currency prices, provide stock-brokers with updates from the trading floor and have even been used as basic displays for primitive oscilloscopes. Finally, we will also provide you with an overview of electronic basics. This tutorial is a bit more advanced than the ones…

Maker Profile Chris Crowder Programmer and database administrator Working in the car industry, Chris develops manufacturing systems for production floor systems using .Net and SQL. In his down time, he likes to play videogames and tabletop games, but was previously limited to his PC for the former. Find out more: imgur.com/a/KPi2n?gallery It was a little intimidating at first as I wanted to make sure that this project looked and felt like an NES “It all started when my wife asked me what I wanted for Christmas”, said Chris over email. “I had absolutely no idea but I had been wanting to mess around with a Raspberry Pi since it came out, so she got me a starter kit. “While waiting for Christmas I started narrowing down ideas and found the…

Ben Heck Master hacker, creator of The Ben Heck Show Maker Profile Ben Heck is an online sensation and a pillar of the maker community, putting out amazing howto videos for games console hacks and all kinds of different Pi projects. He’s done it all on The Ben Heck Show. Find out more: benheck.com Ben Heck has built two versions of the Portable Pi Arcade. The first was the original Portable Raspberry Pi project (youtube.com/watch?v=dUZjzQuTNX4), where he hacked the Pi to reduce its size and opened up a USB game controller to extract the circuits. With a new assembly in place, he 3Dprinted a customdesigned case, put the new device together, and booted up MAME (the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) to play oldschool games. His recent revival of this earlier…

What you’ll need ■ Portable speakers ■ Sonic Pi www.cl.cam.ac.uk/projects/raspberrypi/sonicpi/teaching.html One of the major features of Scratch is its ability to teach the fundamentals of coding to kids and people with no computing background. For kids, its especially appealing due to the way it allows them to create videogames to interact with as part of their learning. In this kind of vein then, Sonic Pi teaches people to code using music. With a simple language that utilises basic logic steps but in a more advanced way than Scratch, it can either be used as a next step for avid coders, or as a way to create music for an Internet of Things or a robot. 01 Getting Sonic Pi If you’ve installed the latest version of Raspbian, Sonic Pi will…

What you’ll need ■ Breadboard ■ LEDs ■ Buttons ■ Resistors ■ Jumper wires ■ ScratchGPIO3 Scratch is a very simple visual programming language, commonly used to teach basic programming concepts to learners of any age. In this project we’ll learn how to light up an LED when a button is pressed in Scratch, and then change a character’s colour when a physical button is pressed. With these techniques you can make all manner of fun and engaging projects, from musical keyboards to controllers for your Scratch games and animations. 01 Installing the required software Log into the Raspbian system with the username Pi and the password raspberry. Start the LXDE desktop environment using the command startx. Then open LXTerminal and type the following commands: This will create a special…

What you’ll need ■ Arduino Uno ■ Internet connectivity ■ Nanpy https://github.com/nanpy You might be wondering why you might want to attach an Arduino to your Raspberry Pi. While there are lots of reasons, probably the most poignant is the extra six PWM-capable pins and another six analogue pins that a standard Arduino Uno offers. You see, while the Raspberry Pi has an excellent array of pins and capabilities, it can’t do analogue and it can’t do realtime processing out of the box. With an Arduino, additions like servos, potentiometers and a whole array of analog sensors are trivially easy to trigger and control. The best part is that you don’t even have to program in Arduino’s quasi-C++ language. All you need is a standard USB connection between your Raspberry…

What you’ll need ■ Latest version of Raspbian www.raspberrypi.org/downloads ■ picamera Python module picamera.readthedocs.org ■ RasPi camera module ■ Pygame www.pygame.org The Raspberry Pi camera module opens the door for your Pi projects to incorporate aspects of photography and movie making. We’re combining both here to create a fully featured stopmotion animation application, Pi-Mation, which makes it incredibly easy to create impressive HD animations. We’ve written this project with Python and it relies on two libraries that you will need to install. Picamera (picamera.readthedocs.org) is a pure Python interface to the Raspberry Pi camera module and is a must for all camera module owners. Pygame (www.pygame.org), which ensures our images can be displayed on demand. 01 Set up the camera module First things first, you need to make sure your…

Web technologies are moving forward at a huge pace, cloud technologies are bringing mass computing to individuals, and hardware has reached a perfect moment in time where sensors, displays and wireless technology have all evolved into efficient and affordable devices. We truly are at a point where nearly anyone can take an idea from nothing to a working product in a week and at very little cost. Just like this project, which is fun, quick and easy to build on and a fantastic way to learn. We’re going to grab an old remote-control car, rip off its radio receiver and replace it with the Raspberry Pi, hook it up on the network, fire up a bleeding-edge web server and then get your smartphone or tablet to control it by tilting…

Components list ■ Raspberry Pi Model B ■ Maplin Robotic Arm Kit With USB PC Interface ■ MPU-6050 Six-Axis Gyro and Accelerometer ■ 3 Mini Push Button Switches ■ Veroboard ■ Velcro strap ■ 1m Ribbon Cable What first inspired you to begin your robot arm project? The robot arm itself was one I’d seen years ago and I really wanted it because it’s something you can control yourself – it really captured my young imagination. I was volunteering at a science museum down here in Harlow and this club based around the Raspberry Pi sprung up, and I bought the robot arm because I wanted it. So then I had the Raspberry Pi thing going on at the same time and thought, why not meld the two? I had…

What you’ll need ■ Bigtrak www.bigtrakxtr.co.uk/shop/bigtrak ■ Breadboard and cables ■ Motor driver bit.ly/1iOnFug ■ USB Battery pack amzn.to/1h2PBiI ■ PS3 DualShock controller The Raspberry Pi is a small, low-cost computer designed to promote an interest in computing and programming – but it doesn't have to be straight-laced computing. In fact, in this article we’ll be showing you how you can use it to turn a Bigtrak into a robot. That’s educational, right? The Bigtrak is a toy that takes in a list of straightforward commands (Go forwards, turn left, turn right) and then executes them. To make things more interesting we’re going to remove the existing circuitry and replace it with a Raspberry Pi, using a small motor driver to safely control the motors in the Bigtrak, which we’ll…

What you’ll need ■ Raspberry Pi 2 ■ Latest Raspbian image raspberrypi.org/downloads ■ Minecraft Pi Edition pi.minecraft.net ■ Raspberry Pi case ■ USB game controller (PS3 preferable) Minecraft m eans m any t hings t o m any p eople, a nd t o Raspberry Pi users it’s supposed to mean education. Not everyone knows, though, that you can still have fun and play Minecraft as you normally would. Using Raspberry Pi, it is also the cheapest way to get a fully-functional version of Minecraft up onto your TV. However, in its normal state, just being on a TV isn’t the end of it. Using all the features and functions of the Pi, we can take it to a state more fitting of a TV by making it into a…

Your Raspberry Pi is plugged in. Raspbian is installed on the SD card and you are right in the middle of setting up a wireless print server or building a robot to collect your mail from your doormat. But are you truly getting the most from your little computer? Do the components you’re using maximise the potential of your Raspberry Pi or are they holding it back? Perhaps you haven’t explored the full set of options in Raspbian, or you’re running the entire OS from SD card, something that can reduce SD card lifespan. Various tools and techniques can be employed to improve performance, from choosing the right hardware to overclocking the CPU. You might even maximise storage space on the Raspberry Pi’s SD card or all but replace it…

What you’ll need ■ Raspbian set to command line ■ RaspCTL ■ Internet connection Not everyone uses the Raspberry Pi while it’s hooked up to a monitor like a normal PC. Due to its size and excellent portability, it can be located almost anywhere that it can be powered and it’s widely used as a file server, media centre and for other nontraditional applications as well. Some of these uses won’t easily allow access to a monitor for easy updates and maintenance. While you can always SSH in, it’s a bit slower than a full web interface that allows for custom commands and a view of the Pi’s performance. We’re using software called RaspCTL, which is still in development, but works just fine for now. 01 Update your Pi! To…

Components list ■ Raspberry Pi Model A+ ■ Raspberry Pi camera module ■ 5 Short cables ■ 5 Popper buttons ■ USB mobile phone battery ■ USB Wi-Fidongle ■ Energenie add-on board ■ Golf glove What physical modifications have you made since we last spoke? The glove is more portable – previously, the Raspberry Pi was in the wearer’s pocket and you had the long CAT5 cables attached the glove. This has all been stripped back and several steps enabled this. Firstly, was the use of fabric clothes poppers to replace the tactile switches. These are metal and when one makes contact with a ground popper on the thumb, it creates the circuit. It has meant that the same functionality is achieved with five wires as opposed to the previous…

What you’ll need ■ Raspberry Pi ■ Hover ■ Breadboard ■ Male to female jumper cables ■ Speaker or headphones People often ask what the best way is for them to get started with Raspberry Pi. Obviously this does depend on the individual user and what they want to achieve and get out of any project, but in a more general sense it’s often the hardware projects that win out for getting to grips with it. They teach a variety of skills (including programming, circuit building, soldering, hardware design and much more) and are also varied enough to both keep beginners interested and allow them to work out for themselves exactly what aspect they love best. Even a seasoned professional will get a serious kick out of a bit of…

The Raspberry Pi is a fantastic project board. Since we love a challenge, we set out looking for something to really take advantage of its capabilities in the most spectacular way possible, something that would really push the limits of our hacking and coding skills. We chose a quadcopter. Kits are available as ready-to-fly (RTF) if you just want the joy of flight, but where’s the challenge in that? W e s tarted with an almost-ready-to-fly (ARF) kit – the DJI Flame Wheel F450 – all the hardware, but none of the control electronics or software. Many enthusiasts have created DIY quadcopters using Arduino microcontrollers, so we knew a DIY build was possible, but very few, if any, have successfully used the Raspberry Pi. This article uses the Python code…

Maker Profile Pete Taylor Web manager Pete works for a charity and has always tinkered with computers, ever since he got a hand-medown BBC computer. He likes that the Raspberry Pi returns to a time when you could hack your own computer without making an expensive mistake. Find out more: bit.ly/1MKRASw The Raspberry Pi is a maker’s dream – it’s cheap and cheerful, and the community built around it is a brilliant resource Do it yourself Version two of the project will result in a kit that people can use to convert their own cameras “that doesn’t require you to take a Dremel to the insides of a Holga!”. He’s not decided yet on whether to make a kit that converts a Holga, or a kit that builds a Holga-esque…

What you’ll need ■ Portable USB speakers ■ python-espeak module ■ eSpeak ■ Raspbian (latest image) We’ve shown in previous issues how the Raspberry Pi can be used to power robots, and as a tiny computer it can also be the centre of an Internet of Things in your house or office. For these reasons and more, using the Raspberry Pi for text-to-voice commands could be just what you’re looking for. Due to the Debian base of Raspbian, the powerful eSpeak library is easily available for anyone looking to make use of it. There’s also a module that allows you to use eSpeak in Python, going beyond the standard command-line prompts so you can perform automation tasks. 01 Everything you’ll need We’ll install everything we plan to use in this…

What you’ll need ■ Internet connectivity ■ Web browser ■ Google Coder googlecreativelab.github.io/coder/raspberrypi/sonicpi/teaching.html We’re teaching you how to code in many different ways on the Raspberry Pi, so it only seems fitting that we look at the web too. There’s a new way to use the web on the Raspberry Pi as well: internet giant Google has recently released Coder specifically for the tiny computer. It’s a Raspbian-based image that turns your Pi into a web server and web development kit. Accessible easily over a local network and with support for jQuery out of the box, it’s an easy and great way to further your web development skills. 01 Get Google Coder Head to the Google Coder website, and download the compressed version of the image. Unpack it wherever you…

What you’ll need ■ Arduino Uno ■ Breadboard ■ Set of prototyping cables ■ RGB LED (cathode) ■ 3x potentiometers ■ 3x 330 Ohm resisters In the previous project we showed you how you can use an Arduino microcontroller to help the Raspberry Pi become proficient in new skills that can drastically increase the reach of your projects. With the aid of the extra 12 pins capable of PWM and analogue input, you could easily add multiple servos, analogue sensors and even add input devices like joysticks. In this project we’re going to demonstrate this by creating a three-colour lamp that employs three potentiometers (twisty knobs) to control each of the three colours in an RGB LED light. With it you can make most of the colours of the rainbow.…

Controlling the interconnects between various devices is paramount to keeping systems secure and safe. Sadly, most router operating systems are closed source – finding vulnerabilities in them is difficult to impossible. Sadly, running dedicated open-source router operating systems is not a solution for the average user, as they tend to demand high-end hardware with prohibitively high prices. OpenWRT is an affordable and efficient alternative. It foregoes some of the complexities found in traditional router operating systems, thereby allowing for lower hardware requirements. The community has ported the system to various routers: with a little care, a compatible router can be found for £100 or less. Invest a few hours of your time to transform it into a lean and mean fileserver, torrent client or – configuration allowing – even a…

Components list ■ A toy RC car with two channels (steering and drive) ■ Adafruit PWM I2C servo driver ■ F emale-to-female jumper cables ■ 5V battery power bank Estimated cost: £60 / $100 Components from www.modmypi.com To help our toy car come to life using the latest web technologies and our credit card-sized computer, we’re going to need to make some pretty significant changes to its workings. Fortunately, the most complex aspects of the build can be accomplished with a couple of affordable purchases, namely a servo controller board to take care of the steering and throttle, and a 5V battery pack to keep the Raspberry Pi running smoothly. 01 Identify and remove old radio This project is effectively replacing the car’s normal transmitter and receiver. Notice the three…

We know people who just have a Raspberry Pi for XBMC, now called Kodi. It’s a great idea and a great use for the Pi – it works just well enough that you can easily play media locally or over the network. The biggest issue came with GUI response on the original Model Bs, and a lack of USB ports for connecting up everything that you want. While optimisation over the last few years has helped, the leap to Raspberry Pi 2 has basically solved all of these problems by giving you much more powerful hardware to play with. So if you’re looking to upgrade or finally take the plunge, this handy guide will help you create the perfect Raspberry Pi 2 HTPC. What you’ll need ■ OpenELEC openelec.tv ■…

We will show you how to create a high-quality networked music player that takes advantage of the UK’s online radio stations, Linux’s popular Music Player Daemon, and a responsive web-server to control it all. The full-sized Raspberry Pis have two built-in audio outputs: audio over HDMI cable and a 3.5mm headphone jack that can suffer interference and noise. The Pi Zero itself has no audio jacks but Pimoroni has come to the rescue and built a high-quality DAC (digital audio converter) using the same chip as the Hi-Fiberry (PCM5102A). The Pi Zero itself has no audio jacks but Pimoroni has come to the rescue What you’ll need ■ Github repository (http://github.com/alexellis/pyPlaylist) ■ pimoroni pHAT DAC £10-12 (pimoroni.com) ■ Soldering iron, flux & solder Auto-starting on Raspbian In Raspbian/Jessie the controversial…

Voice control In this and further issues, we will look at the parts needed to make your own voice control software for your projects. If you want a virtual assistant, one project is the Jasper system (jasperproject. github.io). The documentation on the main website has a description of hardware to attach to your Raspberry Pi and a full set of instructions for installation and configuration. There is a set of standard modules included to allow interaction with various services. Use the time, Gmail or even the joke module, and there are also third-party modules for you to access. There is even a developer API and documentation to help you add your own functionality to Jasper. Everyone who has watched the Iron Man movies has probably dreamt of having their own…

What you’ll need ■ Raspberry Pi Model B ■ ExpEYES kit ExpEYES is a relatively unheard of but very impressive hardware and software platform for science and electronics experimentation, as well as a useful electronic probing tool for makers and professionals alike. It is also open source on both the hardware and software sides, which makes it affordable and versatile. ExpEYES is billed as a science and experimentation kit but really it is much more than that – it is a fully-functioning four-channel digital oscilloscope with an impressive array of features. ExpEYES ships with a wealth of online documentation in a variety of formats (graphics, user guides, web content), including upwards of 50 suggested experiments, and the kit itself contains all of the hardware required to play with the interesting…

What you’ll need ■ Latest Raspbian image raspberrypi.org/downloads ■ At least one breadboard ■ Push buttons ■ LEDs ■ Female-to-male GPIO jumper cables ■ Male-to-male GPIO jumper cables In this tutorial we combine electronics, music and programming knowledge to create a simple sampler with looping capabilities. The implementation used in this article has three drum sounds as the samples, but it is trivial to add more until you run out of GPIO pins. Before we start, I’ll cover some basic musical terms. Music is split into bars. There are a certain number of beats in a bar. This sampler uses the 4/4 time signature, which means there are 4 beats in each bar. Tempo is the speed at which music is played, and it is measured in beats per minute…

What you’ll need ■ Raspberry Pi 2 ■ 4 x 6mm tactile buttons ■ Female-to-female jerky ■ Terminal blocks ■ A glove ■ Router ■ 2x CAT5 cables Many of you will be avid fans of the game Minecraft. In schools it is fast becoming a motivational teaching and learning tool, useful in areas such as programming, creating logic gates and setting up a network. This project is framed around creating a simple networked Minecraft game where one player chases the other and tries to hit the block they are standing on. The real hack is programming a ‘power glove’ that enables you to assign power moves to each button. These powers can then be deployed and used to slow down the other player and get yourself out of sticky…

Components list ■ Raspberry Pi Model B ■ Cypress PSoC 4 ■ Arduino Micro ■ 57 Xbox 360 thumbsticks ■ 57 NeoPixel Diffused 8mm Through-Hole LEDs (Adafruit) ■ 8 16-channel analogue multiplexers ■ 5 16mm Illuminated Pushbuttons (Adafruit) ■ 200mm SoftPot Membrane Potentiometer What inspired the Joytone? David Sharples T he J oytone i s a n expressive isomorphic musical instrument which came out of my frustration trying to learn to play musical instruments. I was trying to teach myself piano and was wondering why there are white and black keys – it makes things so much harder. I learned a bit of music theory and came to realise that a major scale is just a well-defined musical structure; the gaps between the notes in a major scale are the…

There are now over five million Raspberry Pi models out in the wild, and some of the things that you, the Raspberry Pi community, have made with them truly are wild. From elegantly crafted scripts that chain together a series of web services to homebrew Rube Goldberg machines, they are as creative as they are diverse. And through the crowd of new projects bubbling up online every day, if there’s one word that’s guaranteed to get everyone’s attention then it’s the word ‘hack’. But what exactly is a hack? Well, for the purposes of this feature, we decided that a hack has to have some sort of hardware base. It’s the kind of project where you take one device and, with a little Raspberry Pi magic, transform it into something…

Maker Profile Mayur Singh Computer systems engineering student Located in South Africa, Mayur’s expertise is in embedded systems and he is familiar with microcontrollers and systems that enable outside hardware interaction, such as the Raspberry Pi and the Beaglebone Black. Find out more: bit.ly/1Evlmci Home automation has been a thing for years now, with a fair few intrepid engineers and DIYers modifying their home. With wirelessly controlled lights, heating, garage doors and many other household items, it’s amazing what some have achieved. Science fiction has always portrayed houses with advanced systems and Mayur has been busy creating such a system. “The major inspiration came from watching the Iron Man movies, which is where the name Jarvis comes from. I decided to build a simple home automation system, however over the…