Issue #108 — Lego

Hi all

This week the Foundation’s new CEO Philip Colligan joined the team at Pi Towers, and was lucky enough to arrive in time for the Astro Pi competition judging. The second Picademy@Google course took place in Leeds run by Les Pounder, and next week Picademy returns to Cambridge for another in-house session.

The BBC revealed the micro:bit which will land in the hands of Y7s in schools across the UK in late October. It’s a microcontroller, so you program it from any computer – such as a PC or Raspberry Pi. It comprises a 5×5 LED matrix, two buttons, an accelerometer, magnetometer and Bluetooth.

Tomorrow I’ll be running a second workshop for adult-child pairs with the plantpot greenhouse kit at FACT in Liverpool with Rachel.

Ben

Picture of the week

Richard Hayler’s LEGO reconstruction of the Astro Pi flight case

News

• OSMC Stable Released (raspberrypi.org)
  RaspBMC became OSMC (Open Source Media Centre) and the stable release is here
• The triumphant return of the Raspberry Pi Guy (raspberrypi.org)
  Matt's back from exam revision with a new robotics video
• BBC Micro Bit computer's final design revealed (bbc.co.uk)
  The micro:bit final design and specification is revealed

Projects

• Writing Doom For The Raspberry Pi (hackaday.com)
  Writing Doom in pure ARM assembly at Imperial College London
• Giant Snake Game Controller (instructables.com)
  Make a giant Snake game with milk bottles for pixels
• Raspberry Pi Internet Monitor (instructables.com)
  Monitor your home internet connection status with this alert system
• 5" Display Kippah Portable Raspberry Pi (learn.adafruit.com)
  Make a portable Raspberry Pi
• Pitendo Ultimate (thingiverse.com)
  Build a quality Pi-powered Nintendo games console
• PyGame Social Network Monitor (averagemanvsraspberrypi.com)
  Monitor your social networks with this project from Average Man

Articles & more

• Python and Raspberry Pi in education (opensource.com)
  All things Python - programming, physical computing, IoT, community and education
• Pi Wars – annual public robot Olympics (raspberrypi.org)
  Mike and Tim present Pi Wars: 2015 - coming this December
• Remote twerking robot (raspberrypi.org)
  Put your robot t'work and make it twerk
• ELIoT (c3d.github.io)
  Extensible Language for the Internet of Things
• Remote access using SSH and VNC (element14.com)
  Access Raspberry Pi GUI and command line from your Windows machine
• Ultimate BBQ Bot (wired.com)
  How 16 Harvard Students Built the Ultimate BBQ Bot with a Pi

Upcoming Events

• Manchester Raspberry Jam (UK) (11 July)
• Seattle Raspberry Jam (US) (15 July)
• Raspi Summer Jam, München (DE) (26 July)
• Raspberry Pi社群聚會 #09 (TW) (28 July)
• Raspberry Pi DC meetup (US) (28 July)
• Suffolk Libraries Raspberry Jam (UK) (8 August)
• Huddersfield Raspberry Jam (UK) (8 August)
• Raspberry Jam Ipswich (UK) (8 August)
• Ottawa Raspberry Jam (CA) (7 November)

Contact & Submissions

This newsletter is curated by @ben_nuttall. Tweet links to @rpf_weekly or email weekly [at] raspberrypi.org