Feel like building a Minecraft castle using the Python API? If so then take a look at my Python script. You can build a castle in your Minecraft world complete with a keep, walls, battlements and a moat.
Author: Matt
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There are now lots of Raspberry Pi add-on boards and some are more well known that others. Farnell asked if they could send me something to review and while browsing their site I came across a board that I hadn’t seen before. It’s the “Freescale Xtrinsic Sensor Board for Raspberry Pi and FRDM”. They popped one in the post for me.
There are a lot of Raspberry Pi camera projects out there that capture photos. Obviously. I’ve found a nice PHP script that lets you view these photos directly from the Pi via a web browser. The script is called “Single File PHP Gallery” and it’s free.
The Pi Co-op is an addon board for the Raspberry Pi which brings the power of an Arduino microcontroller to our favourite single board computer.
Whether you call them USB flash disks, memory sticks, keys or drives they are a useful accessory in the world of computers. By now many people will have a collection of various devices of varying capacities. Using them with the Pi is a great way of getting some use out of them rather than letting them gather dust in a drawer.
The great thing about the Raspberry Pi Edition of Minecraft is that you can manipulate the game world using Python scripts. You can move the player as well as create and destroy blocks. This allows you to create structures in seconds that would take hours to create by hand. By repeating a script you can quickly create structures you have designed. For example you could write a script to create a tower and a section of wall and use it to quickly create a massive castle.
In a previous post I told you how you could capture screenshots on the Raspberry Pi using “scrot”. That method worked fine for most applications but like many screen capture techniques resulted in a black rectangle when used with Minecraft. This has led many bloggers to simply photograph the screen with a real camera in order to get a screenshot of their Minecraft adventures.
If you use the Raspbian operating system on your Raspberry Pi you will be aware that when you type startx you launch the graphical user interface “LXDE”. Within this environment there are plenty of applications and utilities. In your projects you may want to auto-load one or more of these applications when you run startx to save you having to launch them manually.
I was recently testing a sensor which needed calibrating. This involved plotting some data and making some adjustments based on the resulting graph. As a Windows user this is a task I would normally perform in Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice Calc. In this case I decided to try to do it on the Pi given I was already working wthin the LXDE environment. Could I do some simple plots without getting frustrated with tons of obscure command line syntax?
While browsing eBay looking at electronics stuff I found a few interesting items to connect to the Pi. The first item was a small 2-axis analogue joystick. They are similar to the thumb-sticks you would find on a modern games console controller. These modules are cheap and easy to connect to a circuit so I decided to get one. The outputs are analogue so you need a mechanism for the Pi to read these voltages.
Over the last two years I’ve acquired a set of portable USB power banks. These are great for powering the Pi and the larger ones can keep a Pi running for many hours. In previous posts I’ve tested standard AA batteries, a generic Li-on Power Pack and a RAVPower 10400mAH Power Bank.
If you are using your Raspberry Pi with a smaller screen you may want to change the font used on the command line to make it easier to read. I usually do this when I am using various portable LCD screens (eg the HDMIPi). It only changes the font within the console if you are using a screen connected directly to the Pi. It won’t affect Putty/SSH sessions.
This page aims to collate a set of videos and website articles created by other people showing BerryClip and BerryClip+ related assembly guides, reviews or projects. Hopefully this will make it nice and clear for Pi fans who are little bit nervous about soldering or are just curious as to what the kit looks like in reality.
Alex Eames from RasPi.tv very kindly gave me a beta version of the HDMIPi screen for the Raspberry Pi along with some stickers*. This was a project funded via a successful Kickstarter campaign which aimed to raise £55,000. In the end it raised £261,250. Which was nice! Small HDMI screens are expensive. Native HD ones are astronomical. We want to drive the price down “Raspberry Pi” style.
For a number of months the Raspberry Pi Foundation has been planning a website re-design. They have also been putting together an education hub that would make lots of learning resources available to teachers, parents, kids and hobbyists. On 1st April the www.raspberrypi.org site got a facelift. It wasn’t what most people where expecting.
We attended another excellent Digi Makers event held at the @Bristol centre. It’s always nice to wander around and look at the various activities but I also signed up my son for a couple of the workshops. They suggested using SD cards loaded with NOOBs but being a rebel desperate to fight the system I went for raw Raspbian images.
While working on a Raspberry Pi camera project I wanted to mount the Pi and camera on a standard tripod. I’ve got a few tripods and I was getting fed up with trying to mount the camera using sellotape, blu-tack and luck. So I decided to mount the camera within a standard Cyntech Raspberry Pi case and then somehow make the case compatible with my tripod mounts.
The Raspberry Pi is two years old. The credit card computer was described by some as “vapourware” but has now sold more than 2 million units worldwide. That’s a product demand that would have helped prop up Nintendo’s stock price in recent months!
It was a wet and windy journey but we made it to Cambridge in good time ready for the CamJam. I drove with Graham (raspberrypischool.org) and Harry (pibot.org) as passengers. Unlike our last trip to Cambridge we decided to not bring any show and tell items so we could spend more time looking around and talking to people. We arrived just after the morning workshops were ending and it was good to see so many kids at the venue. To read about the morning Sonic Pi workshops take a look at claremacrae.co.uk.
Despite the threats of floods and road closures we headed into Bristol today to take a look round the DigiMakers event at At-Bristol. The last one we attended was great fun and my son enjoyed the Scratch workshop with robots. This event was themed around computer games which gave the technology on display a different feel to the robot themed event in November.
Jim Flewker, a retired languages teacher, has written a horse racing game in Python for use with the BerryClip addon board. In the game you select one of six horses using the BerryClip button and then wait for the result of the race. The result of the race is shown on the command line and via the BerryClip’s 6 LEDs. If you are lucky your pot of virtual money will grow … but beware … the bookie always wins in the end!
Back in the old days I had an Acer N50 Premium PDA. For the youngsters out there it was like a Smart Phone but without the phone bit, the capacitive touch-screen, memory, apps, GPS or battery life. I mainly used it as a TomTom based sat-nav device connected to a Holux GPSlim236 Bluetooth module. The module had been sat in a drawer for at least five years and I decided to see if I could get it working with the Raspberry Pi. Surprisingly I didn’t need to charge it as five years later it still powered up fine. It uses…