Here’s a guest post from our old friends Mike Horne and Tim Richardson. Come and join the fun at the next Pi Wars!

Pi Wars is a challenge-based robotics competition in which every robot must be controlled by a Raspberry Pi. It’s great fun, and it will all be kicking off once again on 1st-2nd April 2017. For the first time, we are extending the event to run over two days, as we have been overwhelmed with interested applicants.

We have always tried to encourage young robot builders to get involved in CamJam and in Pi Wars. Previously we have held Pi Wars in September and December, but this did not allow school teams enough time to build, program, test, and otherwise prepare their robot around their schoolwork. We therefore decided to move the event date to later in the academic year: we think April is late enough for schools to have run enough robot club sessions, but early enough not to clash with exams.

This time around, we have a celebrity judge: Dr Lucy Rogers from the BBC’s Robot Wars will be putting your robots through their paces.

In previous years, we have categorised robots by cost (in 2014) and size (in 2015). This time, we are going to group teams into the following categories:

• Schools and other clubs

• Families and groups of friends

• Amateur/beginner/intermediate hobbyists(s)

• Professional or expert hobbyist(s)

This means that robot teams will be competing against their peers, rather than against those with different skill levels – so, it will be, for instance, school vs school and family vs family (in a non-Mafia kind of way).

This year’s list of challenges is available on the Pi Wars website. As well as winning points for their performance in a range of challenges, this year’s robots are also being given points for artistic and technical merit. There’s even a prize for the funniest robot (the competition does start on April Fool’s Day, after all!) and a pre-event blogging competition which encourages teams write about themselves, and their journey from a collection of parts to a working robot.

We’ve come up with a list of general rules and also rules for each challenge. Perhaps the most important one this year is a requirement that your robot must be sub-A4 in size. This still leaves quite a lot of room for flexibility in design, whilst at the same time levelling the playing field. It also means that those teams who are using kits are in with a better chance of competing against those who make their robot from scratch.

Entry into Pi Wars is on an application basis, rather than first-come, first served. With the number of teams we’re expecting to apply, the quality of your application is important. You can read more about the application and selection process here.

To apply to enter the competition, please fill in the application form. Feel free to take as much time over your application, and provide as much information as possible.

If you’re interested in robotics and technology, but you don’t want to build your own robot this time, you are still very welcome to come and watch the competition. Spectator tickets will go on sale later in the year. We only charge for adults, so it’s great for those on limited incomes. Join our mailing list to be notified when tickets are available, or keep an eye on piwars.org.

If you’re an altruistic type, you may be wondering if there’s some way you can help with Pi Wars. As with all big events, we need a team of volunteers to make the day go smoothly. Rather than having just a few marshals who spend the entire day helping, we aim to have as many people as possible so that everyone can spend most of the day watching the robots take on the challenges. Depending on the number of people who volunteer, helpers spend approximately two hours doing marshalling activities. Judges generally spend slightly more time judging, but we aim to give everyone a chance to experience the event as a spectator as well as helping us out! If you’d like to help out, please do contact us. We’ll be delighted to hear from you! We are also very happy to hear from potential sponsors: you can check out our website for more information on sponsorship, and on what we can offer in return.

To whet your appetite for the upcoming competition, or if you have never been to Pi Wars and want to know what it’s like on the day, we’d like to leave you with Matt Manning’s video of last year’s event…

Pi Wars 2015

Uploaded by RaspberryPiIVBeginners on 2015-12-05.

…and Spencer Organ’s video of the 2014 wars:

Pi Wars December 2014

What can you do with a Raspberry Pi? Build robots! Check out this video of Pi Wars held on Saturday 6th December 2014.

Tickets will be available for observers as well as competitors; it promises to be another great weekend. We’re looking forward to seeing you there!

In my day, you were lucky if you had some broken Clackers and a half-sucked, flocculent gobstopper in your trouser pockets. But here I am, half a century later, watching a swarm of school pupils running around the playground with entire computers attached to them.

Or microcontrollers, at least. This was Eastlea Community School’s Technology Day, and Steph and I had been invited along by ICT and computing teacher Mr Richards, a long-term Raspberry Pi forum member and Pi enthusiast. The day was a whole school activity, involving 930 pupils and 100 staff, showcasing how computing and technology can be used across the curriculum. In the playground, PE students had designed and coded micro:bits to measure all manner of sporting metrics. In physics, they were investigating g-forces. In the ICT and computing rooms, whole cohorts were learning to code. This was really innovative stuff.

A highlight of the tour was Mr Richard’s classroom, stuffed with electronics, robots, and hacking goodness, and pupils coming and going. It was a really creative space. Impressively, there are Raspberry Pis permanently installed on every desk, which is just how we envisaged it: a normal classroom tool for digital making.

All this was amazing, and certainly the most impressive cross-curricular use of computing I’ve seen in a school. But having lived and breathed the Raspberry Pi Oracle weather station project for several months, I was really keen to see what they’d done with theirs. And it was a corker. Students from the computing club had built and set up the station in their lunch breaks, and installed it in a small garden area.

Then they had hacked it, adding a solar panel, battery and WiFi. This gets round the problems of how to power the station and how to transfer data. The standard way is Power over Ethernet, which uses the same cable for power and data, but this is not always the optimal solution, depending on location. It’s not as simple as sticking a solar panel on a stick either. What happens when it’s cloudy? Will the battery recharge in winter? Mr Richards and his students have spent a lot of time investigating such questions, and it’s exactly the sort of problem-solving and engineering that we want to encourage. Also, we love hacking.

Not content with these achievements, they plan to add a camera to monitor wildlife and vegetation, perhaps tying it in with the weather data. They’re also hoping to install another weather station elsewhere, so that they can compare the data and investigate the school microclimate in more detail. The weather station itself will be used for teaching and learning this September.

Eastlea Community School’s weather station really is a showcase for the project, and we’d like to thank Mr Richards and his students for working so hard on it. If you want to learn more about solar panels and other hacks, then head over to our weather station forum.

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Weather station update

The remaining weather station kits have started shipping to schools this week! We sent an email out recently for people to confirm delivery addresses, and if you’ve done this you should have yours soon. If you were offered a weather station last year and have not had an email from us in the last few weeks (early July), then please contact us immediately at [email protected].

Happy Days! @TASIS_Lugano @Raspberry_Pi @clivebeale @tvenchus pic.twitter.com/cExHlAr083

— Amy Bloodworth (@amy_abroad) July 26, 2016

Rob here from The MagPi. It’s the last Thursday of the month, which can only mean one thing: a new issue is out!

Whenever a new piece of hardware comes out, there are always people trying to port or emulate different operating systems onto it. The Raspberry Pi was no different, with several attempts at porting differing operating systems when it was first launched. For over a year now though, Microsoft has officially supported Windows on the Raspberry Pi through Windows 10 IoT Core.

In The MagPi 48 we cover the latest developments in Windows 10 IoT Core that have come about since the Raspberry Pi 3 was launched, and how to make use of them in your own projects. We’ve also got exclusive news on an upcoming kit specifically for the Raspberry Pi 3 that lets you create amazing projects right out of the box.

As well as all the Windows talk, we invite you to take part in the Scratch Olympics, continue building the arcade machine of your dreams, learn about Twitch-controlled robots, and read a review of the long-awaited NatureBytes wildlife camera.

You can also learn how to make this swimming game from the legendary Mike Cook, which involves paddling your arms wildly in the air in the general direction of a home-built sensor board to control your character.

Raspberry Pi Olympic swimming

From the The MagPi 48 – August 2016 – an Olympic swimming simulator for the Raspberry Pi.

The MagPi 48 is out today in WH Smith, Tesco, Sainsburys, and Asda in the UK and will be in Micro Center and selected Barnes & Noble when it comes to America. You can also buy a copy online from our store, or get it digitally on our app that’s available for iOS and Android.

Get a free Pi Zero
Want to make sure you never miss an issue? Subscribe today and start with issue 47 to not only get the poster and mission patch, but also a Pi Zero bundle featuring the new, camera-enabled Pi Zero and a cable bundle that includes the camera adapter.

Free Creative Commons download
As always, you can download your copy of The MagPi completely free. Grab it straight from the issue page for The MagPi 48.

Don’t forget, though, that like sales of the Raspberry Pi itself, all proceeds from the print and digital editions of the magazine go to help the Foundation achieve its charitable goals. Help us democratise computing!

We hope you enjoy the issue! We’re off for a haircut.

Hello all! Raspberry Pi would like to ask you out for the day. We have a day of making, hacking, bikes, bird boxes, picnicking, and filming lined up. All we need now is some good company! I’ll let Owen explain all…

YouTube

No Description

This day of tinkering shenanigans is in preparation for our brand new programme for young people, which will be launching soon. If you’d like to apply, you need to be aged between 12 and 18, living in the UK, and free on Tuesday 23rd August 2016. You also need to be comfortable in front of a camera. We’ll be catching all the action throughout the whole day and making videos to share with the world, so we need smiley faces! If you love tinkering and getting creative, then this is for you. You don’t need any experience with computers or electronics; this is for anybody who enjoys making things.

We’ll cover your travel costs, and if you are coming a really long way we can provide accommodation for you and a parent or guardian. Accompanying adults will get the day to themselves to do whatever they please around Cambridge: it’s a beautiful place with lots to see.

In order to bag an invitation, you’ll need to send our judges a mini video about yourself. This video is your chance to shine, so get creative! (Don’t worry about special equipment – we’re expecting most of you to shoot on your phones.)

The video should be no longer than 30-60 seconds. It should introduce you and give us a little run down of what you like making and doing. That can be making cake, videos, clothes, robots, or even just making a mess. Please include anything else you think will entertain us. If you are entering in a group with friends, then feel free to get together for your filming session, but remember that each person must submit an individual video of themselves. Group videos will not be accepted: you all need to have your own 60 seconds in the spotlight.

Applications must be received by midnight on Sunday 7th August.

Submit your video and details to us via the Digital Making Day form.

If you have any questions email [email protected].

Don’t forget to spread the word to anyone else who may want to take part!

Formula Pi is the latest Kickstarter project to come from PiBorg, the team responsible for the ZeroBorg motor controller, the wonderful DiddyBorg robot, plus a bunch of other wonderful Pi creations. We’re big fans.

Allowing backers from across the globe to participate, the Formula Pi project consists of two race events. Competing in either the Summer or Winter Series (or in both if they want), participants modify code to run the autonomous Pi Zero-powered cars around 23 laps of the course.

The team at PiBorg have done the majority of hard work, building the cars and writing the basic code. Entrants then have the chance to add to the code before it’s inserted into their car via SD card, to give their robots an edge – and the race begins.

Claire, Tim and the PiBorg team aim to continue the Formula Pi experience, expanding on the races to allow for different classes, speeds, and coding challenges. They also plan to include a battle series in which a MeArm is attached to their YetiBorg, creating the ultimate fighting ArmyBorg.

Both Summer and Winter Series races will be broadcast live for everybody to watch. (We’ll be covering them here.) If you want to take a active part, entry will cost £35, which includes a customisable ‘lid’ for your car, giving you the chance to make your racer stand out from the competition.

Code will be made available to all racers once the Kickstarter campaign ends on August 22nd, allowing time for modifications before race day. Rewards for backing the Formula Pi campaign include having your logo placed upon the track, owning your own YetiBorg racing robot, and the chance to name the first corner of the track.

For more information on the PiBorg Formula Pi campaign, plus a few chuckles at the outtakes of making a car ‘driverless’, check their Kickstarter page out now.

Now. Now, now, now, now, now!

Even you live somewhere heavily endowed with bats, you’ve probably never had a good look at one on the wing. Bats fly so fast – in poor lighting conditions – that if you’re lucky you’ll get a glimpse of something flashing by out of the corner of your eye, but usually you won’t even notice they’re there.

Enter the Batinator.

The Batinator is a portable Raspberry Pi device with an Pi NoIR camera board and a big array of IR lights to illuminate the subject, which means it can see in the infra-red spectrum. Martin Mander has set it up to record at 90 frames per second – enough to capture the very fast flappings of your neighbourhood bats in slow-mo. And it’s powered by a recycled 12v rechargeable drill bat-tery, which makes it look like some sort of police hand-held radar bat scanner. (Which it is not.)

Here’s the Batinator in action (bats start doing bat stuff at about 1:30):

The Raspberry Pi Batinator

The Batinator is a portable Raspberry Pi that uses a PinoIR (No Infrared Filter) camera module to record video in the dark at 90 frames per second, 640×480 resolution. It features a 48 LED illuminator lamp on top and the power is provided by a 12v rechargeable drill battery.

Martin’s made a full writeup available on Instructables so you can make your own, along with some video he’s taken with the same setup of a lightning storm – it turns out that the same technology that’s great for bat-spotting is also great for storm-filming. He’ll walk you through the equipment he’s built, as well as through building your own bat lure, which involves soaking your socks in beer and hanging them from a line to attract tasty, tasty moths.

Thanks Martin – let us know if you take more footage!

 

Bees are important. I find myself saying this a lot and, slowly but surely, the media seems to be coming to this realisation too. The plight of the bee is finally being brought to our attention with increasing urgency.

In the UK, bee colonies are suffering mass losses. Due to the use of bee-killing fertilisers and pesticides within the farming industry, the decline of pollen-rich plants, the destruction of hives by mites, and Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD), bees are in decline at a worrying pace.

One hint of a silver lining is that increasing awareness of the crisis has led to a rise in the number of beekeeping hobbyists. As getting your hands on some bees is now as simple as ordering a box from the internet, keeping bees in your garden is a much less daunting venture than it once was. 

Everyone say “beeeeeeees!” #bees #beekeeping #savethebees #canon #canon5dmarkii #lightscameraaction #bantamscottage #potton

A photo posted by Chloe Peters (@chloepeters) on Jun 26, 2016 at 11:11am PDT

Taking this one step further, beekeepers are now using tech to monitor the conditions of their bees, improving conditions for their buzzy workforce while also recording data which can then feed into studies attempting to lessen the decline of the bee.

WDLabs recently donated a PiDrive to the Honey Bee Gardens Project in order to help beekeeper David Ammons and computer programmer Graham Toal create The Hive Project, an electric beehive colony that monitors real-time bee data.

Colony Collapse Disorder (CCD) is decidedly mysterious. Colonies hit by the disease seem to simply disappear. The hive itself often remains completely intact, full of honey at the perfect temperature, but… no bees. Dead or alive, the bees are nowhere to be found.

To try to combat this phenomenon, the electric hive offers 24/7 video coverage of the inner hive, while tracking the conditions of the hive population.

Bee bringing pollen into the hive

This is from the first live day of our instrumented beehive. This was the only bee we spotted all day that brought any pollen into the hive.

Ultimately, the team aim for the data to be crowdsourced, enabling researchers and keepers to gain the valuable information needed to fight CCD via a network of electric hives. While many people blame the aforementioned pollen decline and chemical influence for the rise of CCD, without the empirical information gathered from builds such as The Hive Project, the source of the problem, and therefore the solution, can’t be found.

 

 

Ammons and Toal researched existing projects around the use of digital tech within beekeeping, and they soon understood that a broad analysis of bee conditions didn’t exist. While many were tracking hive weight, temperature, or honey population, there was no system in place for integrating such data collection into one place. This realisation spurred them on further.

“We couldn’t find any one project that took a broad overview of the whole area. Even if we don’t end up being the people who implement it, we intend to create a plan for a networked system of low-cost monitors that will assist both research and commercial beekeeping.”

With their mission statement firmly in place, the duo looked toward the Raspberry Pi as the brain of their colony. Finding the device small enough to fit within the hive without disruption, the power of the Pi allowed them to monitor multiple factors while also using the Pi Camera Module to record all video to the 314GB storage of the Western Digital PiDrive.

Data recorded by The Hive Project is vital to the survival of the bee, the growth of colony population, and an understanding of the conditions of the hive in changing climates. These are issues which affect us all. The honey bee is responsible for approximately 80% of pollination in the UK, and is essential to biodiversity. Here, I should hand over to a ‘real’ bee to explain more about the importance of bee-ing…

Bee Movie – Devastating Consequences – HD

Barry doesn’t understand why all the bee aren’t happy. Then, Vanessa shows Barry the devastating consequences of the bees being triumphant in their lawsuit against the human race.

 

We’re back again with yet another amazing book in our Essentials series. We know you love them, and we also know that a lot of you love Minecraft. So here is Hacking and Making with Minecraft, the best place to learn about how to mod Minecraft Pi using the power of code.

Hacking and Making with Minecraft is out this very second for you to go and get online.

Packed into its pages, which you can download for free as a PDF, are a load of chapters based on articles in the magazine, as well as plenty of brand new tutorials created by the Minecraft Pi Mastermind himself, Martin O’Hanlon. You may have heard of him – he helped get the SpaceCRAFT code working that was run on the International Space Station by Tim Peake!

Here’s some of the amazing things you’ll find in the 13 chapters squeezed into the book:

• Play the game and write your first program
• Learn how to control blocks using code
• Create your first mini games
• Interact with the GPIO pins through Minecraft
• Control Minecraft with Node-RED and Sonic Pi
• And lots more exciting stuff!

We reckon it will help improve your coding skills, which you should remember when your parents start asking why you’re playing a bit more Minecraft than usual.

You can buy Hacking and Making with Minecraft in our app for Android and iOS, as well as grabbing the free PDF. Print versions are coming soon too.

Now if you’ll excuse us, we need to go try it out ourselves in the Holodeck.

Hacking and Making with Minecraft is freely licensed under Creative Commons (BY-SA-NC 3.0). You can download the PDF for free now and forever, but buying digitally supports the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s charitable mission to democratise computing and educate kids all over the world – so please consider it!

James Dougherty, co-founder and owner of Real Flight Systems, was looking at how to increase the performance of his high-altitude rockets…

James’s goal was to build a ‘plug and run’ video system within a rocket, allowing high-definition video to be captured throughout the entirety of the flight. He also required a fully functioning Linux system that would allow for the recording of in-flight telemetry.

You can totally see the direction he’s headed in, right?

This requirement called for long battery life, high storage to accommodate up to 1080p video, and a lightweight processor, allowing the rocket to be robust and reliable while in flight.

Unsurprisingly, James decided to use the Raspberry Pi for his build, settling for the model B.

Before starting the build, James removed the HDMI port, composite video output, USB post, audio jack, and Microchip LAN9512. Not only did this lessen the weight of the Pi, but these modifications also lowered the power needed to run the setup, thus decreasing the size of battery needed. This shrunken unit, completed with the addition of a Pi camera, meant the Pi could run for 8-10 hours with the recording quality lowered to 720p60 and no audio captured.

Sadly, the first launch had its issues: the rocket suffered a system failure that resulted in the destruction of the micro SD during the Pegasus flight at BALLS 23, an experimental rocket launch event in the Blackrock desert, USA.

Rockets Magazine managed to record the launch which shows the highlights mid-flight.

ROCKETS Mag Balls 23 James Dougherty Pegasus

James Dougherty Pegasus flight at Balls 23

However, the next launch was far more successful, with close friend Jimmy Franco launching Rocket-Pi within a Dominator 4 to record the following footage.

(This clip comes with a motion sickness warning!)

Dominator 4 L1355 – TCC 02/21/15

Jimmy Franco flies Dominator-4 at TCC’s February Launch (02/21/15 on an L1355.

So what was next?

Aside from a few issues with Windows when trying to upload the footage post-flight, the main gripe was the lack of audio.

Investing in a new Raspberry Pi, making sure to keep more of the original components intact, James also updated the board with a USB microphone, added a USB flash drive to eliminate the Windows issues, and replaced the SD card with a lower storage option, as the footage was now stored in the flash drive.

1/3 Scale Nike L3150 – TCC Nike Smoke Drag Race 06/20/15

Launch and recovery of 1/3 Scale Nike Smoke at Tripoli Central Californias June 20th Launch. The vehicle flight-ready weighed 30 lbs, L3150 produces 800lbs initial thrust so we had about 26.6 G’s (burnt time 1.1440 seconds). Max speed: Mach 1.2; Max Altitude, 8,837′ AGL (GPS).

In the meantime, as James has continued to work on the Rocket-Pi, updating the hardware and code, he’s managed to put the Pi through some vigorous testing. During the most recent flight in Blackrock, the Pi reached 48K MSL (48000 feet above sea level… wow), at a speed of up to Mach 1.8 (1381 miles per hour… double wow).

Moving on from the build, James aims to upgrade various features. One of the most exciting upgrades looks to be the migration of Rocket-Pi to the Pi Zero, the smaller size allowing for multiple units in one rocket… creating 360-degree coverage of the flight (yes please!).

More of the build information, coding, and flight documentation can be found at the RFS website.

Over at Mozilla HQ (where Firefox, a browser that many of you are using to read this, is made), some retro hardware hacking has been going on.

The Mozillans have worked their way through several office music services, but nothing, so far, has stuck. Then this home-made project, which started as a bit of a joke, landed on a countertop – and it’s stayed.

Matt Claypotch found a vinyl record player online, and had it delivered to the office, intending to tinker with it at home. It never made it that far. He and his colleagues spent their lunch hour at a local thrift store buying up random vintage vinyl…and the record player stayed in the office so everybody could use it.

Potch’s officemates embarked on a vinyl spending spree.

What could be better? The warm crackle of vintage vinyl, “random, crappy albums” you definitely can’t find on Spotify (and stuff like the Van Halen album above that you can find on Spotify but possibly would prefer not to)…the problem was, once the machine had been set up in a break room, only the people in that room could listen to the cheese.

Enter the Raspberry Pi, with a custom-made streaming setup. One Mozillan didn’t want to have to sit in the common area to get his daily dose of bangin’ choons, so he set up a Pi to stream music from the analogue vinyl over USB (it’s 2016, record players apparently have USB ports now) via an Icecast stream to headphones anywhere in the office. Analogue > digital > analogue, if you like.

The setup is surprisingly successful; they’ve organised other audio systems which weren’t very popular, but this one, which happened organically, is being used by the whole office.

You can listen to a podcast from Envoy Office Hacks about the setup, and the office’s reaction to it.

Mozilla, keep on bopping to disco Star Wars. (I’m off to see if I can find a copy of that record. It’s probably a lot better in my imagination than it is in real life, but BOY, is it good in my imagination*.)

*I found it on YouTube. It’s a lot better in my imagination.