Category: Python

Raspberry PI Rover Upgrades

I recently picked up the Pimoroni Garden hat and some sensors to play with as it looked like a neat way of swapping breakout boards around without wiring or soldering.

Soon after I thought why not upgrade my rover with the hat so it can drive around measuring air quality, temperature etc… Then I remembered I had my phat stack board lying around and the project turned into lets see how many hats I can stack on the rover.

20181110184604 So first I added the phat stack with the breakout garden hat, explorer (motor) phat, four letter phat and a scroll phat HD. For convenience I also attached  USB hub / Ethernet adapter. This makes it easier to work on the PI if there are any Wifi issues.

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I tested everything worked and whilst being blinded by the scroll phat I had the idea of using it as lighting for the front mounted camera. Continue reading Raspberry PI Rover Upgrades

Raspberry PI LED Matrix Games

A while back I brought a new hat for the Raspberry PI called the unicorn hat HD. Its a 16 x 16 led matrix (256 LEDs) which I managed to get cheap while it was discounted.

I started playing with it recently and at first tried to use it as an over head minimap in mine craft. This kind of worked but the mine craft API was too slow to feed it data quick enough. All well and good if you only stood in one place but useless otherwise.

Next I thought I would try building some pixel games and have been working on a little space invaders clone.

The game is written in python and uses the pygame package for keyboard input but if it were to use something else for input like GPIO pins then pygame could be ditched.

I need to get my head round drawing text to it so I can make a game over screen etc…

You can clone the code here: https://github.com/kenjara/Unicorn-Hat-HD-Games

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