Category Archives: Add-On

LEGO Batman Clock Hack

Holy Batman

Inspired by Dan Aldred‘s LEGO Clock hacks (http://www.tecoed.co.uk/darth-beats.html and http://www.tecoed.co.uk/yoda-tweets.html) I picked up a broken Batman clock from eBay for some hacking shenanigans.  I had several aims, based on the great work of Dan before me

  • Add a Pimoroni Scroll pHAT HD, which would allow both text and graphics to be displayed
  • Attempt to retain the existing button board
  • See if the on board piezo was usable
  • Light the white eyes behind the cowl

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Tweeting Dinosaur

This project was inspired by the work of Andy Stanford-Clark (@andyc) and Lucy Rogers (@drlucyrogers).  They used NodeRED to control a Maplin Action Dino kit via the Twitter hashtag #wakedino.  When a tweet containing #wakedino is found by the NodeRED script, the motor is started, which in turn makes the dinosaur nod up and down.

I opted to recreate their work in Python using the Tweepy library.  I also wanted to build upon the NodeRed implementation with the addition of sound, and the capturing and tweeting of an image. Continue reading

ISS Tracker

The blame for this little project can be firmly placed at the door of @SouthendRPiJams (aka Andy) after I signed up to be an Exhibitor at the Southend Raspberry Jam on 21st Feb.  He dropped me a DM and the conversation went like this

SRJ:

We’re doing Astropi this jam but the HAT won’t be out.  If you could show some of the equivalent AstroPi hardware and code working to help give people ideas, it would be greatly appreciated.

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ToffeeBot

OK, so not quite the Sheldon Virtual Presence Device from Big Bang Theory but who knows…. maybe my next version?

I have had various bits of robots floating around for a while now and never actually pulled them all together. I’ve made both a Scratch, and a PS3 controlled, Pibrella powered bot which I must blog about one of these days. I also built one from LEGO motors and a SN754410 H-bridge a year or two back, but the motors were old (20+ years) and it didn’t get far. Continue reading

A #CheerLights Virtual Christmas Tree

What is #CheerLights?

Cheerlights is a IoT based light control system, originally intended to allow social media to dictate the colour of festive lights around the world.


The current cheerlight status

How does it work?

Put the word Cheerlight and a colour in a tweet and you’ve just told light systems around the world the colour they should show.  On the website is a list of the currently supported colours.

On the back-end there is a feed aggregator which exposes a JSON, TXT or XML API. Continue reading