Our friends at the African Robotics Network (AFRON)are currently running a competition to design a low-cost robot platform. The idea is to create affordable robots to help ignite people’s interest in computing, science, maths and engineering.

While the ultimate target is to build a $10 machine, all prototypes that cost less than $100 qualify for entry. The IEEE Robotics and Automation Society are kindly sponsoring the cash prizes, and we’re also supplying some Raspberry Pis as prizes for the winning teams. The deadline for your entries is the middle of September.

Full details can be found on AFRON’s website. You don’t have to use a Raspberry Pi in your design – as long as your robot is cheap, it’ll qualify. Time to put your thinking caps on and get creative!

[via: http://www.raspberrypi.org/]

Mike Cook has rigged up a solenoid-controlled glockenspiel to play some of Rogers and Hammerstein’s finest. Just brilliant.

He’s hand-built a simple buffer board to intermediate between the Raspberry Pi and his robot glockenspiel, which you can read all about on his blog; there are instructions for making a similar board at home, which sounds like a great weekend project. Give me a shout if you make one yourselves!

Pi Plays Poppins from Mike Cook on Vimeo.

[via: http://www.raspberrypi.org/]

We’ve had some people send us some great stuff this week – if you’re working on something cool that you think we might feature in a grab bag post, please mail me at liz@raspberrypi.org.

First up, some video. Linus Torvalds has been talking about Raspberry Pi (we will forgive him his insistence on calling it Raspberry P.I. because he is a massive hero of ours, and the fact that he ever mentions us at all is beyond fantastic.) The question about Raspberry Pi starts at 52m 19s.

Steve Jones from iMica has put AROS, an open-source implementation of Amiga OS on the Raspberry Pi.

Greg Macaree has been using the Raspberry Pi as a crucial piece of wedding reception audio equipment, the whole setup nearly jeopardised by a milking machine (seriously). He says:

For those not familiar, Sonos is a multi-room streaming hifi system.The Connect:Amp incorporates a media player with a 55w stereo amplifier and a 2 port network switch. It connects to your router, network storage device (if you have one) and speakers so you can listen to your music collection or Internet radio feed wherever you have a zone player setup. They also have the ‘Sonos Control’ an ip based wireless remote control which connects directly to the system.

I’ve had a few Sonos zones setup in my house for a couple of years now, generally playing a rock related Internet feed whenever I’m at home!So it was situation normal a few months ago when Becky, my fiancée had one of her mates over to chat about her forthcoming wedding.The music was probably on the loud side, so Becky picked up the Sonos remote to turn the volume down… And so the conversation began, that ended in me volunteering to provide the music for the wedding reception!

As the event got closer the technical aspects became more apparent, the venue – a marquee on their family farm would certainly not have an Internet connection or even a reliable power supply that I’d want to plug a pc into.

Sat at my desk I looked down and had the light-bulb moment, the Sonos system requires two things from a network – an ip address and a music source.. Sat in front of me was my recently delivered Raspberry Pi which could deliver those.. or could it?

I needed to have dhcp and file server services but having only dabbled in Linux (I’ve been a Windows user since 3.11 ) it was going to be a smallchallenge, although I knewit should be possible.

I started by downloading the Debian image from www.raspberrypi.orgThis gave me the bare bones of the server.Next job was to share a folder that I could fill with mp3′s.The Sonos devices need a windows style share, so after some research online I found that the tool for this task is an app or daemon called samba.Using apt-get I soon had samba installed and configured and I attempted to connect from my windows laptop.Before i could even attempt this i needed to know the current ip address of the Pi.Ifconfig soon displayed the answer and success! I could see the share.However I couldn’t write anything to it.Google soon came up trumps and chmod 777 was run on the folder – I could now copy the mp3′s onto the sd card of the Pi.

I then attempted to connect to the share from Sonos and it happily connected straight away, but with the Pi as a dhcp client I had to remain connected to my home network.Again Google came to the rescue, a static ip address was setup and dhcp3 was downloaded, installed and configured.I disconnected the Pi from my home lan and plugged it directly into my Sonos Amp.I rebooted both and nothing..My remote wouldn’t talk to the amp although I thought it should be ok and the activity port on the amp was showing activity –I couldn’t connect.

I was just about to pull the setup apart to check everything when the remote then popped into life, showed a message box – “new ip address, reboot now?” so I quickly clicked ok and up it came with its new ip – it then connected to the amp and in turn the amp connected to the Pi!Blimey, it works!I selected a track and hit play.. Lo and behold, music came blaring from the speakers and the problem was resolved. I had the solution I needed!

Come the day, I setup the Pi, Sonos & speakers in the marquee.. But there was no power, the kitchen had ‘borrowed’ it – I couldn’t test anything so had to disappear to the wedding hoping that all was well.

Several hours later, after the sit down meal, the power arrived and I plugged the Sonos and Pi into the extension – disaster..The Sonos wouldn’t boot.To cut a long story short, the milking parlour on the farm was now in full production and that didn’t leave enough juice for us.. Once milking time was over I tried again and success.. It was a few minutes later than planned but the reception was soon rocking and it kept on rocking into the early hours!

Congratulations to Lyndsey & Alan – a fantastic day, assisted by a small slice of Pi!

And finally, Warrington Collegiate have been working on getting Windows 7 (!) running on the Raspberry Pi using the VMware View Open Client. We think they’re the first people to have done this – they’re calling it Magnum Pi, because we all love moustaches and Hawaiian shirts. Nick Smeltzer, their Director of IT Services emailed me to say that Microsoft already know about it…

[via: http://www.raspberrypi.org/]

I posted this shell tutorial from Linux Command on Twitter earlier today. It’s had so many retweets and favourites that I thought it deserved a spot here as well for those of you who are new to Linux and want to get to grips with the command line in preparation for your Raspberry Pi.

Let us know how you get on!

[via: http://www.raspberrypi.org/]

Someone in our forums was asking yesterday where he could buy some ribbon cable with a press connector for his Raspberry Pi, to attach to the GPIO pins. Pre-built cables like this are hard to find, and the options other people on the forums found were pricey, and also attracted large shipping costs. So Gert stepped in: here’s how to build your own using parts (which you should be able to buy from your local electronics store).

[via: http://www.raspberrypi.org/]