MakeyMakey at Beavers

Recent had a great time playing with a MakeyMakey board (see an example below taken from an Amazon site) with some Beaver Scouts. 

The basis of the activity was a very simple scratch program; where the 'space' key (banana number one) played one recording and 'left key' (better know as banana number two) played another recording. 

Started with a few drum sounds, but when the session really took off was when they started recording their own sounds. Lots of shouts, shrieks and names but it engaged them…and left me with two very smashed up bananas.

Details of the MakeyMakey boards can be found at: http://www.makeymakey.com/

All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.

Northamptonshire Raspberry Jam - 16th April 2016

 PiJam event on Saturday 16th April 2016, in Newton Building, University of Northampton, NN2 6JB.

This is a free event, open to those who either want to found out more about the Raspberry Pi; want to share with others what they have done with the Pi; or just want to talk with others about them. Most of all (I hope) to have some fun.

The event has been supported by the University of Northampton providing the rooms.

Tickets (Free) are available at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/northamptonshire-raspberry-jam-tickets-20886649531

Examples of possible 'show and tell ' items include:

-Minecraft running on a Raspberry Pi with movement controlled with gesture control of an Star Wars styled X-Wing

- Raspberry Pi controlling a 'junk robot'

More updates to follow. 

Tickets (Free) are available at: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/northamptonshire-raspberry-jam-tickets-20886649531


All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.

Raspberry Pi gesture controlled Minecraft X-Wing (revisited)

figure 1

This post builds on two earlier posts and tries to address some of the very useful comments from people who have tried this. I hope this helps.

Overall the project builds on an earlier project to get a simple X-Wing into Minecraft on a Raspberry Pi.  The goal was get Python to build and move the X-Wing. Details of this project can be found here.

Main revision: In this project and the earlier one is based around Python 3 running the Raspbian 'Jessie' November version OS. Also additional libraries may need to be add to get the minecraftstuff (such as ShapeBlock() and MinecraftShape()). Details on how to obtain and install these can be found at  http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2013/11/coding-shapes-in-minecraft.html .

In this post the additional of Pirmoroni's Skywriter is included to allow movements of a hand or a finger to enable the X-Wing to take-off, land, move forward or backward.

It builds on ideas from the book Adventures in Minecraft on using Python and Minecraft using a Raspberry Pi.

figure 2

The Skywriter  is a Raspberry Pi HAT (see figure 2) that allows positional information of the hand just above the board. In this project it is detecting flicks of the hand up, down, or across the board to determine the direction of motion.

Before you start, to use the Skywriter, in the terminal you need to add curl -sSL get.pimoroni.com/skywriter | bash

To start with we just placed the X-Wing above the player by placing blocks in the shape (roughly) of the X-Wing based around the method MinecraftShape (see Chapter 8 of Adventures in Minecraft ).

figure 3

• Find the position of the player;
• To avoid building on top the player the starting position of the X-Wing is set by:
• add 5 to the x position of the player;
• add 10 to the y position of the player(The bit I have to keep reminding myself is the y-axis is vertical.);
• add 5 to the z position of the player;
• Using these values build using, Wool blocks, the X-Wing - 0 for white, and 14 for red blocks;
• If a flick starts at the top of the board (or "north") this moves the X-Wing down towards the ground;
• If a flick starts at the bottom of the board (or "south") this moves the X-Wing vertically up;
• If a flick starts on the right of the board (or "east") the X-Wing moves backwards horizontally;
• if a flick starts on the left of the board (or "west") the X-Wing moves forward.

from mcpi.minecraft import Minecraft

from mcpi import block

import mcpi.minecraftstuff as minecraftstuff

import time

import skywriter

import signal

mc=Minecraft.create()

xPos=mc.player.getTilePos()

xPos.x=xPos.x+5

xPos.y=xPos.y+5

xPos.z=xPos.z+5

xWingBlocks=[

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(0,0,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(-1,0,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(-2,0,0,block.WOOL.id,14),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(-3,0,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,0,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(0,1,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,1,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(2,0,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(2,1,0,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,2,-1,block.WOOL.id,14),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,2,1,block.WOOL.id,14),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,-1,-1,block.WOOL.id,14),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,-1,1,block.WOOL.id,14),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,3,-2,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,3,2,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,-2,-2,block.WOOL.id,0),

minecraftstuff.ShapeBlock(1,-2,2,block.WOOL.id,0)]

xWingShape=minecraftstuff.MinecraftShape(mc,xPos,xWingBlocks)

@skywriter.flick()

def flick(start,finish):

  if start=="south":

    for count in range(1,10):

      time.sleep(0.1)

      xWingShape.moveBy(0,1,0)

  if start=="west":

    for count in range(1,10):

      time.sleep(0.1)

      xWingShape.moveBy(-1,0,0)

  if start=="east":

    for count in range(1,10):

      time.sleep(0.1)

      xWingShape.moveBy(1,0,0)

  if start=="north":

    for count in range(1,10):

      time.sleep(0.1)

      xWingShape.moveBy(0,-1,0)

signal.pause()

For more details on Minecraft and Python I would suggest going to http://www.stuffaboutcode.com/2013/11/coding-shapes-in-minecraft.html especially on how to download the software to implement MinecraftShape. 


If you do use or modify this please leave a comment, I would love to see what others do with it.







All opinions in this blog are the Author's and should not in any way be seen as reflecting the views of any organisation the Author has any association with.