People have been asking me about interesting applications for the Raspberry Pi, and whether Raspberry Pi is an Arduino killer of some sort. The answer to the second question is no; in fact it is an Arduino augmenter. This blog post answers the first question with another question: how about a Haunted House sound effects machine?
A new revision of the Early Release of Getting Started with Raspberry Pi came out last Friday. I read Matt Richardson’s chapter on using Pygame with the GPIO pins on the Pi, which included a simple Sound Sample player. I adapted his example to work with an Arduino that talks to the Pi over a serial connection; this skeletal (ahem) hookup could easily be incorporated into some sort of Halloween installation. I decided to use Arduino for reading the inputs because out of the box it is more robust and can handle a wider variety of inputs. Also, there are many existing Haunted House triggering demos out in the wild that use Arduino.
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Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.