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.
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, or even use Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for MakeCode, CircuitPython, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
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.