Cool project from Friendly Technician!
Many people buy a Raspberry Pi and it sits on a shelf for a while before they look into what to do with it. This is changing rapidly with the introduction of Computing on the National Curriculum and the Governments proposal to give a Raspberry Pi to every Year 7 in September 2015:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31834927
One of the most engaging experiments I’ve personally seen in action (and tried and tested on our recent open day at Scarborough College) is using a capacitive touch sensor to run programs on the Raspberry Pi. When coupled with Minecraft, this is the result.
The idea came from a post I saw by “Arghbox” on his blog which is well worth looking at:
https://arghbox.wordpress.com/
He used an Adafruit capacitive touch sensor to control certain functions in Minecraft through the Raspberry Pi. I thought this was a really nice idea to engage students in some programming and electronics using a game they could all relate with, so I did my own. Adapting some of Martin O’Hanlon’s ideas I made my own python programme to make it a bit more visual for our open day.
This is my version of the code: I used a real flower to place a flower in Minecraft and used the properties of graphite as a conductor to write a word which, when touched, triggered the sensor. I also used a piece of code which took a picture using the Raspberry Pi Camera when you touched the Orange. Another feature which I forgot to put on the video was that one sensor was placed in a bowl of water, so when you dipped a finger in it, an area on Minecraft was cleared out.
Featured Adafruit Product!
Standalone 5-Pad Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout – AT42QT1070: This breakout board is the simplest way to create a project with mutiple capacitive touch sensors. No microcontroller is required here – just power with 1.8 to 5.5VDC and connect up to 5 conductive pads to the 5 left-hand pins. When a capacitive load is detected (e.g. a person touches one of the conductive contacts) the corresponding LED on the right lights up and the output pin goes low. You can use this to update an existing normal-button project where buttons connect to ground when pressed. Read more.
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