Newark element14 employees are “walking the walk” when it comes to the new Raspberry Pi computer. Drew Fustini, senior Web developer working at the company’s Chicago headquarters, recently put the credit card sized programming computer to work, building a system that creates light and sound inside a jack-o-lantern. Fustini describes the project on the element14 online community.
Fustini’s project combines the Raspberry Pi development board with LEDs and a small speaker to light up co-worker Liz Houtz’s carefully carved cat jack-o-lantern. The project is controlled via a web page.
“The simple Web interface is intended to allow one to trigger sound or lights remotely via a browser on a computer, smartphone or tablet,” Fustini says in a blog post on the Raspberry Pi page at element14.com.
Newark element 14 and its parent company, Premier Farnell, began selling the British-designed Raspberry Pi in February and have since added to the line, announcing the availability of an upgraded 512MB version this month. The new version features double the RAM and is suited to multimedia, high-memory applications.
The 512MB Raspberry Pi board is being manufactured for element14 in the United Kingdom by Sony UKTec as part of a manufacturing deal the two companies announced in September. element14 has global stock of the Raspberry PI 512MB board available on a first-come first-served basis through its trading brands worldwide.
