DMX512 is kinda cool. You often find it used in theatre. But these days it lurks in council public lighting systems and the occasional household Christmas display. DMX can control lights, fog machines, relays and my personal favorite, the DMX flame thrower. When DMX512 was first developed in 1986, the original controllers were big, bulky and expensive. These days a Raspberry Pi can control DMX devices. You will also need one of the following USB DMX controllers to go with your Raspberry Pi:

In addition to your Raspberry Pi, you will need the following hardware: A Bluetooth 4.0 dongle. A Polar H7 heart rate monitor *. Next, download, compile and install the latest ‘BlueZ’ on your Raspberry Pi. BlueZ is the Bluetooth stack for Linux, and it works with Raspbian. Plug your bluetooth dongle into your Pi and the following commands will install BlueZ: $ wget http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/bluetooth/bluez-5.37.tar.xz $ tar -xvf bluez-5.

SD cards have a limited life, and the more you read and write to them, the shorter their lifespan. In a Raspberry Pi this makes things a little tricky, the SD card gets a much tougher workout than it normally would in something like a digital camera. Up until now, I have always just picked up a SD card that was sold bundled with a Raspberry Pi. Unfortunately these SD cards are often low quality and didn’t last very long, with some failing in as little as a month.

The code running on Raspberry PI’s within the gasworks project (An art installation that loosely mimics brain cells as clusters of lights) is all written in Golang. While, the hardware architecture for each of the neurones has a Raspberry PI sending commands to an Arduino over serial. This communication link was one of the first things I prototyped for the project. The veritable Dave Cheney maintains unofficial ARM builds of Go which are compatible with the Raspberry PI.