Jul 062015
 

Today we’re getting a bit interactive. I decided to do a mailbag video, showcasing six of the things people have given me or sent in over the last few months. The items in question are…

  • PiUPS
  • Traffic Hat
  • Official Raspberry Pi wifi dongle
  • Shortcrust Plus Pi 2 (& B+) case
  • Unicorn Hat
  • Witty Pi

You Tell Me Which One You Want Reviewed In More Depth

I’m off abroad soon. I haven’t got room in the case to take all of these items. Let me know which is the most interesting to you and I’ll take it, for further investigation. The video should give you an idea which product(s) are of interest to you…

Click any photo to enlarge…

PiUPS

PiUPS is an Uninterruptable Power Supply (UPS) for the Raspberry Pi, which allows you to protect your Pi from a mains power outage. It runs from 6 AA cells. You can get one here for about €30

PiUPS - UPS for Raspberry Pi

PiUPS – UPS for Raspberry Pi

Traffic Hat

Traffic Hat is a simple LED/Button/Buzzer Hat from Ryanteck. It costs £7.75 and you can get one here.

Traffic Hat

Traffic Hat

Official Raspberry Pi WiFi Dongle

This launched a few weeks ago without much of a fanfare. It’s designed by the Raspberry Pi engineers and uses a Broadcom chip. It’s got really good range, from what I’ve been told. You can get one here for £6

Official Raspberry Pi WiFi dongle

Official Raspberry Pi WiFi dongle

Shortcrust Plus Pi Case

The Shortcrust Plus is a Raspberry Pi case. It’s an update of the original Shortcrust case for the B+ and Pi2 B. I think it’s a real improvement on the original Shortcrust design. You can get one here for £8.99

ShortCrust Plus

ShortCrust Plus

Unicorn Hat

The Unicorn Hat is has an array of 64 3-colour LEDs which are really bright and can be used for lots of different display functions or mood lighting. It’s made by Pimoroni and you can get one here for £24.

Unicorn Hat

Unicorn Hat

Witty Pi

Witty Pi is a power management and real-time clock board for the Pi. It’s from UUGear in the Czech Republic and is extremely keenly priced at £10. You can get one here.

Witty Pi

Witty Pi

Don’t Forget…

Let us know which product you’d like to know more about. Use either the comments here or the Youtube video comments. I may also set up a G+ poll once this blog post has gone live.


Update

The Witty Pi took over half of the vote (53%) by ‘decision date’, which was Friday 10th July 2015. So that board will be reviewed in due course. I also picked out the official Raspberry Pi dongle for further attention (I had to remove one from the G+ poll as it only allows 5 options).

 Posted by at 8:48 am  Tagged with:

  12 Responses to “RasPi.TV Mailbag – July 2015”

  1. Unicorn Hat & Witty Pi please

  2. Witty Pi will be interesting!

  3. I vote for the PiUPS & Witty Pi as both are relativly unique products and it would be useful to have an unbiased review of the good points and any problems with them

    John

  4. Witty Pi looks the most interesting

  5. I would like to see the dongle tested & the Witty Pi checked out

  6. Witty Pi and PiUPS. :-)

  7. wifi adapter & wittypi

  8. Witty Pi please!

  9. Hi Alex

    I voted for the Witty Pi, which looks like an interesting little device, seemingly well thought out and reasonable value as a power management system even if you don’t need a RTC.
    (I played the game and voted for one item, though if you should happen to do anything visually interesting with the Unicorn Hat I would quite like to see the video …)

  10. witty pi and piups please. The capabilities of both need thorough examniation

  11. The Witty Pi is a really nice Pi add-on. It solves the age old issue of the Pi where you have to pull out the cable manually after a shutdown. The price point is amazing given a RTC module might cost £3. That’s just an extra £7 for power management with scheduling. If I make a media player with one of my spare Pis the Witty Pi is going straight on top so the rest of the family can just use it without needing to worry about microUSB cables and safe shutdowns.

    • Yeah if you look at the comments and the G+ poll, Witty Pi is doing extremely well. I find the price quite amazing too. I’ve often found the prices of things in Eastern Europe to be “refreshingly honest” as in “not gouging”. There’s quite a lot on the board though, so it is amazing it can be done for that price. It looks like I’ll be taking it with me to have a look at since that’s what people want to see. I saw you covered it. Did you do much with it or just a functionality test?

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