Controlling A Raspberry Pi With Real Life Redstone

minepi

We’ve seen computers built in Minecraft out of redstone, the game’s version of electricity, circuits, and digital logic. We’ve even seen a few redstone contraptions controlling real-world devices. [Angus]’ build, though, takes things to a whole new level. He’s created a bridge between Minecraft circuits and their real life counterparts using a Raspberry Pi.

[Angus]’ build relies on a mod for Minecraft servers running as a Bukkit plugin. Blocks powered by redstone are labeled with an in-game sign, and messages regarding the state of a block are passed over the network using the MQTT protocol.

The hardware side of the build is a Raspberry Pi with a PiFace expansion board. With this setup, [Angus] can control LEDs on the PiFace by toggling Minecraft levers, or light up redstone lamps using the PiFace’s buttons.

If you’d like to try this out for yourself, you can grab the Bukkit plugin over on [Angus]’s git. Check out the video of the real life redstone in action after the break.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ythrmFAJugw&w=580]

20 thoughts on “Controlling A Raspberry Pi With Real Life Redstone

  1. Anyone who likes digital logic and Minecraft probably already knows this, but the RedPower2 mod is amazing in terms of the options it provides for redstone wiring. Multiple cable colors, bundled cables, timers, one-block logic gates, even up to a processor capable of using FORTH. Pretty cool, I haven’t explored even a fraction of the options.

    Computercraft isn’t bad either, it adds LUA based computers and turtles to interact with the game world.

    Either of these would be a great addition to such a project.

    1. you are right, you actually don’t even need a bukkit server for controlling the raspberry, just a smp (single player) world and computercraft, the inbuild http client in computercraft can be used to trigger php scripts on the raspberry as well. or if you want to go even further there is an addon for computercraft called ccsockets which implements the whole tcp stack. having a receiver on the raspberry turning on and of the gpios is dead simple in the end.

    1. That’s pretty much it, but it’s a free simulator, or at least a lot cheaper than buying the hardware, and with all the mods and plugins, there is almost no limits beyond your imagination.

  2. How would one do something like this without the piFace board? There are videos around of similar ‘demos’, where the game interacts with a raspberry pi and vice versa, but no documentation (other than this one which uses a piface). Would like to do something like this with my kids over the fall break :)

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