Playing With The Minecraft API And A Raspberry Pi

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It hasn’t been a week since Minecraft for the Raspberry Pi has been released, and already we’re seeing some cool builds that bridge our analog world with Minecraft voxel land. [Martin] got his hands on the Raspi version of Minecraft and decided to take advantage of the API Mojang threw into the build by making a huge analog block clock that keeps real world time in the Minecraft universe.

Basically, [Martin] created a small Python script that draws the face and hands of a clock in a Minecraft world. The Minecraft API comes with neat functions such as drawCircle, and drawLine, so making a real clock face is as simple as getting the system time and doing a bit of trig.

After the break you can check out [Martin]’s Minecraft clock in action. If you’re running the Pi version of Minecraft, you can also get this running on your machine with the code on [Martin]’s git.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ey4QpoqZLLU&w=580]

8 thoughts on “Playing With The Minecraft API And A Raspberry Pi

    1. Hmm… I also tried it using putty and Xming. And it gave me an error message as well:
      pi@raspberrypi ~/picraft/mcpi $ ./minecraft-pi
      vchiq_lib: Incompatible VCHIQ library – driver version 2 (min 2), library version 6 (min 3)
      * failed to open vchiq instance
      pi@raspberrypi ~/picraft/mcpi $

      I did notice that there is a new download of Raspbian “wheezy” from the 2013-02-09 on the RPi site. So I’m thinking that i either need to setup a new SD card with this or else that picraft is intentionally limited to only work with the local display output and that it will not work with a remote X servers.

      1. The fix I saw is:
        sudo chmod 777 /dev/vchiq
        Still doesn’t seem to work with ssh -X though, I just get a black screen with both putty/xming and in ubuntu.
        I think your probably need to install vnc or something like that to really play it remotely.

  1. Having worked with building mods and plugins for things like Bukkit, this seems way too easy. I haven’t used a Mojang-official API yet, but if this exists for proper PC Minecraft I shall have to give it a try.

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