Jacob from Coventry Makerspace has taken 27 LEDs and soldered them together as a cube. He’s then hooked up each of the 9 columns of LEDs to GPIO pins and also to ground, via transistors. The transistors are also hooked up to GPIO pins in rows so that by combining the columns and rows you can ‘address’ each LED individually. A word of warning: he’s not used resistors for the LEDs, and he should have done. He’s also mixed in the use of a Pi Cobbler but not reflected that on his wiring diagram, so just use whichever method you prefer. The code has been pasted in incorrectly, losing the indents, but you should be able to work out what goes where. Read it here.
Wow, so critical. Jacob who created the instructable is gutted at your comments, who is only 10. Fansatic effort, Jacob.
Please read my response and apology to Steve below.
I think you’ve been a little over-critical? That project belongs to a primary school kid!
Please read my response and apology to Steve below. It wasn’t clear how old the writer was and I would never have criticised it as much had I known.
Hi Micheal, please take a little more time to consider your words more carefully and the story behind the Instructable. This project was created and written up by my 11 year old son with limited help from me. It is not perfect but he did it, wrote all the code from scratch and is rightly proud of what he has created.
Coventry Makerspace is an inclusive group encouraging a have-a-go approach from anybody. The shortcomings of Jacob’s project were not met with “that’s not right” but discussions and demonstrations as to how and why we should do things differently.
Best of luck with Pi-Jam. Let’s hope it is better organised than last year.
Hi Steve.
My apologies if you feel my words were not well-chosen. When I read the Instructable (and I did) it wasn’t clear to me how old the person was who wrote it. I can just about see _now_ from the pictures how young Jacob is. Considering his age, he’s actually done brilliantly well. The project page is well-written and the diagrams are clear enough to be able to figure out how to reproduce it. I’m still a bit worried by the number of LEDs in the project without resistors – without limiting the current it’s possible that the Pi won’t cope. Clearly it’s fine as it works, and the Pi seems resilient enough. The code pasting in, you must admit, has got rid of the indents so you have to do a fair amount of figuring out what goes where. The code is sound (actually, it’s rather good what with the use of variables and arrays), and it’s impressive that he wrote it all himself. I particularly would like you to pass on my praise of the soldering – only had the iron a month and he’s already progressed to doing one of the more complicated tasks I’ve seen, so brilliant stuff.
Makerspaces like yours are the reason a lot of kids have no fear about picking up a soldering iron, or tinkering with code, and it’s terrific.
The comment about the Jam… I’m assuming you mean Pi Wars. From the feedback we received, people generally thought it was well-organised, with a couple of exceptions: the adding up of scores and the prize-giving. We’ve taken that on-board and there will be a lot more organisation on that front this year. If you’ve got any suggestions as to how else we can improve, we’re all ears – the better we can make it, the more enjoyable it will be for everyone.
So, my apologies again if any offence was caused. I never go out of my way to upset anyone, but in this case I seem to have done, so I’m sorry.
—
Mike
Stephen
I’m sorry you do not like our organisation of the Cambridge Raspberry Jams. We always request feedback at the end of every Jam; we will be looking through the feedback for CamJam 10 tomorrow night so will be on the lookout for anything that makes them so poor. If there is anything in particular that you feel we can do better next time, please let us know.
Tim
Co-organiser of the Cambridge Raspberry Jam
PS Mike’s comments were correct, but I agree, an 11 year old could be very upset by them. Unfortunately written comments can come across very differently to spoken comments. I know Mike had no intention of upseting anyone.