Fewer people this time at the Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam, which we decided was mostly due to this being most school’s half term (one week holiday, for those not in the UK). However, it was a very busy couple of hours. Lots of projects were shown, including my PiPodCorder.

Other projects which we saw were:

• Ken Thompson’s work on a museum front-of-house display using hist TBOPlayer.
• Daniel Bull’s work-in-progress on his Super 8 videocamera.
• Daniel Bull’s actual working home heating regulator.
• A work-in-progress on a project to develop a robot hand to operate front-panel computers at the National Museum of Computing.
• Peter Onion’s work on the Elliott 603 emulator (buzzing and whistling away in the background, it was, reading virtual paper-tape).
• A quite wonderful project. The first internet-enabled Enigma coding machine. Just fantastic.

Peter also treated us to a mini-masterclass in soldering – how to do it, how not to do it and how not to destroy anything in the process. I’ll post a video here or over at Raspi.tv of the mini-course.

Suffice to say, those of us who watched the class got a lot out of it and I fully expect all of us to have soldered something new by the end of the week!

The next Jam will be in November, then Peter’s planning to skip December and hold one in early January and one in late January to make up for it.

Met a few new people at the Jam, including a family from Stevenage who are going to use the Pi during half term for both hardware and software projects.

Also in attendance was David Taylor from Cyntech who have recently started to develop a series of products for the Raspberry Pi including a very fashionable new case. The case is a much snugger fit than the ModMyPi cases and includes a slit on the side for the GPIO cable. We were also given hints at a few of their upcoming products which show that these guys are really thinking about the Pi community and how to support us.