Richard Saville attended the first Kent Raspberry Jam last weekend. Organised by 18 year old Bethanie Fentiman, the Kent Jam was a small-ish affair featuring some show-and-tell and talks. Richard gives his insight on his blog, which you can find here. Sounds like it all went swimmingly with some marvellous support from the community.
Trevor Appleton has written a really good walk-through tutorial on using the Twitter API and the tweepy Python library to send tweets out from your Pi. Take a look here.
Andy Proctor has just announced that tickets are on sale for the next Ipswich Raspberry Jam. This one will take place on 27th February from 10am-4pm at the UCS Waterfront Building. If you’re in the area, it’ll be well worth checking it out. Tickets are £1.50 and are available here.
Cerys (@RPi_Stuff) is running a Raspberry Jam in Stafford on Wednesday 10th February. The event will run from 6-8.30pm at King Edward VI High School on West Way. The plan is to have people bring their own equipment along, have some show-and-tell and possibly a few short talks. The Jam is free and you can get tickets from Eventbrite.
Average Man has written a great tutorial on using these tiny bar graph displays with the Pi. There’s a lot of wiring involved, and a lot of maths, but he takes you through it. He’s also written some code to make the whole thing work and then soldered it up on one of his Pi Zero prototype boards. Read more here.
Alex Eames has just announced a new reward level for his RasPiO Pro Hat Kickstarter and I just thought I’d bring it to your attention.
In case you missed it, the Pro Hat is a great new plug-in board for the Raspberry Pi that breaks out all the GPIO pins to female headers, in numerical order (using the BCM numbering scheme) and provides a mini-breadboard on which you can prototype circuits. All the ports are protected so that you can connect things up incorrectly and still not injure your Pi.
The new reward level is £25, is called the GPIO Zero Experimenter’s Kit and includes the following:
It’s a great bundle of goodies and will really show off the capabilities of both the Pro Hat and also Ben Nuttall’s GPIO Zero library (I recently came to understand the benefits of the library – read about that here). It includes an analog-to-digital converter chip (the good ol’ MCP3008) and both a potentiometer and an analog sensor (TMP-36) to get you going in the analog world. It’s nice to see the big LEDs making an appearance and Alex plans on some instructions/tutorials to help you get the most out of the components, including the relay board (which is a mystery to me, so I’m looking forward to that one!). It’s these instructions that really add value to the package – Alex has got a great writing style and goes into a lot of detail with these things, so it’ll definitely be ‘worth having’.
So, if you haven’t backed yet, or if you’d like to change your pledge, head over to the Kickstarter. I’m off there myself now!
