Education, Picademy, Raspberry Pi Foundation

Raspberry Pi Foundation launches new Picademy@Google initiative

by  •  • 2 Comments

The Foundation has just announced a new programme of Picademy training at a centre in Leeds. Picademy@Google will take place on the dates shown below at a pop-up space known as a “Digital Garage”:

  • 21st – 22nd May 2015
  • 8th – 9th June 2015
  • 8th – 9th July 2015
  • 4th – 5th August
  • 5th – 6th October

Run by hand-picked community members and educators, these two-day sessions will be “a mix of hands-on making, project-based learning and general hacking”.

You can find out more details here and apply for a space on the courses here.

This is a really fantastic initiative and could be the start of something incredible – a portable, two-day syllabus of CPD for teachers that can be put into different areas of the country making it accessible to a much wider range of educators.

Databases, Geeky Techiness, Internet of things, Programming, Sensors, Software, Tutorials

Raspberry Pi iBeacon system for bypassing theme park queues

by  •  • 0 Comments

Hacker (and fellow amateur thesp) Michael duPont attended a hackathon at Universal Studios in March and helped to create a system whereby guests to the theme park could bypass ride queues by visiting certain checkpoints in a park area, thus completing ‘challenges’. This was accomplished using iBeacons. He has written an Instructable which takes you through the process of setting up a Pi as an iBeacon and then acting as the ‘gateway’ device for the system. Read it here. See a demo of the hackathon device below.

Arduino, Audio, Geeky Techiness, Making, Music, Robotics

Guitar powered by a Raspberry Pi and Arduino plays network logs

by  •  • 0 Comments

Ben Reardon saw a robot playing a classical guitar in 1988 at a World Expo in Brisbane, Australia. It stuck in his mind and he has now done his own version using a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and some servos to pluck the strings. It’s obviously much more complicated than that, and he explains the challenges in his blog which has photos of some of the build process and lots more of the finished product. There are several videos (one of which you can see below) of it in action. The intriguing part of the project is that he has programmed it to take in the logs from his firewall and convert it into music. Read more here.