Competitions, Education, Outreach, Raspberry Pi Foundation, Research

The Raspberry Pi is heading to the International Space Station

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A partnership between the Raspberry Pi Foundation, UK Space, the European Space Agency and British astronaut Tim Peake is sending two Raspberry Pis into orbit! This exciting development, called “Astro Pi”, gets even more thrilling: school children will be given the opportunity to send their code up to the Pis and have them run scientific experiments in gravity-less conditions.

The Pis will be fitted with a HAT that exposes several different sensors and the schools involved will receive units that they can test their code out on before they finalise the code and transmit it. You can see a (slightly blurry) Vine of the HAT below:

This is simply fantastic in my opinion – the chance for school kids to get involved in space exploration and science really fires the imagination.

You can read more about the competition, which will launch properly at BETT in January, on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog. There’s also a dedicated website that you can take a browse through for inspiration.

You can read and watch a BBC news report about the project here or below:

Accessories, Arduino, Cases, Geeky Techiness, Making, Retro

Building a Raspberry Pi B+ into a vintage Apple extended keyboard

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Apologies for the lack of posts over the past few days. Pi Wars took up all my energy and I’ve been recovering since then! Plus, I’ve had a few nights out on the trot which means I’ve been unable to get to the blog. Normal service will now be resumed!

Ezra Hilyer has taken an old Apple keyboard, a disassembled wi-fi dongle and an Arduino and built an all-in-one Raspberry Pi unit. You can read how he did it here.

Accessories, Making, Raspberry Jams, Sensors

More CamJam EduKit 2 – Sensors coverage

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Today at Pi Wars, we launched our second CamJam EduKit. This one comes with three sensors: temperature, movement and light; and all the bits and pieces you need to build circuits with them. Oh, that includes two mahoosive 10mm LEDs. Because everyone needs more blinkies 🙂

We sent out some review kits to various people. Two of these went to Richard Saville (the Average Man) and Alex Eames (from RasPi.TV) and they’ve kindly covered us on their blogs. Here’s some links to the coverage:

You can get hold of the second EduKit for £7 by following this link to The Pi Hut. You can view the worksheet material on the CamJam website here.

Photo credit: Alex Eames, RasPi.TV

Accessories, Sensors, Shopping

New CamJam EduKit for the Raspberry Pi – Sensors!

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Myself, Tim Richardson and Jamie Mann from The Pi Hut have teamed up again to bring a low-cost electronics kit to market. Following the international success of the first CamJam EduKit, we wanted to produce something more advanced, but still within the capabilities of the beginner programmer. We came up with the CamJam EduKit – Sensors. This kit (which like the first comes in a lovely tin) contains all the components you need to measure temperature, detect light changes and detect movement. You get a breadboard with which to make up all the circuits, plus all the wires and resistors you need. You also get a couple of LEDs (because everyone needs blinkies) and a buzzer. The temperature sensor, in particular, is lovely because it comes as a shrouded module on the end of a long wire so you can measure the temperature outside, or of a cup of water (or, indeed any liquid). The whole thing costs £7 including VAT, which we’re hoping you’ll agree is great value and perfect as a stocking filler! 🙂

As with the first EduKit, this one comes with a suite of worksheets for you to work through, with explained code examples and circuit diagrams. These have been produced by Tim and tested by me and we’re really proud of the way they’ve turned out. As with the first EduKit, these worksheets will be updated and tweaked as we receive feedback (some of which we have already had from our beta testers), so don’t forget to sign up to the mailing list! While I’m here, I’d like to give a big shout out to our beta testers, especially Richard Saville (the Average Man) and Sway Humphries, who have given us such excellent feedback.

You can get hold of the new EduKit by going to http://camjam.me/edukit2 and following the link to The Pi Hut.