Following on from the success of the first Coding Evening at the beginning of this month, Hannah Mills is organising another one on Tuesday 22nd September at The Brewery Tap in Peterborough town centre. Coding Evenings are a great opportunity for teachers to network with other teachers and technologists about the best ways to teach technology in schools.
You can find out more, including how to book free tickets, here.
Gemma May Latham has been looking into ways that Minecraft can be used to explore artistic uses of textiles. With help from David Whale (co-author of the excellent book Adventures in Minecraft) she built a punchcard reader that is powered by an Arduino. The punchcard is fed into a slot in a laser-cut box, the holes are ‘read’ by the Arduino then the data is pushed through to the Raspberry Pi where it is converted into a CSV file and then fed into Minecraft Pi Edition. Lovely project, Gemma! Read more here.
Ismail Uddin over at ScienceExposure.com has done a lovely tutorial, with accompanying code, that mines the London Underground API for tube line status information and then changes a Neopixel ring to give you an idea of how well everything is running. Read more here.
Four students from Imperial College, London (Bálint Rikker, Csongor Kiss, Sicong Li and Toby Shaw) teamed up for their first year final project. The project aimed to re-write classic shooter DOOM to the Raspberry Pi via 9800 lines of ‘bare metal’ code (i.e. ARM assembly code and no operating system). To control the game, they created a custom controller and hooked it up to the GPIO. You can see the results of the project in the video below.
Olivier Matis has written a programming tutorial which shows you how to use an I2C barometric/temperature sensor (the good old BMP180) from within Window 10 IoT. Take a look here.
Sandy Macdonald has written a comprehensive review of his recently-arrived Raspberry Pi-powered media player, the Slice. The Slice was created by Five Ninjas and inside has a Raspberry Pi Compute Module which runs OpenElec and Kodi. You can read the review here. It’s extremely positive with a few minor caveats. Well worth reading if you want a media player.
