This is a nice project. Reagan Ward wanted to give people an idea of whether he and his colleagues were in the office or not. He wired up a Pi with some perfboard and some RGB LEDs, did some nifty programming in C++ and Python and hey presto visitors to their office could tell their status without walking down the corridor to find out. Admittedly, it only saves people about 8 seconds, but it’s still a cool little project. Read more here.
Say you wanted to have a function key run a particular program in X windows. Well, Rolf van Gelder has written a short tutorial on how to do it. Read how here.
Liz Upton, from the Raspberry Pi Foundation, very kindly asked myself and Tim Richardson (as the organisers) to write about last Saturday’s Cambridge Raspberry Jam for the Foundation’s blog. Here’s a link to the write-up – it’s very, very long, with lots of videos to watch!
BlueJ is a free Java Development Environment designed for beginners and the developers have now got it running on a Pi. They’ve stripped back some of the visual features and bells and whistles so that it (in their words) “runs quite well”. Might be worth taking a look if you want to develop in Java on the Pi. Read how to install it here
Gordon Henderson (@drogon) has been busy creating an instructional model of a computer, known as LMC, using his Return to BASIC on the Pi. I can’t begin to understand the technicalities of it at the moment, but here’s what he has to say about it:
The Little Man Computer (LMC) is an instructional model of a computer, created by Dr. Stuart Madnick in 1965. The LMC is generally used to teach students, because it models a simple von Neumann architecture computer – which has all of the basic features of a modern computer. It can be programmed in machine code (albeit in decimal rather than binary) or assembly code.
More information, including installing it and how to use it, are available on his website.
Picademy graduate, and therefore a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator, Allen Heard is organising 3 separate days of CPD (known as CPiD) in Conwy, North Wales. The dates are 16th, 18th and 20th June and there are limited spaces available. More details, including costs and links to book your place are available on his blog.
