Raspberry Pi Pod and micro:bit base

$45 BeagleBone has possibilities

by Michael Horne • 23 April 2013 • 3 Comments

There have been a few boards released recently to compete with the Raspberry Pi. The latest is the new BeagleBone Black from Texas Instruments.

The BBB has a 1GHz ARM A8 processor, 2GB onboard storage, 512MB RAM and a bunch of connectivity options including a massive 65 digital IO pins, 7 analog, SPI, I2C and 8 PWMs.

Until now, no-one has come close to matching the Pi’s price point, but this new $45 board comes close and it’ll be interesting to see if it is as popular as our lovely little green board.

For more information, read this article on arstechnica.com

Programming

Scratch GPIO Version 2 released by Cymplecy for #RaspberryPi

by Michael Horne • 22 April 2013 • 1 Comment

Cymplecy has released a new version of his Scratch GPIO software for the Raspberry Pi. It allows you to run Scratch in parallel with a back-end script that interfaces between the visual environment and the GPIO. Read more here and download the set-up scripts

Education, Tutorials

Basic Electronics – Ohm’s Law

by Michael Horne • 22 April 2013 • 1 Comment

SF Innovations have done an interesting slide presentation on the basics of voltage, current, resistance and Ohm’s Law. See the presentation here

Education, Raspberry Jams

STEM Raspberry Jam in Manchester

by Michael Horne • 22 April 2013 • 1 Comment

Once again, Manchester proves it has a thriving Raspberry Pi community. Ben Nuttall organised a pilot event with the STEMNET team at the Museum of Science and Industry. He hopes that this will become a new activity that STEM ambassadors can offer to schools.

You can read his account of the day here and you can read what STEMNET themselves have to say about it here.

STEM Raspberry Jam Pilot | Ben Nuttall.

Tutorials

Building a real-time transit information kiosk with #RaspberryPi

by Michael Horne • 22 April 2013 • 2 Comments

Brendan Nee has built a wall-mounted information kiosk with the Raspberry Pi and Chromium browser. He’s documented the whole process here.

Programming

Adafruit WebIDE for the #RaspberryPi gets a big update

by Michael Horne • 20 April 2013 • 1 Comment

Adafruit have been busy updating their WebIDE development environment for the Raspberry Pi. There’s a huge amount of new stuff and improvements; these have been covered brilliantly by the Foundation over on their blog. You can find out more about the WebIDE itself by going to the Adafruit site.