Gordon Henderson, of WiringPi fame, has just finished leading a Raspberry Pi course at the Winchester-based Techcamp 2013. He’s written up his experiences getting the young people programming with Bash, BASIC, Python and Minecraft as well as other activities they took part in.
A great read!
I’ve just been browsing a little (waiting for the coffee to kick in!) and come across some SR04 distance sensor modules at Hobby Components. These are ridiculously cheap at £1.75 (inc VAT) and are very close in price to those available from China. I use one of these in my Picorder and several other people have had success using them. It doesn’t take much programming and the sensor sends a digital signal (so no mucking about with analog-to-digital converters).
These are great fun if you need to measure distance or be alerted on proximity. The sensor does its stuff by sending out ultrasonic pulses (like sonar) and then reading how long it takes for the ‘pings’ to come back.
Shop online with Hobby Components.
I don’t have any affiliation or agreement with Hobby Components, I’m just passing on deals when I find them, whoever I find them with.
With a nice new design for the website and a massive 44-page magazine, The MagPi have relaunched with the same great content that we’ve come to expect.
This month’s massive 44-page issue contains features on: I2C sensors, communicating with Arduino via USB, Pi Matrix, PATOSS, Pi-Lite, Bash, Java and XML.
I’m a bit late with this, given how much press coverage there has been, but I didn’t feel it was right to not blog about it.
Dave Akerman (@daveake) has made a habit of sending up high-altitude balloons with Raspberry Pis attached to them. His latest launch/mission was to send up a Babbage Bear to a height of 39,000m and have it replicate Felix Baumgartner’s famous Red Ball Stratos jump. We were fortunate enough to meet Dave, and Babbage, at the July Cambridge Raspberry Jam and it’s great to see the little guy get his moment in the Sun… and the bear too 🙂
Here’s the original post detailing the flight: Babbage Flight | Dave Akerman.
Unfortunately, the first attempt at the mission failed as the release mechanism, a resistor that was supposed to burn through a string, didn’t work. However, Dave fixed this and two days later sent Babbage up again. This must surely make Babbage the most travelled teddy bear in the World (unless someone’s taken one up into orbit, of course). When Babbage eventually jumped, he exceeded Felix’s jump height and was recovered safely.
The Foundation covered the first launch and subsequent second launch: http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4733
Here’s a timelapse of the first launch:
You can view a video of the actual jump below:
This is a lovely article from Wired magazine about Jacob Marsh who founded ModMyPi soon after the launch of the Pi in February 2012. Great to hear about a business success in this economic climate.
Vince Weaver is working on implementing a set of Back to the Future-style time circuits with his Pi. It’s in the beginning stages, but looks very promising. He’s looking to build a circuit board from the project but, quite frankly, just a tutorial to do it with wires would suit me!!! 🙂 (I grew up in the 80s and love BTTF!)
