Alasdair Allan attended the Education Innovation conference last week (where the Jamboree was co-located) and took a look at the Fuze – the retro-styled computer based around the Raspberry Pi. He’s interviewed Jon Silvera (managing director) about the project. Read more and watch the interview here.
Over at Make they’re doing a Raspberry Pi birthday series of articles, so I thought I’d bring them to the attention of my blog readers.
The first one is from a guy called Ryan Slaugh. He’s used a Pi and an Alamode (which is an Arduino that plugs into the GPIO) to create a Pinewood Derby-style racetrack. The video showing the full build is shown below and you can read more detail over at the Make site.
Just launched today, the Pibrella is a simple GPIO add-on board for the Pi. It has on-board the following:
It also comes pre-assembled which means you don’t need to worry about soldering anything!
We used these for our workshop at the December Cambridge Raspberry Jam during which the kids used ScratchGPIO to program a traffic lights sequence.
The Pibrella.com website contains a simple Python example and instructions on how to download the pibrella library. There’s not loads of documentation yet, but I’m sure that will come soon and the beauty of the Pibrella is that it’s very simple and just a few examples will get kids started in no time.
By giving protected inputs/outputs, the Pibrella is also protecting your Pi (hence the name).
It only costs £10 (plus P&P) and is ideal for classroom use (because of the functionality and the protection it affords) – I can thoroughly recommend it and give it a hearty 9.5/10. Here’s another recommendation from Darren Christie who borrowed the CamJam boards for a CAS event.
You can program the Pibrella from ScratchGPIO, as I mentioned before, Python, C (see Gordon Henderson’s page) or any other language that can control the GPIO.
You can find out more about the board from pibrella.com and you can buy it from Pimoroni or Cyntech.
Alex Eames took his Pi-plus-screen-plus-camera set-up to the Raspberry Jamboree last week and took some great pictures. He also grabbed some video of the party at the end of the event and has edited it together. So, if you attended the Jamboree see if you can spot yourself!
This nifty little image map is pretty cool – you hover your mouse over a component on the surface of the Raspberry Pi and a little tooltip comes up describing the component.
Stephen Wolfram and his team have been working on the Wolfram Language for 30 years and it is almost finished. Wolfram is designed to be a “totally symbolic, heavily natural, intensely knowledge-based, and extremely large computer programming language” although no-one has yet been able to satisfactorily pigeon-hole exactly what the language will be like in use. VentureBeat has the full story.
