Albert Hickey and Cat Lamin are organising the 1st Wimbledon Raspberry Jam. It will take place on Sunday, 26th June from 12-5pm at the Wimbledon Library on Wimbledon Hill Road. There will be Show and Tell and talks by teachers and kids who are passionate about coding. More details will be available nearer the time but you can register now for free here.
The Raspberry Pi Creative Technologists
Last year, Yasmin Curren was selected as one of the Raspberry Pi Creative Technologists. On 23rd April, I attended the CTs exhibition at Raspberry Pi Towers and saw her project. It was an interactive video-based experience about monsters living under the bed. It was genuinely disturbing, especially the ‘dare you press it?’ button which… No, perhaps I don’t want to re-live that! It was definitely one of the highlights for me – she had set the lighting low, the sound level to just the right place and created an atmosphere of foreboding. And that was just before you sat down in front of the house model! Yasmin has now written up the entire project so you can see what she’s been up to! Read it here.
Mike Redrobe has written an interesting Android app. It allows you to write Pi SD cards from your mobile phone. It’s called Raspi Imager and is available from the Google Play Store. For now, it installs NOOBS and NOOBS Lite and can be used on both the internal SD card (requires a rooted phone) or an SD card writer attached to the USB port. Download/install the app here.
A self-confessed bunch of students and amateurs have put together a rather cool system for watering plants featuring some soil sensors, an analog to digital converter and a solenoid valve to release the water. You can read all about it, and follow along with their steps, by reading the Instructable.
Picademy, the free CPD course for educators seeking to get the Raspberry Pi into their classrooms, is well and truly on its way in the USA. There will be a Picademy in Baltimore, Maryland on 13th-14th August. The course will be held at The Digital Harbor Foundation on Light St and there are 40 spaces available. So, if you’re interested, go to this page to read more about conditions and how to apply.
Albert Hickey has written a fantastic tutorial over on his WinkleInk blog. He has used a preview version of RealVNC which allows you to view and play Minecraft Pi Edition on a normal PC, in Albert’s case, a laptop.
Up to now, this has been impossible as Minecraft communicates directly with the framebuffer. RealVNC have done a top job on their software for this, so keep an eye out for when it becomes publicly available. He has combined this software with a tutorial written by Andrew Mulholland which allows you to use a USB cable to connect directly to a Zero over OTG (On-The-Go). This means that you can do this with just the one cable connecting the Zero to the laptop. Albert’s made the whole thing very accessible and it’s well worth trying it out. Read more on his blog.
I hope to try out the new RealVNC preview version this weekend and will let you know how it works!
