Packt is doing a 50% off deal on selected Raspberry Pi books today. The books are as follows:
The deal ends at midnight (UK time) tonight.
The Game Creators have just announced that they have released their AppGameKit software for the Raspberry Pi free-of-charge.
CEO Lee Bamber said:
“It’s the full AppGameKit BASIC, which has the IDE, can compile and broadcast (includes broadcasting to iOS and Android devices that have the player app on them) and allows access to the GPIO pins so you can code input and output to external add-ons (LEDs, devices etc).”
According to the blurb on their website, you create “games using AppGameKit’s powerful & easy to code syntax, combined with additional features for the Raspberry Pi such as reading & writing to the digital GPIO pins”.
Sounds very interesting, and anything which gives more options for programming on the Pi can only be a good thing!
GPIO Zero, the easy-to-use Python library for the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins has just had an update on the Raspbian repository. It’s been available for a couple of weeks now via a slightly convoluted route, but is now available with a simple:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install python3-gpiozero
The update includes the following new features:
A big shout out to Dave Jones who did most of the work on the actual code. It’s fantastic how the community at large is contributing, too!
A Raspberry Jam will be held in Covent Garden, London this Saturday. Running from 2-4.30pm at the Covent Garden Dragon Hall Trust, the event will feature some well-known Pi faces and hopes to attract both newcomers and old-hands. Everyone is welcome, so if you’re in the area, come on down. You can book free tickets here.
Grace Owolade-Coombes is holding a Raspberry Jam for children aged between 5 and 15 years old on Saturday 14th May. The event is being held at Kano HQ on Mile End Road near Docklands and runs from 1.30-4.30pm. Here’s how she describes it on Eventbrite:
An exciting Computer Coding event will be taking place at Kano’s HQ in the afternoon of Saturday 14th May, to celebrate World Scratch Day. If you’re between the age of 5 and 15 – come and find out about building the Kano computer kit and exploring their coding applications, hacking with Minecraft, video game design in Scratch, building a robot with the Crumble or Raspberry Pi and get their hands on a BBC micro:bit. Children will also have the opportunity to do some soldering, making cool circuit-board badges that light up, in our open maker space. Parents get the chance to code with the BBC micro:bit and experience the joys of Minecraft. This is a ‘ticket only’ event. Children must be accompanied by a parent/carer.
The event is Autism & Tourette’s Syndrome friendly and Grace and her team welcome children from all backgrounds.
Alain Mauer‘s son Scott is autistic, but that doesn’t mean that he can’t benefit from the cool stuff technology can do, nor should it! Alain decided that he wanted to set-up a media centre/player for his son but needed it to be bright and colourful and easy-to-use. There was nothing on the market, so he went big and built the system you can see above. It uses 6 big buttons to enable Scott to choose which cartoon to watch. Read more here.
