On Saturday, 17th September 2016, myself and Tim Richardson welcomed over 200 people to the Institute of Astronomy in Cambridge for our 13th (!) Cambridge Raspberry Jam.
We are very lucky at the Institute to be able to have our talks live streamed and recorded. Thanks to Andy Batey, the talks from Saturday are now available online on the Jam’s YouTube Channel.
You can download the programme for the day so you can see what talks there were by viewing the PDF here.
We are live streaming (we hope!) from the Cambridge Raspberry Jam today. Talks start at 11am.
Over at Adafruit, Philip Burgess has blogged about a marvellous little project involving a Raspberry Pi Zero. And when I say “little”, I mean “little”!
They’ve used the Zero, together with a 0.96″ OLED display, an amplifier, some tiny speakers and some buttons to create the world’s smallest arcade cabinet. They’ve then installed Mame on the Zero’s SD card, wired it all together and voila! You can see in the picture above and the video below that it is fully working. Just astounding.
At a CamJam long past, Wayne Keenan brought along a Raspberry Pi running a virtual reality demo viewed with an early version Oculus Rift. Looking something like the image above, it featured a brick pi symbol floating on a sea of green ‘grass’. He has always wanted to improve the system that ran it, but until now just hasn’t had the time. Several years, and some software library improvements, later, Wayne has managed to integrate a new Oculus Rift DK2 headset and has re-written everything into a library, called VR Zero. He has written the project up on his blog and made the code available on GitHub. Great stuff, Wayne! You can see a video of the new code in action below:
The Foundation have just blogged this nice little project from Instructables user DevinL9.
He’s taken a Raspberry Pi, hooked it up to a servo and then used the servo to control the position of a small fan with a small webcam mounted on top. The webcam provides a video feed to the Pi which is programmed with OpenCV to detect a face and track it. The servo then turns so that the fan always points towards you. For those long, summer months it could be just the job! You can read the Instructable here.
Yes, yes, it’s a dodgy picture…
Jamie Dixon has trouble getting his youngest child out of bed. So, he grabbed hold of an old electric hospital bed that could be triggered to go almost vertical. He hooked it up to a servo and a Raspberry Pi and wrote a program on the Windows 10 IOT operating system to control the servo. A simple web interface and a wireless router connected to the Pi lets him control the position of the sleeping surface. Ingenious! Read more here.
