Josh Williams has taken a Raspberry Pi, a camera module, a pair of binoculars and some laser-cut pieces of wood and fashioned the PiNoculars. You can see from the picture what it is – a pair of binoculars with a video feed mounted above it generated from the camera module which is fixed to one of the eyepieces. It’s a lovely idea and you can read how it was done over on Instructables.
Trevor Appleton has written a great tutorial about using the Volumio operating system to create a music player with a Raspberry Pi. This is a great piece of software and easy enough to get going. If you’re an audiophile, you can use it with the excellent HATs sold by IQaudIO which give you superior sound quality from the Pi. Read Trevor’s tutorial here.
Jamie Mann has just announced that he’s found some pre-loved Raspberry Pi original model Bs and B+s. He’s just put them on sale at The Pi Hut:
All of them have been tested by booting them and are likely ‘unwanted’ items returned by customers.
There is to be a Raspberry Jam in Gravesend, Kent on 30th January, the first to be held in the county. It will be held at the Gravesend Old Town Hall on the High Street from 10am-1pm and will feature workshops, including Sonic Pi, and talks including details of the recent International Space Station Astro Pi mission. For more details, and to get free tickets, go to this page.
At the end of January (20th-23rd), the Raspberry Pi Education Team will be at the Bett Show at ExCel, London. They will be near the STEAM Village on stand 463 and they are offering the opportunity to take part in STEAM (the new word for STEM… but with art added) workshops based around the Pi. On Saturday 23rd, they are holding their very own Raspberry Jam in the “Technology in HE Summit Space” and on Friday 22nd, Sam Aaron will be demonstrating Sonic Pi live coding in the Bett Arena. Various other talks and activities will be taking place across the various stages and spaces.
Myself, Tim and Jamie (from The Pi Hut) attended last year’s event and found it really worthwhile. There’s a great buzz around the place and, with the Foundation’s increased exposure this year, the Pi is certainly going to be highly visible. Definitely worth a visit if you’re at all interested in Computing in Education.
Tim and I will be attending again on the Saturday – maybe we’ll see you there! (We’ll probably be wearing our purple Cambridge Raspberry Jam polo shirts).
View the timetable of the Foundation’s workshops and talks here.
If you want to attend the Raspberry Jam, get your free ticket here.
To attend anything, you will also need to register for Bett itself. You can do that on the Bett website.
Big thanks to Matt Hawkins for this one – I needed to use it this morning!
Matt Hawkins has documented the new way of getting boot-time scripts to run. On the Jessie version of Raspbian, instead of using /etc/rc.local like you used to on Wheezy, you now have to use something called ‘systemd’. Read how to do it here.
