Education, Outreach

Teaching children to code in Lebanon with the Raspberry Pi

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Eliane Metni, native of Beirut and based at the University of London’s Institute of Education leads the International Education Association, a Lebanese non-government organisation committed to global learning opportunities through ICT for Lebanon and throughout the Arab world. She has recently piloted a programme using Pis to bring ICT education to a secondary school and now her programme has been pushed forward by UNICEF to be used in Lebanon and, perhaps, in other Middle East countries where education, and in particular ICT, is lacking. You can read more about the initiative on the Guardian website. The UNICEF project is using HDMIPi, the small high-definition screen championed by Alex Eames and Cyntech and you can read more about how they got involved over on the Raspberry Pi blog.

Events, Raspberry Jams

Southend-on-Sea Raspberry Jam for Raspberry Pi enthusiasts – 16th August

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Booking is now open for the next Jam at Southend which takes place on Saturday 16th August, and what a Jam-packed Jam it looks like being. Here’s a list of the presentations/workshops currently listed:

  • Robot arm interfacing and video streaming via the web
  • Robot Arm – Human interfacing accelerometer
  • Arduino / Mind control of transistor radios
  • Interfacing Sensors with Raspberry Pi
  • Sonic Pi 2.0 – Programming sound / music with an easy to learn language
  • Interface your Raspberry Pi / arduino with leds, buzzers, switches, PiCam.
  • Scratch and Scratch-GPIO
  • Videoing using Quadcopter – Talk and amazingly beautiful videos of Southend area
  • Brand new Raspberry Pi B+ Model
  • HTML / CSS Workshop – for beginners
  • SSH and Remote desktop access
  • Pi Minecraft and Python Workshop
  • Maths in Nature, Fibonnachi series talk and video

The event runs from 10am to 5pm at the Tickfield Centre (SS2 6LL) and is about 2 mins walk from Prittlewell Railway Station.

Previous events have been covered by a local website and it sounds like a really lovely event to attend.

http://www.lovesouthend.co.uk/local-news/southend-raspberry-pi-jam.html
http://www.lovesouthend.co.uk/local-news/open-electronics-day-is-for-everyone.html
http://www.lovesouthend.co.uk/local-news/southend-raspberry-jam-june-2014.html

You can book tickets by going to EventBrite. Admission is free and there is a raffle if you’d like to make a donation.

Camera module, GPIO boards

Multi-directional cameras with the IVPort for Raspberry Pi

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Here’s an interesting board for the Pi. It allows you to connect two cameras (or 4 if you stack two boards) to the Pi and then switch between them. I can imagine this being used for security camera applications where you want to have camera facing in multiple different directions. I can also imagine some kind of rig taking pictures very rapidly by switching between the cams. I suppose you could even do some kind of rudimentary 3D with it by very rapid switching, but obviously there would be a little flicker. Read more on the IndieGoGo page.

Here’s a video of the board working with 4 cameras:

GPIO boards

Add touch and gesture recognition to your Raspberry Pi

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Thanks to RasPi.Today for this one.

Thanks to a simple I2C expansion board, you can now add touch and gesture recognition to your Raspberry Pi. The board, called simply the ‘Hover’ is $39 and plugs into the I2C pins on the Pi (as well as power and ground). It can recognise up, down, left and right sweeps and also touches on the board itself. They’ve written a how-to guide for the Pi on their website and it looks pretty straight forward. Not sure on shipping costs, but expect it to be $10-15 extra (this is just a guess, feel free to correct me!). Take a look at their website for more details or see it in action on the Pi below.