Shopping

Black Friday deals for the Raspberry Pi and Maker community

by  •  • 4 Comments

Hi everyone. I’ve gone through my big list of Pi and Maker companies and put together a list of those offering Black Friday deals. Find them below!

  • ModMyPi – Up to 50% off a range of products & FREE Pi Zero Wireless on orders > £100 with discount code 100ZERO. Some great stuff here with decent discounts, including the pi-top Raspberry Pi-powered laptop and robotics kits from Pi Borg, and that’s just the start.
  • Pimoroni – up to 40% off various products, including their own. Plus, follow them on Twitter throughout the day to win gift cards on the hashtag #YarrBooty.
  • The Pi Hut – various discounts up to 50%, all worked out for you.
  • Pi Borg – some very special offers here.
  • Pi Supply – 15% off selected products with code BLACKPIDAY18 at the checkout.
  • No Starch Press – 42% off absolutely everything from this brilliant book publisher using code FRIDAY42.
  • Raspberry Pi Press – 50% off books and back issues.
  • Bare Conductive – up to 25% off all weekend.
  • Adafruit – Use code BLACKFRUIT to get a 20% discount *only* on Feather products! All other items will be 15% off. (Discount does not apply to gift certificates, subscriptions and software)
  • Tindie – some great discounts from various independent makers over in their store.
  • Piper – $100 off the Piper computing kit

As usual, if anyone spots any other offers, add a comment below!

Blinkies, GPIO boards, Software, Tutorials

Get a head-start on New Year’s Eve with ModMyPi’s fireworks tutorial for the Raspberry Pi and SenseHAT

by  •  • 1 Comment

Claire Pollard, who recently started work for Pi retailer ModMyPi has started to write some tutorials for their website. On 5th November, she published a great tutorial that uses the Raspberry Pi, together with the SenseHAT, to create a fireworks display. Now, obviously this was for the UK’s ‘Guy Fawkes Night’ celebrations, but it seemed a good idea to point it out to everyone now so that you can get a head-start on your New Year’s Eve displays!

You can buy a SenseHAT from ModMyPi here.

There is some terrific re-usable code included in the tutorial and it even goes into threading to make multiple fireworks appear on the SenseHAT at once. It would be fairly simple to adapt the code to use other boards, such as the Pimoroni UnicornHAT (or whatever) so… take a look at the tutorial here and you can find the code on GitHub here.

Events, Raspberry Jams

Cotswold Raspberry Jam – THIS Saturday afternoon

by  •  • 0 Comments

This Saturday 24 November sees Cotswold Raspberry Jam in Cheltenham, 1-4pm. Free tickets are available from: http://cotswoldjam.org

The event includes the Astro Pi Mission Zero tutorial where you can get your code running on the International Space Station! If you’re under 14, you’ll also get a certificate posted to you after your code has run on the ISS, confirming the date and location.

You can also learn how to code Christmas tree decorations in Minecraft. Write a program to create one star or bauble, then use our example code to place it on the top of every nearby tree!

Cotswold Jam are going to give away a brand new Raspberry Pi 3B+ to the best child programmer who doesn’t already own a Pi, and there are also CamJam EduKit prizes for those who bring along their own projects to show & tell.

David Pride will be demonstrating his Digital Graffiti using a Pi and a Wii controller, there will be balloon-popping war robots with Micro Pi Noon and a host of retro games to play with.

Come along, 1-4pm on Saturday afternooon!

Earlier on Saturday morning, Cotswold Jam are co-hosting Code Club South West’s volunteer meetup – if you’re an adult interested in helping out with Code Clubs, do come along from 10am.

Raspberry Pi Foundation, Shopping

Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+ launched today

by  •  • 0 Comments

Interesting news from Raspberry Pi today. They’ve launched a new product: the Raspberry Pi 3 Model A+. Take a look at the official announcement here. It’s basically a 3B+, with the associated improvements in speed and thermal performance but in the smaller A+ form factor. The Ethernet port has been removed and there is but one USB port. The RAM is also cut down to 512MB. This smaller form factor is great for embedded projects that need increased performance and is sure to be popular amongst the industrial market and hobbyists needing the extra vroom!

You can get hold of the 3A+ by visiting The Pi Hut, Pimoroni or ModMyPi. The price is around £23. Other sellers, such as Adafruit, are sure to come online soon.

Blinkies, Events, Making, Personal, Programming, Raspberry Jams, Tutorials

Fireworks display using the Pimoroni Mote on the Raspberry Pi

by  •  • 0 Comments

This is a nice little project that I wrote the code for a couple of Sundays ago. It uses the Pimoroni Mote (full kit) to appear as fireworks and then uses Pygame to play the sound of fireworks as each Mote stick ‘explodes’ in a shower of sparkles! You can see the effect in the video below and see the code here. You can get hold of your own Mote from Pimoroni. This is all in aid of the Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam on 10th November which is a “Fireworks Special”!

 

GPIO boards, Media centre, Tutorials

Watch TV using the Raspberry Pi TV HAT and Plex with this great tutorial from The Pi Hut

by  •  • 0 Comments

Following yesterday’s news concerning the launch of the new Raspberry Pi TV HAT, the folks over at The Pi Hut have worked out how to stream to the Plex media server. It requires a plugin to be installed, but mostly it’s just a case of software configuration. You can read the tutorial over at The Pi Hut. You can get hold of the new HAT from The Pi Hut here.