Hugh Barnard & Dan Powell are organising a Raspberry Jam in Newhaven, Sussex on Sunday the 23rd October. The event will take place at the Hillcrest Community Centre between 11am and 2pm and there will be Raspberry Pis to try things out on and people are encouraged to bring their projects along with them. Get free tickets from Eventbrite.
David Pride, who previously created the wonderful motorised Connect 4 game (which handed me my butt at the Big Birthday Weekend), recently went to a car boot sale and found an “air drum” kit for £1. Taking this as inspiration, he has worked out how to connect two Wii controllers to his Raspberry Pi via Bluetooth and then play drum samples depending on the position and action of the controllers. Voila! A DIY air drum kit! You can read more about it here and download the code here. You can see the kit in action below.
San Diego based Dave Johnson had a problem: he was due to be using his Raspberry Pi to demonstrate IoT applications using Node.js in a speaking engagement. This meant that he needed to be able to connect the Raspberry Pi to the Internet, and to his laptop, without worrying about network connectivity at the venue. So, how did he do this? Well, he used a combination of an Ethernet cable, Windows network connection sharing and Samba. Set-up in a particular (though not difficult) way, everything would work together as a private network but be able to use whatever Internet connection the laptop could provide. So, all he needed to do was to tether his laptop to his mobile and he could give his Raspberry Pi access to the net! You can read how to do it on his blog.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is holding a Raspberry Jam on Saturday 15th October at their headquarters on Station Road in Cambridge, UK. The event, running from 10am-4pm, will be a mixture of worksheet-led, expert-assisted activities and Show and Tell. They are laying on a light lunch for attendees. Parking isn’t available at the venue, although there are public car parks nearby and the event is within easy walking distance of the train station. You can read more and book free tickets here.
You know how much I love art projects? This is a good one! Thanks to Alex at the Foundation for tracking and blogging about this project.
Clodagh O’Mahony recently completed her thesis on Interaction Design. For her project, she constructed a dress which had a Raspberry Pi and an Adafruit Capacitive Touch Sensor Breakout (that’s the US link, for the UK, try Makersify) embedded into it (under a 3D-printed shroud). Thanks to a lot of conductive thread, the dress detects touches in various places and logs the ‘social interactions’ to a database. The Pi then reads this data and lights up the dress in different colours with a Pimoroni Blinkt. The dress also registers vocal social interactions and reacts depending on whether the words are categorised as positive or negative. The data is also uploaded to a website (below) where interactions are awarded points. You can read more over on Clodagh’s blog and see more pictures over on Instagram.
The Raspberry Pi Foundation is running a Raspberry Jam at the Google Digital Garage based at the Mitchell Library in Glasgow on Saturday 8th October. The event, which will run from 10am-4pm will feature worksheet-led activities with help from experts and a Show and Tell area. A light lunch will be provided for this family-friendly Jam. Read more and book your free tickets on Eventbrite.
