The Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend was a fantastic event, full of fun, laughter and, of course, great content. Myself and Tim were delighted to volunteer for it and had a great weekend. To celebrate the Weekend, Raspberry Pi have just posted a video which you can view below. Lots of well-known people – how many can you spot? (You get special points for spotting me… or my back anyway 😉 )
Frederick Vandenbosch, who I had the pleasure of meeting at the Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend last weekend, has just written up a great guide to working headless with a Raspberry Pi (i.e. without a screen, keyboard or mouse plugged into the Pi itself). He’s focused on Raspbian Jessie Lite, but it will work with both flavours of the Pi’s favourite operating system, and with all flavours of Raspberry Pi, provided you’ve got wifi capability via on-board functionality or wifi dongle. He goes through the process of downloading and burning the image with Etcher and setting up ssh and a wifi connection. Read the tutorial here.
London-based company pi-top has scored a major success this week as its pi-topOS has been endorsed by leading examination-awarding body OCR (Oxford, Cambridge and RSA). pi-top has successfully adapted the standard Raspbian operating system by adding a simplified desktop and additional software: pi-topCODER – a special environment and teaching system for learning programming; and pi-topUNIVERSE – a custom, alien planet-based RPG which focuses on visual programming problems to progress in the game. The company, which has developed both the pi-top (a Raspberry Pi-powered laptop) and pi-topCEED (a screen with a compartment for the Raspberry Pi and accessories, pictured below) are said to be delighted with the endorsement.
Carl Monk has produced plenty of cool hacks in the past, and this time he’s had fun with a Pimoroni Scroll Bot kit. The new kit from the pirates includes the new Scroll pHAT HD (which has more LEDs than the regular Scroll pHAT) and Carl thought it would be fun to build a name badge out of it. But that’s not all! He also added two buttons on the back, and a LiPo to power it, and created an old-fashioned game of pong to run on the pHAT. You can read more about the build and get the code here.
Teacher Hannah Mills from Peterborough-based Marshfields School is running a Just Giving campaign to raise £1000. The £1000 will be used to purchase pi-topCEEDs to be used in class and after school to increase accessibility to physical computing. Marshfields is a special school catering for those with special educational needs and Hannah feels that the pi-topCEEDs are the best way to go to meet their needs, and I have to say I agree – quick set-up, easy access to the GPIO and lots of in-built child-friendly activities. Take a look at the campaign here and be generous if you can be! 🙂