As the headline says, the next Jam will be on 26th September. It runs from 1-4pm and is taking place in a brand new venue: on the Park Campus of the University of Gloucestershire. You can get free tickets here and find out more about the Jam on their website.
Skycademy is a new initiative from the Raspberry Pi Foundation that will teach educators and children’s group leaders how to launch high altitude balloons with Raspberry Pis attached.
Next week, a series of balloons will be launched by the 24 Skycademy attendees and you can follow them live! Simply follow the hashtag #skycademy for further details on the tracking website that will be used. Tuesday will see the balloons being launched from approximately 10.30am. It’s great fun to track HABs, so watch out for it.
For more details on the process that the Foundation has gone through to prepare for this event, take a look at their blog.
Just wanted to quickly blog this absolutely charming article written by the brilliant Liz from the Foundation. It’s a ‘day in the life’ blog post in which she describes a typical day (if life at the Foundation is ever typical!) and includes new arrivals, a clean inbox and how to deal with slightly out-of-the-ordinary blog comments. It really gives you an insight into one of the nicest people at the Foundation. Enjoy! Read it here.
Alex Eames over at RasPi.TV has just published a video review of the Witty Pi power management and real-time clock board by UUGear. This £10 board gives you a real-time clock so that your Pi always has the correct time, even when not connected to the ‘Net and gives you the ability to schedule start-up and shut-down times for the Pi. Alex’s review is available here. My review of the same board (with much earlier software) can be seen here.
Occasionally, I get sent things in the post to review. Sometimes I buy a product just because I think it looks cool. This is one of the latter type.
Update: I have added a video demo here.
Introduction
The original board, known as the “PiPiano”, was developed by Zachary Igielman, a young man who quietly went about the business of raising funds for the board by embarking on an IndieGoGo campaign. The campaign was a success and soon the board (which came as a kit to solder together yourself) began to get into the hands of the backers. This is what it looked like:
A few months ago, Zach was approached by Pimoroni about the prospect of turning it into a HAT and, being very sensible, and with exams approaching, Zach agreed to hand the project over to them. Enter Phil “Gadgetoid” Howard and the others at Pimoroni who took the kit and turned it into a rather attractive HAT:
Now known as the “Piano HAT”, the product was launched very recently and I quickly ordered one from The Pi Hut, having seen a few sneak peaks in the preceding weeks.
The looks
I think you’ll agree that this is one of the most attractive boards for the Raspberry Pi ever produced. It is made in stylish black, white and gold with intricate typefaces and an incredible amount of functionality built in.
The functionality
The Piano HAT comes with the following features:
All the keys, buttons and LEDs can be programmed according to your needs. Because of the sheer number of controls and indicator lights, the possibilities of using it for a variety of different projects are huge. It could, for example, be used as a control pad for automation, or even to program a robot (providing you can find a way to break out the GPIO pins, which, like all HATs, get covered when you push the board on).
The software
The Piano HAT comes with a library of software that you download from the Pimoroni website via GitHub. The install takes ages and I can’t help feel that there’s a little bit of over-egging going on. But, if all of it is necessary for it to work, I can’t really complain about the loss of about 30 minutes of time waiting for the install script to complete. A word to the wise: Do not try and do this over wi-fi – it takes much longer that way!
The library itself is typical Pimoroni: simple, easy to use and comprehensive. You can attach events to key press triggers and you can individually address the LEDs.
Along with the library, you also get a few example scripts. One of them simply loops through the LEDs. Another just listens for button presses. The more interesting examples are when the Piano HAT actually ‘plays’ music for you. There is a simple piano program which you can play whatever you like on. It even uses the instrument button so you can play the drums! There is also another script which teaches you how to play a well-known nursery rhyme by lighting up the LED of the key it wants you to play. All these code examples are excellent and can really give you ideas about what you can do with the HAT. There is also a script which interfaces with MIDI systems, but I lack the equipment to try that out.
The included instrument samples are lovely – very high quality and they sounded excellent through my earphones. If enough people ask, I’ll publish a video so you can actually hear it!
Availability
I got mine from The Pi Hut for £15 plus postage. You can obviously get it from Pimoroni, and it costs the same.
Overall
The Piano HAT is, as far as electronics goes, a work of art. It looks slick, feels slick and, with the software library included, acts slick. The buttons are just about big enough to play with my clumsy adult-sized hands, touch-sensitivity is about right and the LEDs are bright (possibly too bright… I wonder if you can reduce the brightness…). The touch-capacitive nature of the board is a joy and is a big improvement over Zach’s original push-buttons. I do, however, like the way that they’ve kept the spirit of Zach’s original – for example, the example scripts share a lot of similarity to Zach’s original included software – and have honoured his work on both the front and back of the board.
This is another winner for Pimoroni. I recommend getting one and having a play about with it – it’s lovely to use and there’s a lot of possibilities for what it can be used for other than music. I’d love to see someone integrate it with Sonic Pi – they would be perfect for one another.
Rating
I can’t fault the board itself or the software. The price is right, the design is excellent. What more can I say? 10/10
Over at MathWorks’ MakerZone, Eric Wetjen has written a tutorial/article in which he shows a way of using a webcam to count cars on a highway. The webcam captures images and then they use Simulink to analyse the images. The data is then sent to IoT service ThingSpeak and then analyse the data further using MATLAB. It’s quite complicated, and does have some (well-documented) flaws but it’s a good proof-of-concept. Read more here.
