Raspberry Pi Pod and micro:bit base

Geeky Techiness, GPIO boards, Making, Programming

#RaspberryPi Fortune Teller

by Michael Horne • 3 October 2013 • 0 Comments

Les Pounder has been working on a Raspberry Pi-driven fortune teller amusement machine. Here’s his latest video showing it in action.

Here’s what he says about it:

We use PiFace to control 12v electronics, and Python to control the program. The basic flow is Audio is played to attract the customer to use the game. Customer inserts money, which breaks the attract audio, and launches a randomly selected fortune reading, which is stored as an audio file on the Pi. Once the fortune reading is complete, the relays on PiFace are triggered, and this starts 2 12v arcade cabinet devices, a card dispenser, which issues a fortune card, and finally a ticket dispenser, which issues tickets for use in the gift shop. Once this is complete, the code reverts back to attracting customers.

Education

Idaho prisoners use #RaspberryPi with offline Khan Academy

by Michael Horne • 3 October 2013 • 1 Comment

Khan Academy has 5.4 million monthly users of its educational videos, exercises, and gamelike badging platform online. Tens of thousands of schools are using the platform.

Jamie Alexandre has taken the KA platform and created an offline version, called KA Lite, to be used in areas where there is little or no internet connectivity. This has been previously covered by the Foundation in a blog post.

However, now the KA Lite system is being used by Idaho’s Department of Corrections to educate prisoners. Surprisingly enough (cough, cough) supplying internet connectivity is not top of the priority list for the prison system so this is an ideal solution for IT-driven learning.

You can learn more about this initiative by reading this article at Fast Company.

Raspberry Jams, Reviews

More from the September Cambridge Raspberry Jam #raspberrypi #rjam

by Michael Horne • 3 October 2013 • 0 Comments

John Alexander attended the Jam in September and has written a short report with some videos he shot at the event. One video in particular features Ciseco’s kit demo workshop – we haven’t had a recording of any of the kit demos until now so this is fantastic and well worth watching (see below)

Read John’s article on element14

I wrote a blog post about the Jam linking to all the streamed video. I’ve just added John’s kit demo video to that post as well.

Magazines

The MagPi issue 17 is out for #RaspberryPi

by Michael Horne • 3 October 2013 • 1 Comment

This month’s issue features:

Robotics with BrickPi
I/O expansion boards
Radio interface
Scratch – fire ballistic missiles
C – unions and dynamic memory allocation
NanPy
Eye tracking
XML

Download the issue here

Education, Interview

The FT interviews Eben Upton of #RaspberryPi Foundation

by Michael Horne • 2 October 2013 • 1 Comment

Nice little article and interview with Eben about the growth of the Pi. Not much we haven’t heard or read before, but it’s still interesting as it comes at it from the business side. Some really bitchy comments below the article, though.

An unexpected slice of success – FT.com.

Education

Cambridge GCSE Computing online

by Michael Horne • 2 October 2013 • 2 Comments

This is a great learning resource for anyone who wants to get into programming or computing in general. It is a MOOC – a Massive Open Online Course – created by OCR, Cambridge University Press and the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Here’s what they say about the course:

The course is based on OCR’s GCSE Computing curriculum and gives participants an excellent opportunity to investigate how computers work, how they are used, and to develop computer programming and problem-solving skills. The course has been designed for 14-16 year olds; but is free and open to all, and can be used either as a course or a resource to support teachers.