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 😉 )
For those who weren’t able to make it, David Ferguson is curating a playlist of videos of the talks here.
Alex Eames is currently running a Kickstarter to fund his latest project – RasPiO Inspiring. As part of the campaign (which is already funded!), he has shot a video of a project you can do with the driver board and an Inspiring LED circle. He’s placed the driver board on top of a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which gives him internet access, and then connected the driver board to the Inspiring circle. He’s then written some code that gets the current time from his Pi (which is correct, thanks to the wifi connectivity and a service called NTP) and then displays it using LEDs on the circle. Rather ingenious, and very blinky! He’s offering the kit that you can use to replicate the project for £30 (including the Zero W!) on the Kickstarter for delivery in September.
He’s blogged about the NTP clock project here and you can watch a quick walk-through video here:
I’m rather tempted by it – even though I’ve already backed the pyramid which you can see in action below.
Alex has also done a walk-through video of the code which you can see on his blog post.
So, if you haven’t already, take a look at the Kickstarter campaign – it’s good value, a lot of fun and bright… so incredibly bright (he says, blinking).
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! 🙂
