Games, Making, Robotics

Motorised Connect 4 game using a Raspberry Pi

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David Pride decided he wanted to hack something both fun and complicated and so decided to build a motorised Connect 4 game. Called 4-Bot, the project allows a human player to play the Raspberry Pi at the popular game. The Pi works out what move to make based on image recognition and the mechanism is activated to pick-and-place a playing piece into the board. The mechanism is part-knackered 3D printer parts and part-MeArm. You can read about the build on David’s website and see it in action in the video below. David brought the game along with him to the Big Birthday Weekend and one of my highlights of the Sunday was to play the game. It beat me. I am so ashamed! 😉

Events

Raspberry Pi celebrates International Women’s Day with Women in Tech feature

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International-Womens-Day-1

Helen Lynn has just posted a new blog article for the Raspberry Pi Foundation. In the post, Helen highlights six women who are doing brilliant things in tech. They are: Cat Lamin, Sonia Uppal, Dr Lucy Rogers, Yasmin Bey, Sway Grantham and Fran Scott. I’m pleased to have met two-thirds of them personally – they are all brilliant. We should definitely celebrate women in tech and remember that it is still the case that young girls, especially, don’t always get the opportunities boys do. It’s a situation that has existed ever since technology first existed, and we should recognise the contributions women have made and will make in years to come in the hope that it will encourage more girls to embrace technology. Read the blog article here.

Events, Raspberry Jams

Peterborough Raspberry Jam – Saturday, 9th April – tickets now on sale

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Mike Mills, Hannah Mills (no relation) and Tony Warner are running a Raspberry Jam at University Campus Peterborough on Saturday, 9th April. The event will run from 10-4.30pm and will feature a mixture of talks, workshops, show and tell and a marketplace. I’ll be attending and giving a talk on the various HATs you can get for your Raspberry Pi and what you can do with them. (They’re also trying to persuade me and Tim to do an EduKit workshop – stay tuned!)

You can get tickets to the event here. They are £3.50 for adults and free for under 16s. I fully support the idea of charging a nominal amount for events such as these – it helps the Jam to get a bit of money to afford their own kit, and provides incentive for people to actually attend.