Dave Johnson from San Diego contacted me to share a guide he’s written on installing Node.js on the Pi. It takes you through first principles like writing the SD card and configuring the Pi before moving onto the Node.js installation itself. It’s a nicely written guide with lots of screenshots. Take a look at it here.
Alex Eames always creates a new Raspberry Pi family photo of all the different models whenever a new one comes out. Well, he’s now updated his photo to include the Pi 3. You can view the full 50MB photo on his website.
Apologies for the short notice! Just posting this from the hotel!
If you are unable to make the Big Birthday Weekend, you can hopefully (technology allowing) join us via live video stream! Here are the URLs:
http://cam.adobeconnect.com/piparty1
http://cam.adobeconnect.com/piparty2
Here are the talks timetables for the weekend:
That’s all for now. Feel free to share on social media/anywhere else!
PiBorg, the small company based in St Ives, Cambridgeshire who created the Doodleborg and Diddyborg robots (as well as lots of other boards, bots and, of course the excellent turntable at this year’s Pi Wars), have this morning announced the launch of their first Kickstarter campaign. The campaign will raise funds for the development and production of the ZeroBorg. The ZeroBorg has the following features:
There are several reward levels starting at £10 (plus shipping) for an Earlybird motor controller board only, £20 (plus shipping) for a board with a 9V battery clip, IR sensor and power regulator (allowing you to run the Pi and controller board off a 9V battery and to control it via IR remote control), and various others with various combinations. I’ve gone in at the £20 level.
Myself and Tim Richardson visited PiBorg recently and caught sight of the board. It’s incredibly cute and has a lot of possibilities for battery-powered motor operation.
See the campaign video below and visit the campaign for more details and to pledge here.
The MagPi has just published an article that will appear in the next issue, due out this Thursday. Gareth Halfacree has interviewed Eben Upton, CEO of Raspberry Pi Trading, and has got some much sought-after answers about the much-debated question of Raspberry Pi Zero scarcity.
Eben explains that, because the Zero is produced by Raspberry Pi rather than by distributors RS and Farnell, they haven’t been able to easily ramp-up production. Raspberry Pi is, after all, a small player in production compared to these distribution giants and so progress has been a little slow. Eben has also said that in “the past couple of days” he placed an order for 150,000 Zeros with the aim of evening out production at 50k per month. This should hopefully deter those unscrupulous resellers who were buying Zeros one at a time and selling them on for exorbitant amounts.
I’ve also been keeping an eye on the comments section of the Foundation’s Pi 3 post and was excited to hear Liz Upton’s answer to a question someone asked…
Question: How long will the Zero continue to be made available? Answer (from Liz): Forever – we’re churning them out as fast as we can. We’re really sorry we weren’t able to explain why there was a bit of a slow-down; it was because we were using the whole production line for Pi 3 pre-launch!
In my opinion, these pieces of news together should come as comfort to those who are trying to buy the Zero and have, so far, been frustrated. They also explain the lack of Zeros – lack of capacity and a focus on Pi 3.
You can get the full story by reading the full MagPi article here.
I was fortunate to be invited to an RS Components press conference this morning to celebrate the Raspberry Pi’s 4th/1st birthday and the launch of the Raspberry Pi 3. I joined fellow enthusiasts and bloggers, including Alex Eames and Matthew Timmons-Brown, to hear Eben Upton, Lindsley Ruth and Dr Lucy Rogers talk about the Raspberry Pi, how it was launched 4 years ago to change computing and has gone on to be embraced by enthusiasts, education and families. Here’s my collection of projects which I showed off to the assembled press.
Here’s a great Pi 3 unboxing video from RS hosted by Pete Wood, who I met this morning:
And here’s the recorded Periscope stream from the press conference (Just watched it… oh, there I am at around 21:15… Man I need to lose weight :-/)
I’d also like to point you at RS Components’ Raspberry Pi page.
Since its launch, the Raspberry Pi 3 has been covered by numerous news organisations including the BBC. Take a look at their news report here.
Apart from being covered by RasPi.TV and the Raspberry Pi Guy, we have also seen a blog post from Average Man (who does a really nice review of the board) and now the Pi Podcast boys have published their podcast interview with Eben.
All in all, a very exciting day!
