Spencer Organ is not only a teacher, he’s also a key part of the technical team behind his school’s musical productions. Previously, he used a Raspberry Pi and UnicornHAT to accessorise a tin man in a production of The Wizard of Oz. This time, for High School Musical, his Pi development was more technical in nature. Spencer wanted to stream live video from the band playing the music to the front of the stage (so the kids could see the musical director) and also to the control room way at the back of the auditorium. To find out how he accomplished this, read more here.
Recently, Tim Richardson and I were lucky enough to be invited into two schools to teach pupils about the Raspberry Pi. Participants for the first one were all year 8s (12-13 year olds) whilst the second school presented us with pupils from years 6-8 (10-13 year olds). During our first outreach session, Tim took half the kids for a CamJam EduKit 3 robotics workshop (with great success) while I took the other half and taught them about the SenseHAT and how to program it with Python. Our second school was more limited and we taught just the SenseHAT part. We used pi-topCEEDs and a selection of the now-unavailable HDMIPi screens for the purpose.
We found that the SenseHAT was a great device to engage the children, particularly with the AstroPi space angle.
In order to carry out the workshops, however, we needed resources and so we turned to the Raspberry Pi Foundation website’s Resources section. There are several resources on there, however… they are not suitable for printing as they have the Trinket SenseHAT emulator embedded in the pages. Fortunately for us, they store everything on GitHub and so I was able to go there and download the resources I wanted in a more ‘raw’ format. A little editing in Microsoft Word and I (eventually) had printable versions without any Trinket detritus.
I hope these come in useful for somebody – they took a great deal of work to get them ship-shape for printing! 🙂
Sidenote
Printable versions of the Raspberry Pi Foundation resources are, in my opinion, a necessity. In a straw poll of Educators and Jam organisers, we recently found that around 90% of people needed to be able to print the resources out. Fortunately, the Foundation is now working on printable versions of their resources. There’s still a long way to go, however!
Stefan Vorkoetter, a hobbyist who messes about with all kinds of electronics and geeky stuff, from remote controlled airplanes to vintage sliderules, wanted a tablet that wasn’t constrained software-wise like many Android tablets seem to be. He was introduced to the Raspberry Pi and decided that it would make an excellent tablet device. He paired the Pi with the official touch screen and then added other components such as an Adafruit Powerboost 1000C, a 6200mAh LiPo battery, a real-time clock, the guts of a USB audio adapter and an amplifier board. He fashioned an absolutely gorgeous case for it out of wood and what I think is perspex and fit all the components carefully inside. He estimates between 4-12 hours of battery life, depending on usage and the whole thing comes in at 484g (just over 17oz). A truly wonderful tablet build which you can read more about, and see loads of build pictures, here.
pi-top have just announced the launch of the pi-topPULSE. This innovative add-on board (HAT-compatible) for the Raspberry Pi sports the following features:
7×7 RGB LED matrix array
2-watt 4Ω speaker which is powered through an I2S amplifier
Microphone (200Hz to 11KHz response with automatic gain control)
Cloud-based voice service integration with Amazon Alexa (Pi 3 only)
Fully-assembled
Comes with magnetic fixings and pin-connector for use inside a pi-top or pi-topCEED.
Includes magnetic stand-offs for use as a regular HAT on top of the Pi.
There are plenty of example programs and demos to download and for pi-topOS users, there are lesson plans included for you to use.
The board is completely compatible with all 40-pin Raspberry Pis and has the necessary bits and pieces to work with the pi-top ecosystem.
This board looks terrific and has a great feature set. It’s due to retail for $49 (around £45 – a bit spendy, but it does bring an awful lot of functionality with it) and will be available from RS Components. Other resellers will no doubt come on-line soon enough. What impresses most is the inclusion of both a microphone and a speaker, which no other add-on board (that I know of) for the Pi offers. How well the software works remains to be seen, but given that they promise integration with Amazon Alexa, you have to imagine that the software backs the hardware up.
Of course, with integration with Alexa, they’ve rather stolen the march on the Google AIY project kit that came with a recent issue of The MagPi. With the hardware for that project not yet available, the pi-topPULSE offers an immediate solution.
I’ll be getting hold of one of these boards as soon as I can – I’ll let you know what I think of it!
In the meantime, here’s the RS Components un-boxing video:
