Cambridge Raspberry Jam seeks new venue – Can you help?

Can you help?

Recently, we lost our normal venue for CamJam – the Institute of Astronomy. This was through no fault of our own – Andy, who was our contact there, has recently changed jobs within the University and moved buildings. Thanks Andy for the years of support you’ve given us!

This does leave us at something of a crossroads. We have a couple of ideas for places to hold the Jam in future, but they’re currently working out as quite expensive. Given that we want to make sure that our Jams are self-funding and self-sustaining, these venues are at the upper limit of what we think we can afford, given past ticket sales.

So, we are reaching out to you, our attendees and interested parties. Do you know of any venue in Cambridge (or even the surrounding villages/towns) that might be suitable to hold CamJam? A school, community centre, town hall, college, University building or other suitable space?

We are open to any ideas you may have. Ideally, it will be somewhere where you, personally, have either a contact or a personal stake – a foot in the door, so to speak. We would like to hold a Jam in September, so we have a month or two to get things sorted. Hopefully, it will be somewhere that has the following facilities:

  • Cheap/free parking!
  • An area for Show-and-Tell and the Marketplace.
  • A room, hall or area where we can set up chairs for talks.
  • A room, or preferably multiple rooms, where we can hold 20-person workshops.
  • Somewhere to serve food/drink from – a servery, kitchen-with-a-hatch or something like that.
  • Somewhere where it’s possible to either park close to the venue or drop things off outside near the venue.
  • The ability to hold our regular audience of between 150 and 200 people.
  • Good travel links – i.e. not impossible to find!

With any luck, someone out there has an idea of somewhere that is suitable (even if it’s ‘nearly’ right, we’d love to hear from you!) We very much want to continue with the Jams – we just need your help! :-). Contact me if you can think you can help.

Raspberry Pi wins the MacRobert Award, presented at London ceremony

At a ceremony in London last night, the team behind the Raspberry Pi won a prestigious award: The MacRobert Award.

The MacRobert Award is the UK’s longest-running and most prestigious national prize for engineering innovation. The award “recognises outstanding innovation, tangible societal benefit and proven commercial success.”

Beating the two other finalists, Darktrace (a cyber-security company) and Vision RT (radiotherapy pioneers) to the prize is a major achievement for the tech company which started so small with just 10,000 units and has now sold over 14 million units.

Congratulations to the entire company – it is an immense achievement and a validation of all the work you’ve put in to make the Raspberry Pi such a roaring success!

Automatic plant watering system, and a funny story, with a Raspberry Pi

Michael Lynch decided he wanted a house plant. Being a software engineer, however, and not a gardener, gave him a distinct problem: when should the plant be watered? How much moisture is too much? So, he collaborated with Jeet Shetty on an automatic plant watering system called GreenPiThumb.

He used Python on the back-end for managing soil moisture and temperature sensors and for turning the water pump on and off, as can be seen below.

He also recorded events and sensor readings to a database. The front end (see a static example here) was written in AngularJS and Ansible was used to deploy the software to the Pi.

It took over a year to complete, despite the two developers wanting it to be a few weeks’ worth, and they encountered many challenges along the way. The two also captured the growth of the plant using a Pi camera and generated a time-lapse:

You can read a very humorous account of their journey, and see wiring diagrams and more photos, here and see the code here.

Go big with this 12-foot tall Raspberry Pi-powered electric guitar

Chris Riebschlager and the Dimensional Innovations team came up with an over-sized build for the two-day Boulevardia music festival in Kansas City. They built an electric guitar for the event which weighs in at 500 pounds and is 12 feet in length. It is made out of MDF and steel and the strings are comprised of 16-gauge wire. They used a Bare Conductive Touch Board to sense the plucking of the strings. The Touch Board then sends messages to a Raspberry Pi which decides which sound sample to play. They added arcade buttons on the side of the guitar to allow the playing of chords (the ability to play chords on the strings somewhat difficult due to the size of the thing!) You can see the guitar in action in the video below and read more and see more of the build over on medium.com.