Accessories, Internet of things, Making, Nature, Raspberry Pi Zero, Science

Weather forecasting cloud has a Raspberry Pi Zero W at its core

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My apologies for the lack of updates recently. I had a bit of a health problem involving a medication imbalance and it meant I couldn’t concentrate on anything but the bare essentials. I’ve also been busy rehearsing for a new musical called Cloud at Sharnbrook Mill Theatre in Bedfordshire. It goes on next week, so my mind has been otherwise occupied! 🙂 I’m rather chuffed to be able to bring you this not-unrelated post!

Kirby has created this lovely weather-forecasting cloud from a Raspberry Pi Zero W. The cloud is made from wood and houses the Pi Zero W a strip of Neopixel-like LEDs. The software uses the Yahoo Weather API to collect data and then changes the colour of the LEDs accordingly. It’s a lovely project and you can read more about it over on Instructables.

Raspberry Pi Foundation

Raspberry Pi Foundation and CoderDojo Foundation to merge

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Very interesting news this morning. The Raspberry Pi Foundation and the CoderDojo Foundation are to merge.

CoderDojo is a global network of coding clubs for kids from 7-17 and was established in July 2011 by James Whelton and Bill Liao. There are currently 1,250 CoderDojos in existence and together, the Foundations have set themselves a target of increasing that to 5,000 by 2020. (To me, this seems a bit on the high side, but who knows what these great organisations can achieve?)

Based in Ireland, CoderDojo will remain an independent charity with the Raspberry Pi Foundation being a corporate member of CoderDojo and Philip Colligan serving as a director.

You can read more about the merger (which has to be ratified by Irish regulators) on the Raspberry Pi website.

GPIO boards, Programming, Tutorials

Make your SenseHAT and Raspberry Pi into an email status device

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Gus over at PiMyLifeUp has written some excellent software and accompanying tutorial that enables you to turn your Pi and SenseHAT into an email-inbox-status device. The SenseHAT’s LED matrix is used as a readout to tell you how many unread emails you’ve got. You will need an IMAP-enabled email account for it to work (such as Gmail). Take a look at the tutorial here.

3D printing, Accessories, Making, Medical, Sensors, Wearable

Building a heartbeat monitor with the Raspberry Pi

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Daniel Fernandez has taken a Raspberry Pi, a Polar H7 heart sensor and a 3.5″ screen and created a heart monitoring system. The system allows you to wear the sensor, which sends readings to the Raspberry Pi which then graphs the results in real-time. A 3D-printed case completes the project, along with the software which he’s made available on GitHub. Read more over at The MagPi.

Accessories, Education, Freebies, Programming, Tutorials

CamJam EduKit for the Raspberry Pi receives GPIO Zero / Python 3 worksheet update

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Tim Richardson and I are pleased to announce that there are brand new versions of the CamJam EduKit 1 worksheets now available from the CamJam website. In addition to the classic RPi.GPIO versions being revised to feature 40-pin Pis and various small typographical changes, we now have available worksheets that use the GPIO Zero Python library.

For those of you who do not follow such things, GPIO Zero is a relatively new Python library developed by Ben Nuttall of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Dave Jones, who also created the picamera library, amongst other contributors. The library allows a much simpler way of programming the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins and is much more suitable for beginners. It has become extremely popular in the Raspberry Pi community and is now the de-facto standard for GPIO coding. In fact, many intermediate and advanced level programmers also use it as it allows you to get straight into GPIO programming without some of the “messing around” you need to do with RPi.GPIO.

You can find the new worksheets here. You don’t even need to buy the EduKit – if you’ve got the components already, feel free to use the worksheets, especially if you’re in education!

We’re hoping to do GPIO Zero versions of the EduKit 2 and 3 material in the next few months.

Events, Raspberry Jams

Potton Pi & Pints – a Raspberry Jam doughnut – Saturday, 17th June

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The next CamJam event is Potton Pi & Pints on Saturday, 17th June at The Rising Sun in Potton. Get free tickets here.

This is a strictly informal family-friendly event from the same team that brings you the Cambridge Raspberry Jam. The event starts at 1pm.

We start at lunchtime and encourage people to bring along their projects to show and discuss or to come along and find out more about the Raspberry Pi and what it can do. We set up some Pi workstations for general hacking, but you’re welcome to bring your own equipment along. This event is an ideal opportunity to get some one-on-one help with setting your Pi up or to get assistance with an ongoing project.

This event will be a real social for Pi enthusiasts and we’re hoping it will be nice and relaxed with none of the stress and frantic nature of the usual CamJam! Kick back, unwind and do stuff with your Pi.

We’ll be supplying a few Raspberry Pis, monitors, keyboards, mice, cables and power sockets so all you have to do is come along. But please feel free to bring your own Pi, your SD card and whatever other electronic wizardry/gadgetry you happen to have.

We’ll have some of our worksheets available so there’ll be some activities for kids available.

At the end of the Jam (5pm-ish), feel free to join us for a meal/drink/chat. We generally go on into the evening!

You can get free tickets to Potton Pi & Pints from Eventbrite.