Ben Nuttall is once again organising a Jam at Pi Towers. This one is on Saturday, 8th April from 10am-4pm at the premises on Station Road, Cambridge. Various Pi-related activities and workshops will be available. If you’re interested, head over to Eventbrite to get your (free) tickets.
A number of organisations are getting together to present the inaugural Norwich Raspberry Jam on the 27th May. I haven’t got loads of detail at the moment, but it looks like they’re expecting it to be a fairly large event with workshops, talks, show-and-tell and vendors all present. To start with, they’re getting people to express an interest in helping with the event via a Google Form, so if you’re in the area, or are willing to travel to it, take a look at the form. There are other events occurring the week before as part of the Norwich Gaming Festival, but take a look at the form to find out about them.
I’m almost certainly going to be there and taking along the CamJam / pi-topCHAMPIONS pi-topCEEDs, and I’ve volunteered to give a workshop and a talk.
Alex Eames, who was covered in a community profile yesterday, has used his RasPiO Inspiring system of bright LEDs in geometric shapes to create an illuminated pointing sign. He’s blogged about the mini-project, which involved some foam board, some sewing and, eventually, an ESP8266 Wemos board (he started out by prototyping the code in Python on a Raspberry Pi and then ported it to the Arduino-like Wemos). You can read about the work that went into the sign here and take a look at RasPiO Inspiring here. You can see the results in the GIF below, but you can also see a video of it working here.
Raspberry Pi has published online an article from issue 52 of The MagPi. It’s a community profile of my friend, Alex Eames (that’s him in the cheesy picture above!), who you probably know from RasPi.TV and RasPiO. Recently, he’s launched a Kickstarter to fund RasPiO Inspiring, which is all about making interesting shapes with very bright LEDs. You can see a picture of the Kickstarter below. Click on the picture to take a better look at the campaign.
Here’s an interesting article over on The MagPi website. According to the article, Raspberry Pi has now sold more than 12.5 million units across the range. This surpasses the 12.5 million sales of the Commodore 64. Compared to the C64’s 11-year life span (shown in the graph below), the Pi has achieved this in just 5 years and shows no signs of slowing down.
How you measure sales is, of course, open to interpretation. The C64 12.5 million figure is based on an analysis of serial numbers, and there is some debate as to whether the true figure is more or less. I suspect that the Raspberry Pi sales figures are slightly more accurate. Someone on the MagPi article has commented that, really, one ought to include all the other (compatible) models of the Commodore such as the 16, 64 and 128, and they’re probably right – the MagPi’s assertion uses the entire range, so why not count the entire competing range? My feeling is that the 16 and 128 make up just a small proportion of sales compared to the C64. However, my statisticians brain screams out for accuracy, which I guess I will never get! 😉
A group from Lithuania has launched an IndieGoGo campaign for a new sound board for the Raspberry Pi. Called pisound, it has the following features:
Here’s the blurb from the campaign:
pisound is an ultra-low latency high-quality soundcard and MIDI interface specially designed for Raspberry Pi pocket computers. Equipped with 192kHz 24-bit stereo input and output driven by the legendary Burr-Brown chips, classic MIDI In and Out ports, user-customizable button and bundled software tools, this little board is an all-around solution for your Raspberry Pi based audio projects.
You can see the campaign video below and visit the campaign here.
