Exeter Library are holding another Build a robot workshop over 1/2 term.
This half term: Build a robot in a team of 4 to win a prize!
Ages 8+ / 20 places available
£40 for 4 sessions including light refreshments
The sessions are 10 am-1pm:
Mon 26th Oct
Tues 27th Oct
Wed 28th Oct
Thurs 29th Oct
all sessions must be attended for you to win
Tickets available from Exeter library or by phoning 01392 384223
More details on the
Exeter Raspberry Jam blog
Today saw another really good Pi jam in Exeter.
Demonstrations included a Pi based home automation system, which also included a webcam which takes a photo of whoever presses the doorbell and e-mails you a picture.
Led Traffic lights ( I think this is PIC based) – Tom Brough
Toms latest robot (crazy Ivan) this moves around, and can turn randomly and move forward again.
Sadly marco mark 2 had a problem, so was here but just not working as planned.
Pi Ready for eager coders to use.
Lots of people with new Pi’s in need of set up. so I did quite a bit of support here, also minecraft-pi was popular and people seemed to like my modification which drops tnt blocks over grass.
Robots will make another appearance at next weeks Torbay Pi Jam 14th March, Paignton Library from 13:00
It seems Lenovo the PC / Laptop makers have been installing spyware on their PC’s without the users knowledge or consent
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-31533028
I think this is a good reason to either re-install your OS when you get a new computer. Normally you get install / restore media or the option to make this, however in this case if the spyware is pre-installed it could be on these restore cds. so you will be no better off, you can possibly get a removal tool, but these removal tools usually end up putting other malware on to your computer, removing it is a PITA.
A BETTER OPTION
Install a free and open source OS such as Mint, Ubuntu or a pure free software and take back control of your computer.
Join a GNU / Linux user group so you can learn more.
This is also a good reason why you need to know more about what your computer is doing..
This months Pi jam was a real gem, lots of things being demoed and some excellent progress being made with various projects.
Tom, brought along his Marco 2 robot, which if you are following this blog or are a regular attendee of jams. This has now been updated to allow control via a web interface.
More information on this is on the Feb 2015 Exeter Jam write up blog post. So I will let people go there for more info.
Tom also brought along Freddie and after some basic set up this worked fine, following a green ball with his eyes.
Video taken back in July
Doodle bot also made an appearence this is really good as it works without any user interaction and can draw (or try) to draw what it has been programmed to.
We also helped a lady get up and running with her new pi,
Here is the pi being installed from the NOOBS install tool
And a picture of the pi running the Raspbian OS after install.
I also demonstrated my Minecraft Pi coding with python. I will post a video to youtube and put this on my website blog.
We also helped out a user who had an older install of GNU / Linux on his PC (Debian) and wanted a newer GNU / Linux installed so flash player would function properly.
We were unble to help fully however he will be back at the next jam iwth his PC backed up so we can install Linuxmint 17.1
One of our younger members also worked on getting a cluster of computers up and running and thanks to a router / switch donated by Rick at Wifispark he got 2 laptops and my Pi up and running and proved that by sharing the load calculations can be performed quicker. There is a dedicated page for this on the website. Where results will be posted shortly.
We also had a Dan from the TDA drop in to see what was going on with the view on how they can help further and perhaps involve some of the local hi tech companies.
So a BIG thank you for everyone involved today and everyone who came along to support the event. Hopefully next month will be more of the same and perhaps even bigger and better.
We also had Sarah from Inspiring Dreams, Achieving Change, who offered to help promote what we are doing.
The word on the Pi jams IS spreading. which is a good thing.
See everyone on the 14th March 2015 at Paignton Library. 13:00 to 15:00
Another pi jam today which went well, We had the 3 young people come along who are more serious hard core hackers so get on really well with each other
At present to get a laptop or PI to connect to the network we need to connect to the Libary wifi and enter a UID password then agree to the terms in a browser window
We tried to see if there was a different way to do this with a wifi router acting as a bridge so 4 laptops could connect to the router and that would provide a bridge between the wifi and the 4 wired Ethernet ports.
This didn’t seem to work 100 percent even though I did see the wifi router on my net book with 100 percent signal strength, compared to about 74 percent for the library wifi, So this project will carry on next month probably.
In another project they young people had a multi player mine craft game set up using the Pis.
Using the Model B for anything reminds you that if you plug and unplug things it can reset due to power issues,.
Jonathan who is an IT apprentice also came along to support and help and said he would ask about if there are any solutions to the wifi / network connectivity so that we can connect easier.
We had Raymond and his wife drop in for a chat and I showed them the DVD I am working on to explain about Creative commons / free software and the 4 freedoms.
Myself and Jonathan also helped Melvyn with his new phone and to check to see if it would charge when plugged in to his net book.
One of the visitors from last month came back and asked about suitable monitors etc so I advised him on a few options. including using a TV which i suggested is a good option if you want to use the media centre software. Some TV’s also have the VESA connectors at the back to which pi’s can be attached.
Photos are available on Mediagoblin
https://goblinrefuge.com/mediagoblin/u/zleap/collection/january-2015-pi-jam/
The next jam is on 14th February
Here is a poster for the January Pi jam. If anyone is able to print off or display on their website I would be very grateful as this really helps to promote.
Another pi jam today and it went very well highlights as follows
We helped on visitor get up and running and ended up re-creating an sd card with raspbian (1)on in order to get the Pi up and running. In the end Tom got everything up and running, with some help from myself as I seem to have an array of adapters and other bits and pieces which always seem to come in handy. Including various images on my netbook.
Our younger visitors were busy with various projects Arduino (6) hacking and getting Arch (2) Linux up and running in a virtual machine, (Virtual box) (3))
I have loaned out my pi-liter (4) to one of the younger visitors so he can demonstrate at school
1.) http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads/
2.) https://www.archlinux.org/
3.) https://www.virtualbox.org/
5.) http://shop.ciseco.co.uk/pi-liter-8-led-strip-for-the-raspberry-pi/
Support repositories for the pi liter
https://github.com/zleap/RaspberryPI
and
https://github.com/zleap/compgroup
Which has some ladder board source code, but should demonstrate the use of the GPIO.
You can also download the pi liter data sheet from the website http://shop.ciseco.co.uk/pi-liter-8-led-strip-for-the-raspberry-pi/
However you DO need to install python-pip with
sudo apt-get install python-pip
For some reason the data sheet instructions missed out this step.
The next Pi jam is on 10th January so if you get a Pi for Xmas come along and we can help you get started or show you what you can do with it. We don’t BYTE 🙂 and are happy to help.
Today was another excellent pi jam up in Exeter, and well attended, the word is getting out there.
Highlights
Tom Brough demonstrated the parity bit trick and also had some coloured cones to demonstrate how a bubble sort works, you can try this take about 8 cones of different sizes and put them randomly in a line now sort them one by one so the line goes from biggest to smallest.
I spent some time, with some help working on getting scratch to talk to the pi liter, once done (not too difficult) we spent some time then creating a program that is the same as the chaser type program written in python. This works really well, further enhancements allows the user to interact, chance speed as well as stop / start the routine.
I also had a chat with another user who showed me his chromebook running lubuntu. This was also connected to the Pi with vnc, the performance was excellent.
Ivan was also showing various projects and we had minecraft running on another pi. In the fab lab was the usual beginner work shop where you can learn to light up leds on a bread (project) board using the raspberry Pi GPIO
So in all excellent, Looking forward to next week as it is the Torbay Pi jam from 1 – 3 at Paignton Library, good news is that the 3 sd cards (well micro + adapters) arrived to day so these are all ready for next week, I may look at preparing at least one with Noobs, as this may save time next week.
Thank you to Simon and Exeter library for hosting another pi jam and everyone who attended.
With monthly Raspberry Pi jams in Paignton, what would you like to see at these jams. Given they are now more about just raspberry
At present we :
Help on how to get started, what you need to get started, what to buy etc
Show you some of the many add on boards etc available for the pi
Demonstrate projects based on the PI AND Arduino systems (which will hopefully inspire your projects)
Help with getting started with programming or provide advice on the next step for example where to go after using scratch.
We have a few laptops (with Linux)
Help with hardware projects (either stand along or linked to Pi , Arduino and similar devices)
Networking with other users
We would like to encourage young people to network with other young people and advocate collaboration and peer supported learning
We sometimes invite people in, for example in September we had the virtually safe team in who spent some time discussing the concerns of the young people at the jam
We also try and advocate other groups and initiatives that may be of interest to young people: for example Young rewired state, coder dojos, after school clubs. Promote events for adults for example hack4good events or hackathons on services such as geekli.stWe can also help with Linux user group related activities such as install and set up help for Linux. Advice on software or general discussion on related issues.Promote and advocate the use of free and open source software and the work of the Free software foundation Europe..Advocate and promote the new school Computer science curriculum. Enguage with parents, students and teachers in order to facilitate support if needed.Promote STEMnet and Stem activities. Free giveaways such as stickers if available, copies of Linux cd’s again when / where available.
The Arm DS Development tools is now available for Debian.
Quoted from the website (Which I hope is ok, as its for promotional purposes)
The ARM® DS-5 Development Studio is a professional toolchain developed by ARM to accelerate the development of native (C/C++) Linux applications. It is available free of charge to Debian Developers and offers 32-bit (armel and armhf) and 64-bit (arm64) ARM application debug and system analysis to help make Debian packages robust and highly optimized for ARM processor-based devices. Learn more about Streamline performance analyzer and DS-5 Debugger.
Please visit:
For more information