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.
Torbay Pi jam – 13-12-2014
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.
Raspberry Pi in Space
The raspberry pi foundation are offering a chance to have your code sent in to space on 2 raspberry pi’s which will form part of science experiments on board the International Space station. This will be open to all primary and secondary school aged children who are resident in the United Kingdom.
For more info check out the post on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog.
2015 Torbay Pi jam dates
The following dates (2nd Saturday) are proposed for the Torbay Pi jam, they should get booked in very soon.
10th Jan 14th Feb 14th March 11th April 9 May 13 June 11 July 8 August 12 September 10 October 14 November 12 December
New ubuntu core
An update from Mark Shuttleworth
Announcing Ubuntu Core, with snappy transactional updates!
Just enough OS (jeOS)
Ubuntu JeOS (Just enough OS) — the smallest, (merely 63MB compressed!) functional OS image that we can still call “Ubuntu”. In fact, we call it Ubuntu Core.
This looks interesting as a base to develop bigger systems
Torbay Pi jam – December 2014
The next Torbay Raspberry Pi jam is on Saturday 13th December 13:00 to 15:00 at Paignton Library.
Exeter PI jam – Dec 2014
The next Exeter Raspberry Pi jam will take place on Saturday 6th December at Exeter Library 10 – 12.
Holsworthy Meeting Nov 2014
Our next meeting is due this coming Saturday 15th November at the White Hart starting at 2 pm. As I mentioned in an earlier email this is also the day of Holsworthy carnival. There is usually a procession for the young people in the afternoon, but this year this has been cancelled. Th carnival procession itself is due to start at 7 pm so there should be not problem for us. I have booked the meeting. Hope to see someone there,
Exeter Raspberry Pi jam – 1/11/2014
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.