Saturday 6th September 2014 saw another Raspberry Pi Jam in Exeter take place and what a great turnout there was!
At today’s Jam, there was lots of teaching going on with the introduction to Raspberry Pi course going on in the Fab Lab and there was even more teaching going on in the Meeting Room where the rest of the Jam took place. Continue reading
As I am part of the team that run the Torbay Pi Raspberry Pi jam. This is a call out for anyone who would like to either do a demonstration or do a talk at a future pi jam,.
So, If you would like to do a talk or demo or can help in other ways please get in touch,
2nd August 2014, saw yet another pi jam take place in Exeter Library / Fab lab, the 2 hour session seemed to be really busy. In the main fab lab there was a introduction to raspberry pi workshop where users were given an intro to the pi and had a chance to experiment with some electronic interfacing 
The Library / fablab have some new raspberry pi model B+ for users 
Bag of components from CPC ready for the work shop 
This is a project from Mark evans, the display shows the Pis IP address 
Some of the creations by some of the younger visitors using scratch 
And yes minecraft on the pi, i think we managed to hack this enough to get the tnt blocks to explode with code rather than using redstone torches which are not available in MC Pi edition. 
And bob made an appearance one of Tom Broughs many projects. This is arduino based but that is not really important, anyone inspired to make their own Bob ask Tom for info :).
Handy – Scratch controlled robot arm (not the mini webcam)- issue with camera settings hence it is dark,
Freddie (photo from a previous jam ) has now improved further.
So in all an excellent jam, more of the same on Saturday 9th August in paignton, we hope to see lots of people there :), and maybe we can look in to doing mini workshops at a future date.
Introduction to the Raspberry Pi. I can't imagine any of our regulars have been underfed Pi, but I'm sure some here are scratching their heads wondering whether the Raspberry Pi is for them. http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/o/fablab-devon-6722521537
Last night I decided to have a go at seeing if Windows 3.1 would run in dosbox. Surprisingly it does, and pretty quick too, you need to download the dos mouse driver and run that before starting windows but other than that it works. The install was pretty quick too.
Windows 3.1 running in DOSbox
I copied the folder i have all my dosbox items in over to the pi and tried this on that, you need to run dosbox through x in order for the keyboard to work properly (or it seems by default you do) so this slows things down, dosbox will run without X but the keyboard mapping was seriously messed up,
I guess this being a more proof of concept idea as I am not really sure what I would need windows 3.1 for, mind you there was an excellent periodic table program with decay trees for elements which was pretty good. Kinda out of date now as since then we have discovered and named more elements, and named beyond their initial Latin numerical names.
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Exeter Raspberry Pi jam
Saturday 2nd August between 10:00 and 12:00
Exeter Raspberry Jam Exeter Library Castle Street Exeter, Devon EX4 3PQ United Kingdom
For anyone who missed out today, we had another great pi jam, Big thank you to those that turned up and the 4 young people who also made it.
Again today was a good mix, Tom demonstrated his latest project: a face with a built in webcam that can track a coloured ball using OpenCV! This uses both Raspberry Pi and Arduino.
Video
One of the young people showed me the fg and bg commands, so my pi-liter project can now run but be put in the background, while it runs. I showed him the cowsay command, and one of the other young people got cmatrix working. These young people are uber L337.
I attempted to install Skype from Ubuntu software centre, failed, tried to download and then tell the installer to run through software centre, that failed, so just used dpkg and it worked fine without problems! I put a few notes on my website about this.
We could now do with more monitors and Pis, so we can get more people set up with Pis. I think we may have a few laptops at a future jam.
For anyone who missed out today, we had another great pi jam, Big thank you to those from the Lug that turned up and the 4 young people who also made it.
Again today was a good mix, tom demonstrated his latest project a face with a built in webcam that can track a coloured ball using open CV, this uses both Raspberry Pi and Arduino.
Video
One of the young people showed me the fg and bg commands, so my pi-liter project can now run but be put in the backgroiund, while it runs. I showed him the cow say command, and one of the other young people got cmatrix working.
I attempted to install scratch from ubuntu software centre, failed, tried to download and then tell the installer to run through software centre, that failed, so just used dpkg worked fine without problems.
Just got back from the Raspberry Pi jam in Exeter and have included a few photos below of some of the things on show.
First off is Tom Broughs Excellent Wii remote scratch game, this uses Python to take input from the wii remote via bluetooth and pass it on to scratch, so that the cat can be controlled to move around and catch / eat falling fish.
Still with tom, we had handy (robot arm controlled from scratch) and Bob the robot which as arduino at its heart.
We also had Lego Rovers Devon make an appearance, amazing what you can do with lego and the nxt block
We also helped Chinna out with his buggy made from an old remote control car and raspberry pi.
Chinnas Blog can be found here http://scientistnobee.wordpress.com/2014/07/05/raspberry-pi-spotter/ And a link to github for the code https://github.com/scientistnobee/Raspberry-Pi-Spotter
Scratch game created by one of the young people.
This is the new Raspberry Pi compute module courtesy of Gordon Henderson
Trevor sharp had a Self made IO board on show
Demo of my own Pilte, More info on my website at http://www.zleap.net
Minecraft on the pi
Arduino based distance measuring project using the ultrasonic module HC-SR04
Simons pi powered music chimer.
Fab lab was open, showcasing the range of things that can be made with some of their kit
Another month and another trip up to Exeter to take part in a Pi jam. Again anyone not there missed some really good projects.
Gordon Henderson came along with the fuze box, fuze basic now integrates with minecraft pi allowing you to write programs that directly control the minecraft world.
Fuze box running Minecraft Pi and Fuze Basic.
The Glockenspiel was again there along with the other projects from a local school teacher.
I didn’t demo any of my own projects but did do a quick demo of Sonic Pi and my nested loops program to the lady organising Sidmouth Science week, My main demo on my pi was the Helicopter game created by Tom Brough. Who demonstrated his Bob Robot, (see blog for videos that have been previously created)
Tom was also using a digital picture frame to explain how bob works.
Another project had a LCD display to dispay the local IP address ( I think) of the device on the network
It is the small box on the right hand side with the green display
In all another successful event and looking forward to the Torbay Jam on 12th April, Hope to see lots of families, children, teachers and other school staff there. We need more demos 🙂