Raspberry Pi for Dummies: sample chapter

The camera boards are now available for order! You can buy one from RS Components or from Premier Farnell/Element14. We’ve been very grateful for your patience as we’ve tweaked and refined things; it’d have been good to get the camera board out to you last month, but we wanted your experience to be as good as possible, and we’ve been working on the software right up until last night. Thank you to Gordon and Rob at Raspberry Pi and to… More

Do you remember the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks this website was undergoing a few months ago? They made the news (partly because it was just so bizarre to see someone attacking an educational computing charity) – if you want to refresh your memory, see this, this, or this. Pete Stevens, who runs marathons and our hosting company, Mythic Beasts, thought you’d be interested in what he’s been doing to try to ensure this can’t happen again. (Famous last… More

A slightly abbreviated post today – we’ve just driven 380 miles to Phoenix from LA for Intel ISEF, where Eben’s talking tomorrow, and we’re ready to drop. But I was mailed this amazing piece of work this morning, and it really deserves your attention. Andrew Holme is a member of the Systems Group at Broadcom Cambridge. He’s friends with several of Raspberry Pi’s engineers, and he’s been working on a homemade GPS receiver in the evenings for the last few… More

Here’s a guest post from our friend Pete Wood at RS Component’s community arm, DesignSpark. Pete is one of the organisers of the Oxford Raspberry Jams. This post was first published at www.designspark.com. Raspberry Jams are now being held all over the world; I’ve been trying to go to about one a month, and am lucky enough to be in Tokyo for some press and meetings while the Tokyo Jam is on later this month. There’s a list of events… More

There’s a really fantastic piece in Techradar and Linux Format, going into considerable depth to compare, contrast and review five Raspberry Pi operating systems. If you’ve been thinking about trying out a new distro on your Pi, it’s a great place to start. (And well done, Raspbian!) More

While we love all programming languages equally here at the Foundation, we do love Python an awful lot. Most users run their code under the “default” CPython interpreter, but over the last few years the PyPy project has made great strides in producing an highly compatible alternative interpreter with an integrated tracing JIT compiler. On x86 platforms this can improve the performance of some workloads by a factor of ten or more, and the PyPy team are now bringing the… More

The ten-year-old in question is Jessica, Gordon’s daughter, who dropped into the office last week to give us a hand testing some Raspberry Pis that customers had sent back to the manufacturers as “faulty”. Whenever this happens, the Pis are passed on to us or to the Sony factory in Wales where the Pis are built, and we test them to find out what’s going on and to ensure that there isn’t a bug in manufacturing. At the moment, we… More

We’ve seen a number of photographers who have taken to the Pi as a way to bring down the cost of the sort of kit that was, pre-Pi, outside the budgets of mere mortals. Case in point: gigapixel photography. A gigapixel image is made up of (at least) a billion pixels, which means you’ve now got access to the sort of fine and vivid detail on your monitor that we mere humans with our shonky eyeballs could only dream of… More

Eben and I are going to be out of the UK for much of the rest of May, doing press, meeting partners, visiting Raspberry Pi fans, hanging out with science fair kids and giving talks. We’ll be in Phoenix for Intel ISEF, San Francisco for Maker Faire (come and listen to our talk! We don’t have a stand this year, but Raspberry Pis will be on sale in the Make Shed), and, most excitingly for both of us, in Tokyo… More

It is a bank holiday, and we are all quite…cheerful, post company barbecue, so I will keep this brief. Here’s a motion tracking demo from Erik Haberup. He says: In case the Raspberry Pi team would like another example of the versatility of their product. This is my capstone project for the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (Computer Electronics Engineering) which uses a Raspberry Pi to wirelessly transmit live motion tracking data from a set of 13 inertial measurement units.… More

The MagPi is a free magazine made by Raspberry Pi fans for Raspberry Pi fans. It’s the example of just how remarkable the Raspberry Pi community is that we point to most often: volunteer enthusiasts with no publishing experience have been producing a really tight, entertaining, and educational magazine for twelve months now, and it’s just getting better and better. The MagPi is a community magazine, which is not produced or otherwise fiddled around with by the Raspberry Pi Foundation.… More

Here’s another little snippet of video from Mike Cook. This game is one of the projects you’ll be able to make with Raspberry Pi for Dummies (click the link to learn more), by Mike (hardware) and Sean McManus (everything else). Watching this reminds me that I had a crush on Virgil Tracy when I was about six, despite the fact that he was made of balsa wood. More