Your votes have been counted: there was a clear winner. Congratulations to Fergal Butler, who was the first person to respond to the original post with the name Babbage.
Well done Fergal! Emma will be in touch with you next week to get your address. The prototype bear has already found a home with Clive’s little girl, and production Babbage won’t be with us for a couple of weeks, but we’ll make sure yours is the first to be sent out.
We’ve been choosing bear names for the competition today.
A name has been chosen! See our latest post to find out what it was.
We ended up with a shortlist of the best names, and set to voting.
Thirty seconds after this, the shouting started. Note that Gordon has drawn a Darlington pair (badly) to explain things to the software guys, who are slow to catch on.
Unfortunately, we ended up in deadlock, with four votes each for Darlington and Babbage. Eben went so far as to try cheating, and added some extra ticks when he thought nobody was looking.
So we’ve decided we need your help. The two choices we’ve boiled things down to are Babbage and Darlington. We’d like you to let us know which you prefer. Please leave a comment letting us know which is your favourite! (Babbage and Darlington only, please; we know some of you want to call the bear Pinus after Linus Torvalds, but there were all kinds of problems with that.)
In about a month’s time, we’re going to be launching a brand-new range of Raspberry Pi merchandise. (My desk is currently awash with notebooks, gym bags, pencils, mugs, umbrellas and…stuff.)
This little guy is going to be one of the additions to the line-up.
He’s soft, he’s cuddly, he’s only about 20cm tall, and he doesn’t have a name yet. That’s where you come in.
To win a bear, as well as some other goodies I’ll select from what’s kicking around in the office, and to have your choice of name used in the shop, leave a comment below with your chosen name, with an explanation of why you selected it. (Make sure the email address you log in with is a genuine one, so we can get in touch with you if you win.) The competition ends at midnight on Tuesday April 16.
We’ve sent the first camera boards to production, and we’re expecting to be able to start selling them some time in April. And we’ve now got several pre-production cameras in the office that we’re testing and tweaking and tuning so the software will be absolutely tickety-boo when you come to buy one.
Gordon is in charge of things camera, and he’s got ten boards to give away. There is, however, a catch.
The reason we’re giving these cameras away is that we want you to help us to do extra-hard testing. We want the people we send these boards to to do something computationally difficult and imaginative with them, so that the cameras are pushed hard in the sort of bonkers scheme that we’ve seen so many of you come up with here before with your Pis, and so that we can learn how they perform (and make adjustments if necessary). The community here always seems to come up with applications for the stuff we do that we wouldn’t have thought of in a million years; we thought we should take advantage of that.
So we want you to apply for a camera, letting us know what you’re planning to do with it (and if you don’t do the thing you promise, we’ll send Clive around on his motorbike to rough you up). We want you to try to get the camera doing something imaginative. Think about playing around with facial recognition; or hooking two of them up together and modging the images together to create some 3d output; or getting the camera to recognise when something enters the frame that shouldn’t be there and doing something to the image as a result. We are not looking for entries from people who just want to take pictures, however pretty they are. (Dave Akerman: we’ve got one bagged up for you anyway, because the stuff you’re taking pictures of is cool enough to earn an exemption here. Everybody else, see Dave’s latest Pi in Space here. He’s put it in a tiny TARDIS.)
So if you have a magnificent, imaginative, computationally interesting thing you’d like to do with a Raspberry Pi camera board, email iwantacamera@raspberrypi.org. In your mail you’ll need to explain exactly what you plan to do; and Gordon, who is old-school, is likely to take your application all the more seriously if you can point to other stuff you’ve done in the past (with or without cameras), GitHub code or other examples of your fierce prowess. (He suggested I ask for your CVs, but I think we’ll draw the line there.) We will also need your postal address. The competition is open worldwide until March 12. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
To celebrate our first anniversary, RS Components, one of our two main manufacturing distributors, are releasing a limited edition of 1000 blue Raspberry Pis. These Pis are very cute: there’s something really handsome about that blue. They come with a certificate of authenticity signed by Eben and a matching blue case from One Nine Design in Wales; and blue, as drinkers of Slush Puppy should be aware, is the canonical colour of raspberry flavouring. (Do not eat this Pi.)
There’s a catch. You won’t be able to buy these Pis. The majority of them are being donated to charitable causes involving kids and education. But some are also being held back as competition prizes, and you can win one yourself.
For four weeks from today, everyone who tweets #bluepi to @RSElectronics along with a suggestion for uses for a blue Pi, or with a great Pi design idea, will be entered into a competition to win one. (Please tweet your entries to @RSElectronics – don’t leave your entry here in the comments, because it won’t be counted.) Every week, the top ten entries will be selected by a panel from RS and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and those ten winners will be sent a blue Pi. Easy! There will be another competition when these four weeks are up – RS will be running Blue Pi events until June.
Terms and conditions are available at RS’s website.
We first met Paul Beech in 2011, when he won a competition we were running to find a logo design. (That’s it, up at the top of the page.) Paul, Eben and I hit it off immediately over a shared love of toast and dripping. Since then, Paul’s become a familiar face here at the Raspberry Pi farm, especially since he set up a small business called Pimoroni with his friend Jon Williamson, and started making the Pibow, which we still think is the best-looking case that’s available for the Raspberry Pi.
This is a bit of a special time for us. It’s the first anniversary of the Raspberry Pi’s launch on Friday (or Thursday, depending how you count; we launched on a leap day last year). You’ll be able to read more about that on Friday, but to celebrate, Pimoroni have launched a competition with one of the most drool-worthy prizes I’ve seen. Paul says:
A lot of you have asked for custom Pibows. Alas, we’re not set up for it, but you can always grab the design and get your own cut. For everyone else, there’s this competition.
The aim is simple, show us your tasteful/useful/insane* vision for your own custom Pibow.
The person who comes up with the best design wins a customised Pibow – and everything that’s in this box. (And the box.) Click the image for the entry page.
What’s in there? You’ll get a special Pibow, made to your custom design, AND:
Jon adds:
This is a totally spiffy and positively super collection of useful stuff to pimp, mod, and extend your Raspberry Pi with. Even better you can tote it around with you as your own awesome mobile hacker space! This is all stuff we use ourselves at Pimoroni Towers so we know you’ll love it.
Paul interrupts:
Gotta mention the mini-servos and the 7-seg displays, and the range of resistors and caps. anna anna pony anna anna hekiloptor!
(Have to admit, I have absolutely no idea what Paul is on about – I’m not sure if you get mini-servos, and I’m almost certain you don’t get ponies or helicopters as part of the prize.)
So get to it, and submit your designs for the competition. We’ll be featuring the winner here so everyone else can sulk jealously at your good fortune.
It’s here a month earlier than the expected publishing date because the typesetting elves have been working their tiny hats off. You can now buy the Raspberry Pi User Guide, written by Eben Upton and Gareth Halfacree, in good old-fashioned book form, with pages made out of paper and everything, which will please those of you who were holding out because you don’t like e-books.
The User Guide serves as an in-depth manual for the Raspberry Pi. It’ll teach you the basics like where to plug the cables in and how to turn it on and use the terminal, and then lead you through learning how to configure it, how to program, how to set it up as a web server, how to use it as a media centre, how to use the GPIO to read buttons and flash lights, and more. I’ve got a copy (already coffee-stained) on my desk, and it’s fantastic; Eben, Gareth and the editorial and production teams at Wiley have done a beautiful job.
If you’d like to win a copy signed by Eben (I may be able to get Gareth to sign it too if I see him in time), just leave a comment below saying exactly what you’d like him to write in his dedication to you. The best/funniest/most tear-jerking will win a signed copy of the book – and some highly sought-after stickers if Rob has any left after his tour of the US. I’ll announce the winner next week.
Another post in an occasional series on the cool stuff people have been doing with their Pis. Sorry for the lack of a post yesterday – total disorganisation on our part. The event we were at yesterday (at which we won a paperweight proclaiming that Eben is Cambridge’s most influential business person, a rather phallic award, and a box of chocolates – hurray chocolates) went on for longer than we’d expected, we didn’t get to do half the things we were meaning to before the end of the day, and we are reminded that it’s probably getting close to time to hire some admin staff, because this diary is becoming a MONSTER.
First up, some competition news. PA Consulting is sponsoring a series of prizes for UK teams. The task is to make something that will make the world a better place, using a Raspberry Pi – you can enter hardware projects or software projects. There are categories for several different age groups from primary school through to university and beyond; this is a competition that adults can enter too. The schools prizes are a generous £1000; for other categories, prizes range from internships to cash prizes. And the first 200 teams to enter will get a free Raspberry Pi – what could be nicer? Read the rules and enter here.
In other competition news, if you submitted an entry to our own Summer Coding Contest (which we’re judging at the moment – we had a lot of really excellent and complicated entries, so it’ll take us another couple of weeks to get through them all), you should have received an acknowledgement email from us. If you haven’t, please email contests@raspberrypi.org.
Yesterday, we learned about the first ever Raspberry Pi supercomputer. A group at Southampton University led by Professor Simon Cox has, with the help of six-year-old son James Cox (the team’s LEGO specialist), built a supercomputer out of Raspberry Pis, a bajillion cables and an awful lot of LEGO. You can read all about it here, and learn how to make your own. Obviously, this is probably not the most economical way to get bang for your MIPS, but it’s a really lucid way to explain how a supercomputer works, and we love it.
Prof Cox and James, and the biggest Bramble we’ve seen yet
The Raspberry Pi isn’t just getting a foothold in UK universities. This morning, I was sent this video from the IIIT in Bangalore, an Indian university specialising in information technology. Students there have been making an informational video about setting up the Raspberry Pi. Over to them:
Meanwhile, back in Europe, Ponnuki has a clever little hack to turn a Kindle into a Raspberry Pi e-ink display. E-ink’s something we’ve been very interested in at the Foundation. This kind of very readable low-power display is a really good option for environments where power hard to come by: battery-powered portable systems, solar-powered systems which need a display in out-of-the-way places, and set-ups in developing countries, can really benefit from this sort of technology. You won’t be able to watch video with these refresh rates, but most desktop-type applications are very usable. Right now, it’s very hard to buy such a display as a consumer – they’re usually part of an e-reader device, and even if you’re lucky enough to be able to source one independently, they’re very expensive. We’re watching the sector with interest, and we’re hoping to see prices come down and availability increase – we’re aware of a few companies who are doing really interesting work in this area. But until then, we rather like Ponnuki’s solution.
Kindleberry Pi. Click the image for instructions on setting up your own.
I’m starting to think we should be giving this kid a weekly spot. Now, I’m having to rush around a bit today, so won’t have time for a screed of text for you; instead, here’s Philip’s third game in Scratch.
What we’re really enjoying about Philip’s videos is the way the games are getting a little more sophisticated each time. I’ve encouraged him to submit his code in our Summer Programming Competition – there are only a few days to go for you to get your entries in, and a lot of you seem to have been spending your summer writing stuff for us. Get cracking with the entry form if you haven’t already!
Here’s an A3 poster for you to print out and hang up at your school, scout group, coding club, Makespace, Hacklab or youth club to publicise our summer coding contest for kids, announced this weekend at Games Britannia (and already making the news). Thanks, as ever, to the most excellent Paul Beech for the graphical wizardry.
Click to download PDF version
If you don’t own a Raspberry Pi, don’t panic: you can still enter. Use QEMU to emulate the Raspberry Pi in Windows. (There are descriptions of what you’ll need to do in this forum thread.)
Edit to add: A few of you have been asking about whether using existing software libraries or third-party assets (like graphics) counts as being “all my own work”.
If you use a publicly available software library such as Pygame, that’s absolutely fine.
If you use assets created by someone else, that’s something we’ll be looking at on a case-by-case basis. We’ll be expecting you to declare what work you did on the project, and what was done by somebody else. We’ll expect the vast majority of the work to have been done by you; but we do understand that not everybody is a renaissance man who has the skills to both code and produce graphics at the same level. A couple of thousand lines of code written by you which manipulates a few sprites drawn by your friend will be OK; for reference, that’s the sort of balance we’ll be looking for.