Grab bag | Raspberry Pi

Friday grab bag

Adafruit Web IDE

First up, Adafruit’s Raspberry Pi Web IDE is now in Alpha, and they’ve made some improvements which I think you’ll find very helpful. The package now includes:

Python step debugger
Node.js update to 0.8 from 0.6 for faster navigation, and page loads.
Package node binaries with the WebIDE for faster, and easier installs

You’ll need to reinstall to take advantage of the new features.

Web IDE debugger in action – click to visit Adafruit

Crunchies

We’ve been nominated for one of Techcrunch’s Crunchie awards! We’re up for Best Hardware Startup, and you can vote for us here. You can vote once a day; we’d really appreciate it if you could take a minute to show your support!

Pinball

Mark Baldridge is taking a year out between high school and university, and he’s spending that year on hobby projects. This is one of them: a home-made pinball machine with a Raspberry Pi for brains.

Click to visit TechFruits for a tour of the system, and some video

We thought this was a brilliant project. Eben and I have always fantasised about having the time to refurbish an old pinball machine, but we’d never thought of building one from scratch – we’re in awe. Mark is also blogging his progress on his own website – check it out!

Getting Started with Raspberry Pi

O’Reilly have just published a new Raspberry Pi book under the Make banner. Full disclosure: I haven’t actually got my hands on a copy of Getting Started with the Raspberry Pi yet, so I can’t review it here. But I do know Matt Richardson from Make, who wrote it; and I know that he’s a great teacher and demonstrator, and a very engaging writer, so I feel pretty confident in telling you to go and check it out. When I last spoke to Matt, he mentioned that the book would contain a chapter on using the Pi with Arduino, which was something we didn’t include in Eben and Gareth’s The Raspberry Pi User Guide (the two books should complement each other nicely, if you have room on your sheves) – Matt’s book also contains a chapter on working with webcams. Click the image to visit the Getting Started with Raspberry Pi Amazon page.

Raspberry Jam

Alan O’Donohoe led another London Raspberry Jam last week. We’re really excited to see that his message is getting out: every one of these events seems to be larger and more diverse than the last. (Alan has started holding the events at weekends, which makes them much more accessible for kids.)

Around 70 children, parents and teachers came to learn what they could do with a Raspberry Pi at a number of workshops – we sent Rob Bishop, our roving engineer, to join in. Alan has a short post about the event, and a photo album you can have a flick through. He’s looking for sponsorship so he can make the jams even bigger and better – if you can help, please email me at liz@raspberrypi.org, and I’ll pass your message along.

Train times

Finally, here’s a project from Gareth James, a man who lives five minutes from the train station but always seems to get there just as the train is leaving. He’s made a very handsome picture frame which displays train times, powered, of course, by a Raspberry Pi. You can find out how he did it on his website.

Wednesday grab bag

Christmas presents

Apparently, it’s the most wonderful time of the year. We have been thinking about what to get for the Raspberry Pi owner in your life. Happily, MakeZine have done the hard work for us, and have come up with a terrific gift guide. Head over and check it out – once, of course, you’ve stopped by our own store and bought your Raspberry Pi fan a branded t-shirt, lovingly hand-knitted from Santa’s beard hair by elves*. All profits on the shirts go to support the charitable work of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

*Details about t-shirt production may or may not be strictly speaking true.

Baby monitor

Here’s something I’ve been hoping one of you would produce for a while now. If you’ve got kids, you’ll know that many baby monitors are disgustingly expensive bits of kit, whose price remains as high as it is in a pretty unpleasant bit of exploitation of the fear and worry that every new parent experiences. So I was really pleased to see Matt Kaar, a Pi owner from Virginia, make his own networked, high-fidelity monitor from a Pi and a USB microphone. He’s very pleased with the results: “You can hear a pin drop.” You can follow Matt’s detailed instructions on his website if you’d like to make your own. (Thanks very much for responding to my request to write about it, Matt!)

These are all the parts you’ll need to make your own. Matt says the whole setup was “easier than I’d thought” – this is a project that even beginners will be able to approach.

I’m sure that once the $25 camera board is released in the new year we’ll start to see some cheap camera monitors being hacked too.

Plan 9

We’re very pleased to see that Plan 9 has been ported to the Pi. Plan 9 is an open-source Unix-type operating system, which was originally developed at Bell Labs as a research OS. What’s particularly interesting about Plan 9 is that everything behaves like a file, whether it’s a local or a network resource. We recommend you have a play with it!

Glenda, the Plan 9 bunny

You can download an image for your SD card, alongside documentation and a pdf newbie’s guide.

Raspberry Pipboy

More than a year ago, people on our forums started talking about using the Raspberry Pi in a very specific piece of cosplay. If you’ve played Fallout, you’ll know that no self-respecting apocalypse survivor goes anywhere without her Pipboy. People were wondering whether a Raspberry Pi could be used to drive a working piece of costume, perhaps with a GPS, and definitely with a small screen and lots of blinkenlights.

I thought that particular thread of conversation had died quietly: I was wrong. Ryan Grieve has made a really nice example using a car reversing panel, a tub of polymer pellets, a handful of leds and an Adafruit cobbler.

His Pipboy has functionality including a world map, local map, radio and a twitter client – or at least it did before some shonky home-wiring caused the whole arrangement to burst into flames. Happily, the Pi survived, and photos were taken before the disaster. Ryan also has code so you can put your own together – just please be more careful with the wiring if you make one yourself. Electricity’s not a toy, kids.

Good luck in fixing her back together, Ryan! We congratulate you on your flameproofness.

Gasser

Here’s a project with a more practical application. Gasser is a Pi-based, networked, mobile pollutant sensor for detecting nitrogen dioxide, ozone and sulphur dioxide, developed in Paris.

Gasser v2 prototype

This self-contained unit’s BOM cost comes in at €255 (the majority of that cost is taken up by the very accurate sensor); this is cheaper and smaller than equivalent devices – and it’s still only a prototype! We wish LaboCitoyen all success with the project; it’s great to see a Pi being used to make our cities healthier places.

Cookies

Like Raspberry Pi? Like 3D printing? Like biscuits? (OK, Americans: cookies.) This Thingiverse cookie cutter pattern from Tesla’s Moustache also comes with a recipe to make your own dough.

Learn about relays

Alex from RasPi.tv has some video to show you how to use relays to turn what he calls “useful, real, BIG things” like fans and lamps on and off, according to environmental conditions – too hot and the fan will turn on, too dark and the lamp will turn on. You can also hook the devices up to the network, so you can use a connected device, like your phone, to turn them on and off; and just because he can, Alex has also added some sound effects. This is a great tutorial. If you’re interested in learning about physical computing, it’s well worth watching this video and reading Alex’s blog post. RasPi.tv has plenty of other fun tutorials – I recommend you spend a few minutes browsing through the collection!

RC LEGO car

Finally, here’s a project to use up some of the LEGO you’ve been asking for for Christmas. Tom Rees has instructions on building a remote-controlled LEGO car, steered with an Xbox controller.

Sunday Grab Bag

They said that it could never be done! But here it is: a Sunday grab bag. A little something to read while sitting in your shreddies, eating a bowl of Shreddies and singing “It’s a Sunday Grab bag! Doodle ooo doo, doodle ooo do do do doooooo!” to the tune of The Final Countdown. Sorry if it’s a bit rushed — I’m off to the zoo to have poo flung at me by doolally chimps.

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A one-button audiobook player for the visually impaired

First up is a project that embodies the keep-it-simple principle. I love the elegance and simplicity of this and the fact that it’s extremely useful.

Simple. Elegant. Useful.

Its creator, Michael Clemens, says, “This little Raspberry Pi based project is a gift for my wife’s grandmother for her 90th birthday. Being visually impaired, she is hard to entertain but loves to listen to audiobooks. The problem is, that she isn’t able to handle a ghetto blaster or MP3 player. The solution to this problem was – tadaaaah – a one button audiobook player”

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Differences between the Rev1.0 and Rev2.0 Raspberry Pi schematics

Over on the ever-useful Wiki, AndrewS details the differences between the two versions, with a very smart and thorough schematic comparison. “I’m really pleased with how well the ‘graphical difference display’ worked out”, he says. “I also spent a chunk of time adding ‘Rev2.0’ columns (amongst other wiki edits)”.

Raspberry Pi Rev 1.0 and 2.0 schematics overlaid

Thanks for the hard work Andrew and to everyone else contributing to the Wiki.

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Raspberry Pi driving a huge LED panel

Petr Jakeš is using the Raspberry Pi to drive a large LED panel. He says, “We are using SPI port to control 6144 LEDs (192×32 matrix). The hardware is still flaky a little bit (see glitches in the left bottom corner), but consider it as a proof of concept ”

Petr is going to post some details on this when he gets a chance!

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Emulation isn’t just for games consoles: the ICL1900

Last month David Holdsworth gave a talk on software preservation to the Computer Conservation Society in the Science Museum in London, where he demonstrated a Raspberry Pi emulating the venerable ICL1900 mainframe and running the George3 operating system and the RSRE Malvern Algol68-R compiler. You can try it out for yourself. The page also has David’s presentation on software conservation.

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Pi Cars: Raspberry Pi controlled RC cars

If there is a better way to introduce children (well, anyone) to physical computing and programming than using Scratch to make RC cars skid about the house? No, there isn’t! I’m definitely going to be trying this myself and I’m already wondering if it will work with helicopters. Pi Cars currently have five of their cars to give away to people who come up with the best ideas of what they will do with them (Raspberry Pis not incuded!)

Connecting the Raspberry Pi to a radio transmitter

Friday grab bag

MagPi

The November edition of the MagPi is out! The MagPi is a community magazine produced by Raspberry Pi owners, and is now available in print as well as as a free download. If you’d like to see the MagPi have a future in print, please buy a copy. They’re not expensive at £2.49, and if the team are to raise enough cash to be able to offer the back issues in print as well (which I know many schools have expressed an interest in), they need your support.

This month’s issue has an interview with Mike Thompson, the man behind Raspbian, a tutorial on getting your Pi talking to an Arduino, a really nice piece from Jaseman on the evolution of the Pi since February, an introduction to C++, a competition, and plenty of hardware and software projects for you to get your teeth into. Download a PDF at the MagPi’s site, or buy a printed copy at Mod My Pi (not available at the time of posting, but it should be soon – I’ll amend this post when it is).

Picade

After less than two days on Kickstarter, the Picade project, which was set up to build a gorgeous arcade cabinet around the Raspberry Pi, has reached its initial funding goal! There’s still time to jump on the funding wagon so the boys at Pimoroni can reach their stretch goals if you’d like to be part of the UK’s first ever Kickstarter (and happen to like retro games, slammin’ style and Raspberry Pi); head on over if you’d like to take part.

Ken (Jon) and Ryu (Paul) realise that they are perfectly matched. This could be the start of a long session.

Bletchley

If you’re in a pledging mood, we’d also encourage you to take a look at this book by Dr Sue Black, a Friend of Pi and an exceptional educator and advocate for women in tech. It’s on a subject very dear to us – saving Bletchley Park – and we’re really pleased to see it’s reached its funding goals too (like Picade, it got to its goal blisteringly fast). You can still donate, and importantly, a proportion of profits go to Bletchley Park. Sadly, the donation tier that involved Sue knitting a pair of socks for the donor has now sold out. But there’s still some good stuff left.

Stuff

We won another award! Raspberry Pi won Innovation of the Year at the Stuff Gadget Awards last night, and Alex B went along to the ceremony to pick it up. At the moment, our search for offices involves careful consideration of just how much shelving we need for these things.

Adafruit

Adafruit, who carry a lot of Raspberry Pi-related gear as well as selling Raspberry Pis themselves, have been unfortunate enough to find themselves right in the middle of Hurricane Sandy. I had mail from PT and Lady Ada earlier this week and an update this morning: they’re in the part of NYC which was hit the hardest and are still without power. UPS haven’t been sending anything in or out of Manhattan since the storm, but Adafruit hope to be able to start stocking and shipping again this weekend or early next week. It’s a pretty rough time for them; this happened right in the middle of a move to new premises, and we’ve been thinking about them a lot this week. We hope you can support them by ordering some cool Pi stuff from Adafruit the next time you feel like tinkering with something new.

Limor “Lady Ada” Fried in a Manhattan that looks as if it ought to be populated by zombies.

Guest posts

We’ve had a lot of interest from our call for guest posts. We’d like to see even more! If you’d like to write a post for this blog about your adventures with Raspberry Pi, your ideas about computing education, your project ideas, or your thoughts on low-cost computing, please email blog@raspberrypi.org. I’m away for a couple of weeks from Monday, and this blog will be being curated by the lovely Clive, who will be selecting the very best articles and posting them here.

Thursday grab bag

Heatermeter

Want to control the temperature of your barbecue, smoker, firepit or clambake over a web interface? Here’s the Raspberry Pi-powered HeaterMeter. Bryan Mayland says:

HeaterMeter for RaspberryPi joins an Arduino / AVR ATmega328 microcontroller with OpenWrt running on a RaspberryPi $35 wonder-computer for the purpose of providing oven-like control of a charcoal BBQ grill via web interface. The microcontroller controls a fan which limits airflow to the pit, displays the current status on a character LCD, and passes the data on to the RaspberyPi which streams real-time updates to connected web browsers. The website also works on mobile browsers running Android or iOS, allowing users to unchain themselves from their grills and partake in many life-enriching activities such as

Going to the grocery store to buy more beer

Going to a bar to drink more beer

Not get off the couch, where your beer is

Possibly other non-beer related hobbies

Monogame

Dean Ellis has got Monogame running on his Pi. There are details of exactly what hacks he’s used to get it running so well on the YouTube page that this video comes from.

Monogame is an open source implementation of the Microsoft XNA 4 Framework – and it gives us all kinds of ideas about game development on the Pi. You can read some more about Dean and his Pi here.

Make Yourself at Home

We’ve been seeing a lot of visual artists using the Raspberry Pi in their installations. Whether you’re driving video or if you want to drive something with wheels, the Pi offers artists a much cheaper way of getting to their goals than the old “borrow someone’s old laptop” model. We’ve seen Pis being used in the Tate Gallery’s new Tanks in London; we’ve seen them being used in installations at Milton Keynes shopping centre. Most recently, I’ve heard from Martin Beha, who was working on the electronics side of an installation by Austrian artist Robert F Hammerstiel in Hannover. He used Raspberry Pis to make three lawnmower robots talk to each other. (You can see them from about two minutes into this video.) The result is curiously charming.

Click for more on the installation

Martin says:

The communication is established through Wireless LAN. One of the Robots is configured as a server and delivers a (completely wrong but usable) time via NTP for synchronisation. It also calculates the start time for the audio files and delivers it to the other robots via SSH and “at”. The audio is taken directly from the analog output and is amplified by an 18W amplifier module. The sound quality is quite satisfactory for speech.

The devices are powered by a second battery because the manufacturer of the lawn mower robot has built in a function that monitors if additional current is taken from the main battery and stops the robot. The 5V is generated by DC/DC-Converters for car use. Other included circuits are for example a differential amplifier against an audio ground loop and a deep discharge protector.

I chose the Raspberry Pi for reasons of flexibility, size and because there was a very limited budget. The original plan was to communicate via Bluetooth Class 1 dongles and rfcomm to get a virtual serial connection. Because of several bugs in Bluetooth I could not connect the devices and decided to choose Wi-Fi as an alternative. Depending on different (resistor) jumper settings on the GPIO-Port, the RPIs recognize their conversation role after startup and play the right file. The jumper also defines the role as server or client. So I was able to use the same SD-Card image for all robots.

The actual audio files are mp3s of a dialogue about the sense of a robot’s life, spoken by three TV announcers of Austrian national television (Austrians will surely recognize their voices).

STEM – training the teachers

There was a big Raspberry Pi event in Manchester last week, where a large group (including our very own Pete Lomas, accurately described by gocracker.com as “charismatic“) came together for a CPD/networking event for teachers at the Museum of Science and Industry.

Krisma? Bags of it.

We’re not alone in recognising that there’s a lot to be done before a new Computing syllabus arrives at schools next year in helping teachers out of the old ICT mindset and showing them how easy starting with the Pi can be. We’re really pleased to see how seriously teachers are taking the Raspberry Pi, and, as always, incredibly grateful to STEMNET for their tireless volunteering. This was the first of a series of events, where teachers were learning how to use the Pi with Manchester University’s Pi Face, getting to grips with Scratch and Python, and working on cross-curricular activities with the Raspberry Pi. A number of STEM ambassadors from industry also attended, doing that support and mentorship thing that STEMNET does so well. (I don’t think I’ve been to a single Raspberry Pi event that hasn’t been attended by at least one STEM ambassador.) We’d like to thank every one of them, and all of the teachers who are working so hard on getting to grips with a new piece of kit – we’re very grateful.

Jude’s cardboard case

Pete Wood from DesignSpark put me onto this most excellent little series of tutorial videos from Jude Pullen. Jude is a fan of cardboard. Having watched this, so am I!

Thursday grab bag

I’m in a bit of a rush today; we’re driving down to Wales with Pete in an hour or so to visit the UK factory, which is celebrating a special anniversary tomorrow. So here’s a grab bag of stuff from around the internet that people have been doing with their Pis. You guys have been having a busy week.

Beer Church, a group attached to the hackspace at Pumping Station:One in Chicago, have been brewing the good stuff using Raspberry Pis to control cooling.

This isn’t the only brewing project we’re aware of, but it’s the first we’ve seen pictures from. If you’re using your Raspberry Pi to control fermentation (bread, beer or kimchee), please drop us a line; we’d love to hear from you.

Rob’s hackspace tour of the US continues, and the photos that are emerging make the rest of us wish we were there with him – it looks brilliant. Our friends from Adafruit dropped by last night’s event at NYCResistor. A couple of photos below: you can see more on Adafruit. Rob has added an extra stop today: if you’re in the CS Lounge at Colombia University at 5.30pm, he’ll be there to talk about Pi.

Lady Ada demonstrates Adafruit’s Raspberry Pi PoV wand

Rob, capturing hearts and minds.

Back in the UK, Chris Roffey got in touch to tell us about a series of Coding Club books he’s writing for kids. You can read more about the series by clicking on the image, and there’s a PDF you can preview of the introduction to the Python Basics book, due next month.

One of my favourite projects this week has been this face recognition security camera from Kean Walmsley. He says: “Here’s the elevator pitch: Facecam is a security camera that recognises a resident’s Facebook friends when they come to their front door and allows for tailored communication both to the resident and the visitor.” Read more about it here and here.

Not all projects have to have productive value, though: here’s a Raspberry Pi missile launcher for your office from itr8r.

Raspberry Pi Retaliation. Click to visit site and download source code.

Heather heard someone call their Raspberry Pi a “Raspberry Pee Eye”, and was inspired to make this crocheted raspberry complete with Tom Selleck moustache.

Click to visit Heather’s blog.

And here’s a bit of video: aaa801 has got open webOS, HP’s mobile/tablet operating system, running on the Raspberry Pi. He says:

“This video shows the first public build of open webOS running on the Raspberry Pi. There is no GUI at this point in time for ARM builds, there should be one within a month or so. When the GUI is up and running I will release a ROM to the community.” Thanks aaa801 – we’re looking forward to it!

Right. I’m off to Wales. Wish me luck with the caravans.

Wednesday grab bag

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.

Wednesday grab bag

Eben and I are travelling to Edinburgh today for the Turing Festival, a technology festival that runs at the same time as the Edinburgh Festival. Eben’s giving a talk on education and technology on Saturday; we’re very excited to be at the same event as Steve Wozniak, and hope to be eating many square sausages and black puddings.

So we’ll be rather absent from the internet today, because Edinburgh’s a long way away from Cambridge. Here are some bits and pieces to keep you occupied.

Maplin bundle

Maplin Raspberry Pi bundle. Click image to pre-order.

Maplin, the UK electronics company, are selling a Raspberry Pi bundle, which includes a Raspberry Pi and all the peripherals you might need to get started, from September. You can pre-order now if you want to get ahead of the crowd (orders are first-come, first-served), and they’ll arrive in stores next month. We think the kit will make a great Christmas present, especially if you know any young people who might have trouble rustling up things like wi-fi dongles and USB hubs on their own. For £69 you’ll get a Raspberry Pi, keyboard and mouse, an SD card pre-loaded with Raspbian, a powered USB hub, HDMI and USB cables, a power supply and a wi-fi dongle.

Super Turkey

Seven-year-old Philip, whom you may remember from last week, has spent another week programming in Scratch with his Raspberry Pi and has another game to show us. Dad tells me that Philip’s plush parrot, who features heavily in this video, doesn’t have a name yet: please leave suggestions in the comments!

We can’t get enough of videos and pictures like this at the Foundation. If you’re a proud parent with a Raspberry Pi-wielding kid, or if you’re a kid yourself, and you’ve got video or pictures you’d like us to share on this website, please mail me at liz@raspberrypi.org – we really like to remind ourselves and everybody else that this sort of thing is what the Raspberry Pi project is all about.

And some grown-ups have been working on stuff too…

You may have already read about Dave Hunt’s DSLR hack – it went viral last week. He’s embedded a Raspberry Pi in a camera battery grip, which allows him to wirelessly tether his camera to…well, whatever he’s got on his network. He’s been automatically pushing pictures to other devices, controlling the camera with networked objects (a smartphone, a PC), making it respond to a remote trigger, auto-saving pictures to a USB drive – the Raspberry Pi also works as an intervalometer, and he can use it to program aperture and exposure settings. He’s got big ideas for further development, too, with plans for an additional screen and an internal power supply. Here’s a video of the camera sending images to an iPad, with some example Perl script.

Off-the-shelf DSLR cameras with these kinds of functions typically run into the many thousands of pounds. Dave’s done it all with a $35 Raspberry Pi. More power to your thrifty, imaginative elbow, Dave.

And have you come across Nixie clocks? These cold-cathode tube clocks have been a bit of a web fetish for a little while now, but this one, from Martin Oldfield, is the first one I’ve seen being driven by a Raspberry Pi. I’m going to hack one of these together myself when I get some time; it’s a lovely looking thing, and putting one together at home is simpler than you’d think.

Meanwhile, in Germany, a Cherry G80-3000 keyboard (one of those fabulous mechanical keyboards with a lovely clicky action, like my now-deceased IBM Model M but from this decade) has been hacked to contain a Raspberry Pi, hidden in some space under the function keys – a whole computer in a keyboard. I feel like we’ve seen this kind of thing before.

Please spread this Jam

The Raspberry Jams continue around the world – Milton Keynes, Bristol and Melbourne, Australia (which happened very shortly before I wrote this post on Tuesday night, so I don’t have any bloggy links about it yet), have seen Jams in the last few days. These events are a great way to meet other Raspberry Pi users, get a start if you’re a kid or just a grown-up who wants to learn about programming and electronics, and to show off your projects.

Raspberry Pi and something much bigger. (It's an evaluation board from Heber, who sponsored the Bristol Raspberry Jam.)

Our good friend Alan “Teknoteacher” Donohoe, who does a phenomenal amount of work organising and promoting the Jams, maintains a page describing where and when all the Jams across the world are being held. We’re seeing venues as small as local cafes and venues as large as university auditoriums being used for groups of all sizes, and people aged from 14 to 70 setting the events up. The list is growing all the time; if there isn’t one near you yet, why not set one up yourself?

Monday grab bag

I’ve been sent links to a lot of cool stuff the community’s been working on over the weekend. Here are a few items which really tickled me.

@Jojoreloaded has ported Frontier, the sequel to Elite (David Braben, who developed both games, is one of the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s trustees), to the Raspberry Pi. Frontier, unlike Elite, has a shareware licence; I hope @Jojoreloaded also shares his code so we can all have a go! It’s a DOS game, so the last time I saw a working version (curse you, ubiquitous Windows) was on a friend’s Amiga at school.

Matt at Exaviorn has come up with RasPiWrite, an Mac OS X script which automates the preparation of your Raspberry Pi SD card. I’ve been using it myself, and it does what it says on the tin; I think it’s the first such tool available for the Mac, and it’s extremely straightforward. Just follow the instructions he’s put online.

Quentin Stafford-Fraser has put together a nice little embedded hardware app for changing the bandwidth on a couple of webcams so he can press a button to switch from a monitoring state, where the cams take pictures every second or so, to a state where they’re taking several FPS if he needs a closer look at whatever’s going on. (There are flashing LEDs too!) He uses the framebuffer interface in PyGame – there’s no need for XWindows or any of that jazz.

Click to view a larger version on Twitter.

Richard Leggett has been using Cortex to do genome assembly and variation analysis on E.coli using the Raspberry Pi. ~~We’re pretty sure this is the first genetics application we’ve seen running on the device.~~ 7pm – I stand corrected! Here’s a forum thread I was pointed at in the comments that says otherwise.

If you’ve been doing something cool with your Raspberry Pi (or have spotted someone else online doing something you think should get a wider audience) and you have some video or screenshots you think we’d be interested in sharing with the community, please drop me an email at liz@raspberrypi.org.

Tuesday video grab bag

First up, here’s our friend Pete from RS talking about the Raspberry Pi’s potential in education. When he talks about Christmas, Pete is joking, so please don’t spam the comments in horror.

Meanwhile, in America, the guys at Adafruit have been busy making add-on boards (they’re calling them “plates”) for the Raspberry Pi. We think this is really exciting stuff. (Eben shouts from across the room: “It’s awesome!”, and I agree.)

Dave Honess has compiled Open Transport Tycoon for his Raspberry Pi, following the instructions at http://wiki.openttd.org/Compiling_on_Linux - he shares the results here. I now expect global productivity to take a slight dip while everybody with a Raspberry Pi drops what they’re doing to play Open TTD.

Dave says in an email:

Yeah, the binaries can be downloaded from here:
http://dl.dropbox.com/u/14125489/openttdpi.zip

I think Hexxeh’s version will be better when he’s finished it though – as he’s porting it to work outside of the X desktop and also to the the gpu acceleration. Mine is just a straight svn checkout and build with no code changes. So we should tell everyone to use his one when it’s done!

Thanks Dave! [Update, 1400h PST - Dave would also like me to draw your attention to a blog post he's written on the subject, which contains some more instructions.]