Jon Williamson | Raspberry Pi

Super-duper special Pimoroni competition

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:

The awesome Sortimo compartment case that contains all this fine loot!
Raspberry Pi Model B (512MB from the Sony plant)
Raspberry Pi Model A with Pibow Model A
Pibow VESA mount
25W Antex soldering iron (like the one Jon has been using since he was 12)
Brass soldering sponge essential tip cleaner
Desoldering wick
Multi-colour Sugru pack (this stuff is amazing)
Breadboard jumper leads
Six coloured mini breadboards
Luminous cable ties
Adafruit ADC breakout board
Adafruit T-Cobbler (essential GPIO hacking fodder)
Adafruit Pi-Plate
Digital calipers (useful more often than you’d think)
A selection of components
Crocodile clip leads
Sparkfun cerberus USB cable
Sparkfun hydra USB cable
HDMI noodle
Pink and blue USB noodles

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.

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.

Picade – the UK’s first Kickstarter project!

I am driven to blog from Starbucks today, thanks to lousy public transport and awkwardly timed meetings. I am amazingly caffeinated.

A Picade prototype

So. Kickstarter finally launched its UK offering today, and the very first project to get approved (proof of this rather awesome feat is available here at the Kickstarter blog) has a Raspberry Pi at its heart (we notice that those involved with Raspberry Pi seem to be extremely skilled at hitting F5, hence the excellent positioning of this project at the head of the Kickstarter queue). If you’ve been following the news on this site, you may have noticed that it’s a project that’s being run by some familiar people very close to the Foundation’s hearts.

Prototype under development. You may recognise the beardy fella with the hat.

Paul Beech and Jon Williamson run Pimoroni, a company they set up to make the very popular Pibow case. It’s my favourite of the cases out there: I use one myself. It’s now open source and available on Thingiverse, and was acclaimed “the best-looking Raspberry Pi case ever” by Gizmodo. Paul is also the designer of the Raspberry Pi logo. We published a post here about what they’ve been up to over the last few months, in a period where they’ve become employers and business owners on the back of the Pibow, a few weeks ago. They’re both old-school gamers, and they have a plan for a new product, for which they need Kickstarter funding.

Enter the Picade.

Picade! (Prototype model)

The Picade is intended to be a very high-quality, hackable, desktop arcade machine. It’ll come in kit form, with a top-notch screen; a good-looking, solid cabinet; a proper arcade joystick; and handsome microswitch controls: all you need to provide is the Raspberry Pi. We love the idea, and we know that Paul and Jon’s attention to detail, finish and quality is exceptional. The Picade’s going to be quite a special piece of kit when it’s done.

At the moment Picade is in prototyping. I’ll leave the nitty gritty to Paul and Jon, who have loads more information about what the project’s all about on their Kickstarter page, and just leave you with their Kickstarter video for now (watch until the end: there are outtakes). What you see in these pictures and video are rough mockups of what the eventual product will look like, once funding has come in.

It’s a brilliant idea, and we are beyond pleased that it’s the very first UK Kickstarter project out there. I’ll be throwing a few quid their way, and I hope you’ll consider it too!

If you’re setting up your own Kickstarter using a Raspberry Pi, please mail us to let us know about it. We’d love to hear what you’re doing.