Tag: LEGO

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.

Raspberry Pi in schools

This term, we’ve started to see the beginnings of school applications of Raspberry Pis. We’ve been taking a lot of orders from teachers in the UK, and we’re very pleased to see teachers elsewhere catching on to the project too; I’m talking to a number of charitable bodies and businesses around the world who are providing units to local schools, and we’ve met some singularly inspiring teachers both at home and on the recent tours we’ve been doing.

Pupils at Charlotte Latin School meet a Raspberry Pi for the first time

Tom Dubick, who teaches engineering at Charlotte Latin School in North Carolina, is one of those teachers. He thinks (we do too) that he became the first teacher in the United States to teach a regular class using the Raspberry Pi, when he started Pi lessons on October 1 with a group of middle-school girls. They’re working on systems using sensors, motors, lights and microprocessors from robotics to wearables, alongside programming in Scratch and Python. And they’re loving it, which we are pleased (and cheerfully unsurprised) to hear.

Tom says: “Our students are doing math and science when they learn how a computer works or a microcontroller can be programmed. They are doing engineering when they develop an unique use of the Raspberry Pi to solve a problem.  It will be a great opportunity for our students to experience the creativity and beauty found in engineering and design. It’s like a sandbox and you get to play and try new ideas. I am excited to see what you will do with the Raspberry Pi that hasn’t even been thought of yet.”

I met Tom at the Charlotte Hackerspace, where I wish we’d had more time to talk. He’s got some solid and tested pedagogical ideas, which he’s very happy to share with teachers around the world, and which we found exciting and thought-provoking; if you’re a teacher looking for tips on teaching with the Raspberry Pi and you’d like to talk to him, please email me and I’ll pass on your address.

Meanwhile, back in the UK, St Saviour’s School in Paddington, London, has been holding a weekend session for 240 kids between five and eleven, where Story Corner was temporarily transformed into Coding Corner with the addition of 30 Raspberry Pis, as one of 20 weekend projects.

The kids were working with Scratch, and later with a Lego WeDo crocodile, who they programmed to snap at any encroaching little fingers. (Farnell very kindly donated half of those Raspberry Pis to the school at the end of the weekend’s fun, and they’re now earmarked for teaching.) The workshop was organised by the most excellent Little House of Fairy Tales, who I hope we’ll be hearing more from.

Formal lessons aren’t the only way to go. We’re also seeing a lot of interested parents and teachers who have been setting up after-school clubs. Dave Culp has been working with an after-school group of programming kids and the Raspberry Pi over the summer at his daughters’ elementary school (Mark Twain Elementary in Colorado). He’s been pleased and surprised to find that 2:1 of the kids who signed up were girls. Dave says:

I was introduced to the TRS-80 and the wonders of programming at the same age as my oldest is now – seven.  So, in some sort of nostalgic way, I was seeking something for her that possessed the same breadth and mystical charm that programming did for me in my childhood.

Setup during the after-school club’s first session

Whether it was programming games, making computer music or simply scrolling my name across the screen in an endless loop, each completed (or incomplete, for that matter) project allowed me to play out a different character in an ever-evolving story of the mind.

A couple of years ago, during a period of time when the whole concept of creating a computer club was nothing more than a fleeting thought in my head, I chanced upon a book called, Hello World! Computer Programming for Kids and Other Beginners by Warren and Carter Sande.  I bought a copy and read it, then had my daughter – who was 6 at the time – work through the first couple of chapters just reading the grey boxes and looking at the pictures.  As it turned out, she seemed somewhat interested and was able to convey to me the general principles set forth in each of those chapters.  I thought to myself, if we should ever really get this thing off the ground, this would be the book that I would suggest using.  Consequently, because of its usage in the book, Python became the primary language of consideration.  Additional research to this point has not revealed a ton of other well-written computer programming books for children, although there are a few out there.

Rapt attention

Fast forward a bit to this summer, leading into this school year.  The decision to implement the computer club had already been made and I was working with administrators to download and install the requisite Python-related programs on the school’s computers; develop a full plan for the club; gain the appropriate school network credentials; and work a couple of other unrelated freelance development projects.

During one of these projects I was reading a blog related to a Linux product with which we were working.  Somehow I stumbled upon the mention of the Raspberry Pi, totally unaware at this point that such a product existed; or, for that matter, was even in development.  Needless to say, the make-up and functionality of this device seemed to be a perfect fit for use in our club.

As I mentioned, today was the first meeting of the club and six wide-eyed, exuberant youngsters and one wide-eyed, deer-in-the-headlights instructor all arrived ready to get the ball rolling.  Let’s just say that this was one of the fastest 1 hour, 20 minutes encounters of my life.  My goals for the day were to get everyone acquainted with the Raspberry Pi; have each student get one-on-one attention while hooking it up for the first time; and, get that oh-so-wondrous “Hello World” program written and executed properly.  We somehow managed to pull it all off without incident and the children left with that same bright-eyed, inquisitive look that I had when I wrote:

10 print “My name is Dave”
20 goto 10

All 30-plus years ago!  As they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same!

 

It’s early days, but we’re excited to see the beginnings of school use. Are you teaching with Raspberry Pi already? We’d love to hear from you.

Biz’s LEGO case: buy parts!

The Daily Brick have released their first custom LEGO kit: it’s all the bricks you need to make Biz’s Raspberry Pi case (£9.95). You might remember Biz; she’s an 12-year-old Scout, a roboticist and a fan of Raspberry Pi. Her case was really popular here – I know a lot of you have made one already from LEGO you had at home – and was written about online in places like MakeZine and The Register. (We’re impressed; we had to work for six years before The Register paid any attention to us.)

Click to visit The Daily Brick.

I’ve spoken to Biz’s Dad, who says that Biz has chosen to be remunerated by The Daily Brick in LEGO. So if you want to see Biz’s collection grow, and don’t have the pieces you need to make the case at home already, please head over and order. Well done Biz, and thanks, Daily Brick guys!