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.
The name Mike Cook echoes around the corridors of Pi Towers every now and then when we make awed conversation about our hardware heroes. Mike used to write a column called Body Building for Micro User magazine back in the days of the BBC Micro, in which he’d create hardware projects that made kids like me swoon at the sheer potential of those GPIO pins at the back of the Beeb’s casing. (The Beeb’s exposed GPIO was a big influence in the design of the Raspberry Pi.) Mike was an early adopter of the Pi, and you’ll have seen several posts here featuring his otherworldly Pi hardware hacks. (The solonoid glockenspiel and the first persistence of vision project we ever saw for the Pi were both Mike’s – see this tag for all the posts on this blog featuring Mikestuff.)
I thought Mike had been quiet for a bit. We hadn’t heard much from him in the last few months: turns out that this was because he was busy with the whizz-bang hardware section of Raspberry Pi for Dummies, the rest of which was written by Sean McManus. If you are even slightly interested in learning about hardware (and having fun with it), you should run to your nearest bookshop right now. Here are some videos to give you a taster of the sort of hardware projects you’ll be able to make with the book:
This second video is only the start of the potentiometer fun – you’ll end up making something that looks an awful lot like an Etch-a-Sketch.
Sean McManus, by the way, who wrote all the non-hardware bits of the book, is also someone I’ve chatted with by email in the past about Pi – and he’s someone to whom I owe a vote of thanks for another excellent book he wrote, this time in the Older & Wiser series. His iPad for the Older & Wiser has saved me many, many hours of shouting “No! Touch the blue thing that looks like an A!” down the phone at my Dad, clearing time to have lovely fatherly/daughterly conversation instead, for which we are all grateful. Sean’s own page on Raspberry Pi for Dummies is well worth a look; he’s posting additional guides and content there on an ongoing basis, and is available there to answer your questions.
So if you’re looking for an addition to your Raspberry Pi library, Raspberry Pi for Dummies comes highly recommended. Thanks to Sean, Mike and all at Wiley for your work on the Pi – we really appreciate it!
Mike Cook, a regular Raspberry Pi contributor and electronics Superman, videoed himself building a Gertboard. Mike claims that it’s time-lapse (or GertLapse to use Mike’s phrase, although this sounds like something unspeakable has happened to poor old Gert). But we all know that it’s actually real time and that Mike used a gimmicked clock just to make us mortals feel better about our soldering skills.
I’ll let Mike introduce it: I’ve got to finish waxing the floors of Raspberry Pi Towers. And the hallway goes on and on–if I didn’t know better I’d suspect that it was infinite.
—
“While the future of the Gert Board as a kit might be in doubt at the moment I thought I would have a go at videoing my attempt to construct a Gert Board. When it arrived I deliberately did not open it until the filming began. First I have to modify an old video camera so that it would take images automatically at set intervals, I found that the fastest I could do this was 3.25 seconds per frame. Then I tipped out the contents of my package and began assembling it. I was surprised that the packets of surface mount components contained only the Farnell part number and not the component’s value.
Unfortunately on the first part of the video the camera malfunctioned so you miss the surface mount and LED soldering. However, the rest of the construction was not too error prone and the camera worked. There is a clock showing the time in one corner and I did take some breaks during construction. The music was something by son composed years ago when he was at school and adds to the urgency of getting it built. I wish I could solder as fast as that in real life.”
Mike Cook, electronics Superman, swapped some emails with us after we last posted about one of his projects. Eben and I both wanted to talk to him about a feature from Mike’s Body Building column in Micro User from 1989, where Mike made a magic wand that wrote letters in the air.
BBC Micro User, July 1989
I read the magazine and lusted after the thing; but at my girl’s boarding school in rural Bedfordshire, where we didn’t have an electronics lab (although we did have a huge domestic science suite), mercury switches and leds were about as easy to get your hands on as unicorn poo – you could buy a kit from the magazine, but I’d spent all my money on bubble gum and cello rosin. Eben had a very lucid memory of that particular column too, and hadn’t been able to get the parts either. We both mentioned that it was our favourite design from the Body Building column while thanking him for the projects he’s done with a Raspberry Pi so far. (Mike, ever self-effacing, says that similar projects have been done a million times since then, but he does believe that this was the first time such a thing ever appeared in print.)
So Mike went quiet for a couple of weeks, and then came back with this: a magic wand controlled by his Raspberry Pi. I have been scampering around the study like a schoolgirl since I got his email. He has, as always, written exhaustive instructions if you want to make one yourself, complete with software you can edit on your Raspberry Pi, tips on font design, and notes about the legality of mercury switches (which, as it turns out, are still available and can be used legally as long as you’re not going to sell your magic wand).
Of course, these days, we’re probably supposed to call this a persistance of vision project. But as far as I’m concerned, it’s still a magic wand. Thanks so much, Mike; this is quite a lot like having a rock star you worshipped as a kid re-write a song for you. And I’m sorry about the beating your shoulder took during testing.
A housekeeping note: I’m away for a couple of days travelling to and setting up for DEF CON 20 in Las Vegas, which we’ll be attending as vendors. Bugger. Unforeseen circumstances and all that; we are no longer attending, because a problem with liability for Nevada sales tax came up at the last minute. Really sorry if you were hoping to see us.
If you’re of a similar vintage to me, you might remember Micro User, a magazine from the 1980s which was all about the BBC Micro: reviews, programming tips, listings, Q&A pages and all that good stuff. (I’ve been trying to find a complete set of the magazines for years; please leave a comment if you have one to sell! There are scanned PDFs available online if you fancy a bit of computing nostalgia.)
Micro User. And a boastful statistic: lifetime sales of the BBC Master (admittedly, not the core of the BBC's lineup and, at the time, an expensive option) from 1986-1994 were around 200,000. The Raspberry Pi has been on sale for just over 4 months, and we've already had orders for over 500,000 units.
Mike Cook, who you may remember from the glockenspiel project I posted a couple of weeks ago, had a page in the magazine which I used to read longingly every month. (Shamefully, when posting about the robot glockenspiel, I failed miserably to put two and two together; Mike was a bit of a childhood hero of mine, but it simply didn’t occur to me that this Mike Cook, thirty years on, might be the same guy who wrote for the magazine. Turns out he is. Colour me ashamed.)
Body Building with Mike Cook was a series of little hardware projects which used the BBC Micro’s GPIO ports. There was a new one to make every month; you could buy the sets in kit form through the magazine, or get your own parts from your local electronics shop. I couldn’t afford them on 20p a week’s pocket money, but it was lovely to imagine soldering up my own infra-red remote, hacking together a home-made Geiger counter, and making light wands.
A few hundred miles away in darkest Yorkshire, Eben was busy reading the same articles. He’s spent much of the period since the glockenspiel post shaking his head, beaming, and saying: “Mike Cook. Can’t believe it. Mike Cook.”
Click to visit Mike's site for instructions
To my and Eben’s enormous joy, Mike’s taken the Raspberry Pi and has run with it; we’re hoping to see more projects from him soon. Right now, he’s got instructions on his website which will show you how to make your own breakout board (a simple version and a couple of versions which protect the Pi’s GPIO lines) to give you easy access to the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins and allow you to get to work on hardware projects. Although soldering is easy, Mike’s aware that it can be intimidating for beginners, so this project uses no solder, just those pokey through-hole connectors. Here’s some video of Mike putting the board together. Let us know how you get on if you make one at home!
Mike Cook has rigged up a solenoid-controlled glockenspiel to play some of Rogers and Hammerstein’s finest. Just brilliant.
He’s hand-built a simple buffer board to intermediate between the Raspberry Pi and his robot glockenspiel, which you can read all about on his blog; there are instructions for making a similar board at home, which sounds like a great weekend project. Give me a shout if you make one yourselves!
Pi Plays Poppins from Mike Cook on Vimeo.