Tag: office

We’ve got offices!

You probably didn’t realise this, but up until now, we haven’t had an office to work from. We’ve been completely virtual: I work from the study at home, we’ve got some space at the University Computer Laboratory in Cambridge which we use for meetings with visitors, there’s a small electronics lab in our house, Jack deals with paperwork from an office in his house, we borrow space at St John’s College for board meetings…it’s not a very efficient way to run a million-unit computer company.

Now we’ve started taking on our first employees, it’s really not a tenable way to do things any more, so Rob Bishop (evangelist and developer), Gordon Hollingworth (GSH on the forums) and James Adams (software and hardware chaps respectively) have been moving into our new office in the centre of Cambridge this week. Clive Beale, Eben and I will be joining them when Clive’s teaching contract is up at the end of the month, and when Eben and I get back from a series of meetings in the US.

We finally have something to keep Rob in. (The chap on the right is from the removals company, and not a Pi person.)

Rob and James Adams survey the mess. Rather them than me; there’s nothing worse in the world than the sound of squeaky polystyrene. Gordon’s behind the camera.

We’ll be decorating soon, but it’s already a fully functional office (we’ve got an entry phone and everything), and best of all, it’s only a few hundred yards from the pub. It’s leafy, it’s central and I’m really looking forward to moving in next week!

Single-button scan-to-email

Networked scanners are another one of those things that are simply incomprehensibly pricey; a quick search just turned up tens of devices which are selling for more than £900. And you don’t buy ease of use with that money: if you’re working in an office with people who aren’t very comfortable around computers, these machines can be intimidating and difficult to get to grips with.

So Eduardo Luis has come up with a cheap, and incredibly simple (single-button-simple) alternative to the brain-crampingly expensive off-the-shelf networked scanner, and has built a device using a Pi, a couple of LEDs, a resistor, a push button and an old scanner. Pop a document in the tray, push the button, and your document is scanned and sent to email automatically, with no further interaction from you. Here’s some explanatory video: Eduardo goes into more detail on his website.

We love watching you guys come up with ingenious ways of replacing expensive specialist equipment (see baby monitors, time lapse camera rigs, virtual analogue synthesisers – and, of course, the ubiquitous media centres) with the Raspberry Pi. Give us a shout via the Contacts page if you’ve got something similar you think we’d like to feature on this blog.