Update, 23/11 – congratulations are in order again for the winners: you’ve made the BBC news website!

Before I get onto the meat of this post, I’d like to say a mahoosivenormous thank you to Clive for babysitting this blog while I was away in Japan, spending my time doing terrible things to live abalone with a sort of ad-hoc bunsen burner. We think he’s done an amazing job – we’d also like to thank UKScone in particular, as well as Abishur and JamesH, for their tender ministrations to the Raspberry Pi Twitter feed. If you don’t follow us on Twitter already you really should; it’s where news gets posted as it happens, and you’ll find loads of links to relevant Pi events and hacks posted daily, alongside necessarily concise discussion.

So then. Summer Coding Contest. We’d hoped to have the results ready weeks ago, but there were so many excellent entries to go through line-by-line that it’s taken us a little while; we were blown away by some of what you did. If you’re a winner, your prize will be on the way soon, just in time for Christmas. And if your winning software is available online somewhere (not all of it was) and we’ve missed it, please drop me a line so I can add a link to this post.

The first prize in both categories is $1000, with runners-up prizes of $200 in each category. Well done to all the winners, and thanks to everybody who entered. We look forward to doing this again!

13 & Under Category

Winner: Aaron Hill – PySnap

Aaron’s entry was a great example of what you can do using Python on a Raspberry Pi. His PySnap program allows you to easily set-up automatic time-lapse photography using a USB webcam. The CLI-based program allows the user to set the periodicity at which photos are taken and was well thought out and designed. You can find a download at Github.

Runner Up: Louis Goessling – SerPint

Louis’s SerPint program allows you to remotely control the GPIO pins on a Raspberry Pi over a network socket or serial port. It can be used to control the GPIO pins from languages that don’t already have a GPIO library available and helps to make the Raspberry Pi an even better platform for remote automation. A download is available at Github.

Runner Up: Conner Foxley – The Matrix

Connor Foxley impressed us with his text-based world simulator which was written in C# – the programming was quite advanced and even featured an IRC interface. You can download The Matrix at Github.

14-18 Category

Winner: Ashley Newson – SmartSim

SmartSim is a digital logic circuit design and simulation package for the Raspberry Pi. It’s actually been featured on this blog before – and I should point out that this had absolutely no bearing on our decision to award Ashley the first prize – we had a lot to say about it, and you can read more about it here. A download is available on the SmartSim website.

Runner Up: Bradley Pollard – Neutron Craft

Bradley entered a StarCraft-inspired wave based survival game. – the game featured original sound and graphics along with a particularly well thought-out in-game tutorial/help system.

Runner Up: Yussuf Khalil – Pancake

Pancake is a lightweight HTTP server written in PHP. It offers a fast PHP API accelerated with code caching. It has its own website; you can find the sources of Yussuf’s projects at Github.

I appear to have mislaid my screengrab. Here’s a picture of some pancakes.

Runner Up: Hannes Westermann – BerryBox

BerryBox is a tool that allows you to sync files/folders across computers using a Raspberry Pi as a server. It comes with a server that runs on the Raspberry Pi and a client that runs on Windows, but as both are written in Lua it should be portable and able to run on Linux and OSX.

Runner Up: Aneesh Dogra – RasPod

RasPod is a simple music server for your Raspberry Pi. It allows you to control the playing of music on your Raspberry Pi with a web browser. Aneesh just mailed me with a link to RasPod on Github – get downloading!

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.

Tag: Summer Coding Contest

Summer Coding Contest results (finally!)

13 & Under Category

Wednesday grab bag