4th Egham Raspberry Jam – Sunday 3rd November 2013

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If you’ve arrived here after seeing/speaking to me at the weekend…. hello!

Pumpkins

I’m part way through writing up my pumpkin + Scratch game but I thought I’d put the basics in a post for the keen ones amongst you.  Remember, take care when wiring anything to your Pi or the magic smoke may escape!

  • Touch sensor was from made by AdaFruit and from Pimoroni (other retailers are available)
  • Scratch GPIO interface can be found on Cymplecy‘s website
  • The main Scratch loop looks like this
  • The Scratch project can be downloaded here

Jamming

This is the second Jam I have attended (I made it through the snow for the inaugural one back in January).  It was great to see how some projects had evolved (i.e. Leo’s BigTrak) and the variety of projects on show; from a simple motor control project to a fully mocked up home automation system.  Neil Ford of Code Club fame rocked up with a few Pis ready for hands on hacking as well.

This time as someone with something to demonstrate I had a very different perspective on the afternoon.  It was great to interact with the young people and I hope I didn’t bamboozle them too much with what was going on in my Scratch game, but “touch a pumpkin, stuff happens” is a bit too simple!  It would be great to get more youngsters to come along but that’s probably still some way off yet.

Big thank you to Albert for organising it (and Gartner for the use of their offices).  Albert has a much better write up on his blog.

What next?

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Almost a couple of weeks on from the launch of this site c/o Raspberry Pi and it’s all quietened down now. So where next? I have a few projects I’d like to play with when I can find the time/impetus to get on to them.

  • D.I.Y. LED matrix – Buy a bucket load of LEDs, solder them to a breadboard and make messages/patterns.  Equally I could make a simple game of snake, pong or similar.  Yes yes I know there are ready made boards…. but where’s the fun in that
  • LED Cube – I find these fascinating and would love to build one
  • LEGO Bot – Who doesn’t love LEGO?  I have LEGO, motors and a Pi…. just need to combine them
  • LEGO Bot + Web – Web technology has never been my forte, but putting together a web page that could control the bot would be great.  Possibly harness the Google Coder project for it

I doubt I’ll get round to much more before the Egham Raspberry Jam comes around on 3rd November.  I’ve said I will bring along my Time Circuit and Flux Capacitor project so I can’t go too mad just yet.

What a difference a day makes

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Knowing that Liz was going to put this on the raspberrypi.org blog I thought I’d add Google Analytics to see how well received my write up was.  Well, as you can see from the following graph; a couple of people liked it

Approx 4pm 18th Sept to 6pm 19th Sept

Approx 4pm 18th Sept to 6pm 19th Sept – click for more detail

So, Hello to the 1700+ people that have visited this site in the last 24 hours!  That stat just blows my socks off.  At it’s peak there were 132 hits inside and hour, on the real time stats I saw 31 hits in a minute go past.  Just wow!

Not only that but you lovely people come from all over the globe

Top ten countries visiting this site

Top ten countries visiting this site

If it's blue it's a hit (don't sink my battleship....)

If it’s blue it’s a hit (don’t sink my battleship….)

In all, 76 countries have seen the Raspberry Pi blog post/tweet and then visited this site; mind blown. This just goes to show the reach and reputation that the Foundation has built up over the past couple of years, hats off to them.

I’m humbled.