Friday, October 9, 2015

9th Egham Jam – Show and Tell Competition – Prizes donated by 4tronixs


I think we might be coming to the end of the Prize announcements.
So, last but not least are the Prizes donated by 4tronixs.

Robot lovers Prizes from 4tronixs

These prizes are especially situated to the robots lovers.

Each Prize includes:

The PlayHat includes a 3x3 full colour neopixel LED matrix, 4 big buttons and a buzzer.
Great for programming with the Raspberry Pi. This is just begging out for a game of Simon to be created.

PiRoCon and iBoost64 This board is great. Te PiRoCon  plugs right on top of the Raspberry P and gives you all the additional electronics needs to drive motors.
Motors are fun things. When they start they draw a lot of  power (think of train pulling out of the station. It needs far more power to get going then it does to keep itself moving.  Same thing for motors).  This mean if you want to drive motors you need extra circuitry to do it safely without damaging your Raspberry Pi.  The PiRoCon is one of the best solutions for this for the Raspberry Pi.

In addition to motors drawing a lot of power when they start and stop they can also affect the voltage and current of electronics drawing from the same power supply.  This can cause difficulties in getting good readings or accurate control.  This is where the iBoost64 comes in.  It cleans up the signals and makes them good without affecting the rest of the circuit.  Ideal for robots where there can be a lot of stopping and starting of motors as well as reading of external sensors for line following or object avoidance.

With the combination of the PiRoCon and iBoost64 you have the electronics to get that robot built.
If working in Scratch the current ScratchGPIO library from Simon Walters supports the PiRoCon.

If you have robots you will need power.  The final 2 boards are a 1 way and 4 way charger board for Li-Po batteries.  These are great batteries for robotic as they store lots of energy and give out a consistent voltage.  Cheap batteries have a power curve that means they very quickly drop from the maximum voltage which can cause lots of problems with motors.  Li-Po batteries are the ones used in high quality remote control cars.
Unfortunately you can't just plug a Li-Po battery into your normal battery charger due to the way they work so custom chargers are usually provided or need to be purchased with the battery.  These great little boards mean you can use a standard 5V microUSB power supply to charge the batteries.  This is the same type of power supply used for the Raspberry Pi, meaning if you are building a Raspberry Pi based robot you will already have the correct power supply.
There are 2 different boards included.  A 1 way, so it can charge 1 battery and a 4 way which can change 4 batteries at the same time.  Giving you more than enough power for your laser guided, GPS tracking, missile shooting, web cam streaming, grabber, digger, flame thrower robot. Or maybe just a line following robot.

From the picture you can see they also provided some pens.

Thank you 4tronixs for the prizes.







Thursday, October 8, 2015

9th Egham Jam – Show and Tell Competition – Prizes donated by RasP.IO

With the Egham Jam on this Sunday (http://eghamjam9.eventbrite.com) it's lovely to be see the prizes are still coming in.

This time from RasP,IO who product a number of really useful and practical accessories for the Raspberry Pi.

RasP.IO Breakout / 40 pin portsplus2/26 pin ports

The Ports boards are 26 and 40 pin versions so perfect fit for both types of Raspberry Pi.

The Breakout gives you easier access to the GPIO pins and allows you to use male/male jumper wires just like Arduino, so ideal if you're like me and have a load of these already and very few male/female jumper wires. It also gives the same labeling as per the original RasP.IO ports boards. The current model available is the 26 pin version which will fit on the 40 pin B+/2.


In addition RasP.IO ran a Kickstarter for their gpioruler for the B+/2 40 pin Raspberry Pi. I supported the 4 ruler pledge and will be providing one for each prize pack.

GPIO Ruler

+Alex Eames the man behind RasP.IO has also done some fantastic videos on the Raspberry Pi that you see at http://raspi.tv

Here's looking forward to a fantastic event.
See previous posts for other prizes for Sunday.