Try Sonic Pi and Minecraft Programming at the Egham Raspberry Jam on the 26th of April

Come and try out Sonic Pi and Minecraft/Python programming.

Sonic Pi is a great way to create music by programming. You can even do Live Coding giving you the ability to compose music as you playing. 
Sonic Pi is such an amazing way to learn about music and programming that the Raspberry Pi Foundation recently ran a competition for Sonic Pi compositions.
The 10 finalists are amazing.  Be a composer by coding.

Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi is a great open world environment where you can program what happens.  Build a Giant Clock or how about a Town Square 

How about mixing the two and creating music using Minecraft. See the Minecraft Piano

Now's your chance to try them out on the 26th April at the Egham Raspberry Jam.

The event is free to attend all you have to do is register on Eventbrite.
http://eghamjam7.eventbrite.com 
Places are limited to 100 and last time we sold out and had a waiting list for the final week and it's looking like it will be the same again this time.

So, if you're interested in trying Sonic Pi and Minecraft then get yourself registered and come along.

To see more of what happens at the Egham Jams checkout the write up and some pictures from the Jam we had on had in January. http://winkleink.blogspot.co.uk/2015/01/egham-raspberry-jam-25th-of-january.html

Surrey and Hampshire Hackspace evening - 21st February

Last night was another great evening at the Hackspace with more new people coming along which is fantastic.

During the week a kind person contacted the hackspace and offered to donate some test equipment and books.  One of the members offered to go to Croyden and collect the stuff.

some of the donated books and kit

What a great donation. It included many electronics books. Some were of great interest from a nostalgia standpoint but will be great for introducing new concepts to members starting out.The book on the 741 op-amp is a great little read and introduces the fundamentals of analogue signals and circuits in a nice easy but practical way.  Amongst all the books were an lcd projector and an oscilloscope. Both in perfect working order and will be a great addition to the resources the hackspace has for meet-ups and building circuits.


With new blood came new and interesting possibilities. There were great discussions about pic programming in assembly, control circuitry for race cars, home heating automation with a Raspberry Pi at the heart of it amongst other tops.

A real interesting topic was a satellite developed in Surrey that is controlled using a mobile phone.
More details on the University of Surrey website
Below is video showing what is in the satellite, what it does and how it's all put together.

So, the hackspace is going from strength to strength with more people taking part.

Here's looking forward to the next meet-up and some more interesting discussions and demos.

A selection of pictures from the evening. (sorry for the poor quality - mobile phone pics)

Surrey & Hampshire Hackspace evening 7th February 2013

Last night was the second Surrey & Hampshire Hackspace session I have attended at GamesGalaxy in Farnborugh.  Last time I had planned to solder up my Raspberry Pi interface for a remote control car but got sucked into the excellent Eagle tutorial by Bob, so this week I was determined to get it done.

Ohms Law

Bob and Doug

While I was quietly getting on with stuff Bob for his second tutorial gave an introduction to Ohms Law.

Alan busy soldering

What he's soldering

Alan was soldering up an SMD board. A lot more complex and precise than my efforts. Not sure the circuits purpose but as you can see from the pictures Alan had 2 soldering irons at his disposal.

circuit on proto-board. too many wires

For the remote control project I needed to move the components from a proto-board that due to the number of wires hanging off it causing too much interference and stopping the remote from working reliably.  I wanted to build it on a stripboard to get rid of all the wires and also as a small, simple introduction to using stripboard as this was my first time using stripboard.

When I arrived I realised I had left my computer at home and in it’s case were my notes. Nothing too detailed but not a great start.  I also left my soldering iron at home so a quick trip to Maplin around the corner sorted that out.

figuring out the circuit

So began the task of taking a simple circuit with 4 components and figuring out how to do it on stripboard. It’s amazing how something that makes perfect sense on a proto-board suddenly appears more complex than it needed to be.

After a bit of head scratch I figured out the layout and it only used 5 strips.  one for 0V, one for 3V (from remote) and 3 for the transistor and the 3 resistors.  Hopefully a nice neat circuit. 

I then turned the board over to start placing components and thankfully Doug pointed out that I needed to mirror the circuit compared to put the components in on the strip side.  I expect this saved me a lot of troubleshooting later on.

first one soldered

top side components

I soldered in the first circuit after figuring out the mirrored circuit and where I needed to cut the tracks to make it work.
(sorry for the poor picture quality)

Really happy about getting it done and was then about to solder in the second circuit when Robin popped over so I explained the layout and again noted a mistake. I was missing a location where I could take the output to the remote. If you look at the hand drawn circuit above there is no output at the transistor.  Whoops, another mistake averted.  I had to move the transistor forward one hole to create the point where the remote wire would attach.  If you look at the 1^st solder side picture above and the final one below with the 4 circuits in place you will see the one on the left has moved to the edge with no spare holes left. Lucky I had the space to move it.

Also, on the first one I thought I’d be clever and use the legs of the resistors to do the bridging by just bending over the pins and soldering them. It worked perfectly, but looked a bit of a mess so I decided for the other three I would use jumper wires on the top of the board. That is why there are no jumper wires on the first circuit but the other three all have small jumper wires.

All 4 solder in - see the one on the left has moved...

component side up. 3 on the right have  jumper wires

Here is the final layout for 1 of the circuits as a schematic diagram and also on the strip board. I put the jumper links on the strip side for illustration purposed but you can see for 3 of the 4 circuits above the jumpers are on the top.

white under resistors are cuts in the strip

So, that was it all wired up.  I then added the wires to connect to the remote control and the wires to connect to the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi through the Adafruit PiCobbler.

After hooking it all up and attaching a screen and keyboard I loaded GPIOScratch, Opened my test code and it worked.  Sending commands from Scratch on the Raspberry Pi made the car drive.

All the problems I had with interference due to the tangle of wires have been fixed and I now have a reliable circuit that I can possibly bring into the CodeClub I run to show the kids that Scratch is not just for making a cat run around the screen.

In my joy it slipped my mind to photograph the finished circuit all wired up to the remote and the Raspberry Pi. So, for the next post I will do some more pictures, a video and show the Scratch Code.

It was an excellent evening at the Surrey & Hampshire Hackspace and next get together is the 21^st of February. If this type of thing interest you then visit the website and join the mailing list. Or even better come along on the night. For more going on you can follow on Google+.

Roll on the 21st and some more computing and electronics fun.

Egham Raspberry Jam report for Sunday 20th January

Having caught Raspberry Pi fever and attending the excellent Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam on a couple of occasions I approached my employer about running a Raspberry Jam at our offices in Egham. After a bit of explaining what a Raspberry Pi is and what a Raspberry Jam is they gave the green light and we put the 20^th of January in the calendar as the date for the Raspberry Jam.

Eventbrite page was set up to allow registration to keep the numbers to a reasonable level and started to promote the event on the Raspberry Pi forum and on Twitter through my @Winkleink account. Through retweets from @Raspberry_Pi and @Teknoteacher we got 50 registrations with over a week to go.

I put out the call for presenters and two people stepped forward

Dave Ackerman the Pi in the Sky man offered to present on sending balloons into the stratosphere and using a Raspberry Pi transmitting live images from the flight.

Stephen Cornes offered to present on using a hard drive as your primary drive and also connecting to the Raspberry Pi over serial using the GPIO serial connection.

The 20th January rolled around and after snowing for 3 days I expected the day to be a flop.
Giving myself loads of time I got there for 12:30 with a 2:00 start and began getting things organised.

Then to my joy Dave arrived about 1:00 with 3 boxes of bits and a presentation so I knew it wasn't only going to be me.

We both got ourselves set. Dave in the boardroom with the projector and the theatre seating and me the main area where the show and tell activity was going to go on.

I’d spent the week getting a small cheap remote control car to be controlled through Scratch (see previous post) but due to my mad/bad wiring when I set it up interference between the wires meant the car always wanted to go left. I could show the wheels spinning forward and backwards but the grand plan of having people try to figure out how to program Scratch to get the car to navigate an obstacle course did not materialise.

Alongside my nearly working demo Dave set up his ballooning bits.

Paschal Egan showed using the GPIO to produce 433MHz home automation control signals to switch on and off domestic appliances.

Ian Law brought along his set up to see if someone could help with debugging the Python snake game he was working through from the Raspberry Pi Users Guide.

Robin Fordham set up his circuit that expanded the GPIO pins using I2C controls.

At the far end Leo White brought along his Raspberry Pied BigTraks with robotic arm and webcam.

In the end over 30 people made it out in the snow to attend. An amazing turnout considering the weather. Ranging in age from 15 to a much older.

Once most people had arrived Dave presented Pi in the Sky. I was so wrapped up I failed to keep him to time so we got a lot of details on what was involved.

Then Stephen presented on using a hard drive as your main file system and also connecting over GPIO using serial. His impetus for both was issues with SD cards giving errors and not wanting to have to attach the Raspberry Pi to a screen. If you connect over serial then you even get to see the boot sequence. This is not the case if you SSH in over the network as networking has to be active for the SSH connection to happen.

Stephen kept to time and by the rush of people to the front after he finished his presentation was of interest to a number of people attending.

After the presentations we went back to the show and tell area. Where we mingled and chatted. Those of us with demos answered questions and tried our best to explain what we did, how we did it, why we did and what use it was.

I must admit seeing the BigTraks with the robotic arm controlled by the PS3 controller over Bluetooth and live streaming to a browser was fantastic. It really showed the power of the Raspberry Pi and the number of things it can do at the same time.

There was a crowd around Ian’s Raspberry Pi trying to figure out what was wrong with his code. In the end Robin Fordham came to his rescue and worked out there was a rogue file in the directory with the program causing problems. Once this was deleted then everything worked as it should after a simple typo error was fixed.

From the feedback people have provided it sounds like the event was enjoyable and achieved its goal in inspiring people to do more. One person has invested in a Raspberry Pi, another purchased a Pi Cobbler and others found answers to their questions that would allow them to continue with their projects.

From my point of view as an organiser of a Raspberry Jam I must admit it was quite painless. Just set things up. Let people know it’s on. Manage registration on Eventbrite and then play host on the day.

A few things I would tweak are

Maybe have each person do a 10-20 second intro (name, own a Pi, what done so far, what do you wish to do) so people can connect and also any gaps in the official(ish) agenda can be filled by meeting like minded people.

Keeping presentation to 30 minutes. Extra detail for those interested can be do one on one in the show and tell area.

Have people demoing put a sign or sheet out showing what they are demoing so it’s easier to figure out which projects are of most interest.

Encourage others to take pictures and videos as I was either presenting or running around so took very few photographs and no video.

Here’s looking forward to the next Egham Raspberry Jam.