CamJam 12th September 2015

On Saturday 12^th September I travelled up to Cambridge to attend another excellent CamJam.  I had a good look around the market place as well as some of the show and tell items.

Brian Corteil had his Digital Zoetrope which used 12 oled displays, this was very cool.  He also had a couple of prototype bits from the Digital Zoetrope project on display.

Jarle Teigland had a couple of projects on display, including a Sense HAT, a TiddlyBot robotic kit and a CodeBug which is a cute, programmable and wearable device designed to introduce simple programming and electronic concepts to anyone.

Barry Byford had some interesting Bluetooth projects on display. The tracking Bluetooth beacons showed the signal strength of two Bluetooth beacons depending on how far away they were from the receiving device. 

David Saul had PiMuxClock and Pi-LCD projects on display. The PiMuxClock is basic Raspberry Pi add-on allowing you create a simple digital clock and temperature display.  I brought a PiMuxClock bare PCB from David. The Pi-LCD is simple LCD interface for your Raspberry Pi which has been launched today as Kickstarter project. 

Peter Onion had his awesome LED matrix display on show, it used 4 32 x 32 RGB LED panels connected together running off a Pi.  It was running Tetris.

Phil Willis was showing of the TractorBot which he and Keith entered in the recent CamJam PiWars competition. 

Robin Newman had a Sonic Pi demo on display using an IQaudIO board and a Raspberry Pi DSI touch screen running Sonic Pi controlling Minecraft.

gPiO had their gPiO control box and had some example primary school projects on display.

Workshops

I had agreed to do some Jam Making, not making Jam but it’s the term used for people who volunteer at CamJam. I helped out with the hacking sessions which were taking in place in the library.  Some Pi’s were setup to allow people to try stuff out and have a go.

Talks

I only attended one talk given by Cat Lamin. Cat talked about running Coding Evenings for teachers and non-teaching staff.

CamJam June 2015

On Saturday 6^th June I travelled up to Cambridge to attend another excellent CamJam.  I had a good look around the market place as well as some of the show and tell items.

Carl Monk had couple of IoT projects on display, there was a Rocking Dino which was controlled by people sending Tweet’s, which would activate the dinosaur and play a random sound effect. The Tweeting Dino allowed the dinosaur to be activated by pressing the PiBrella button. In doing so a picture is taken and posted to a Twitter account. Cheerlights is an IoT based light control system, which works by sending a tweet containing Cheerlights and a supported colour name.  See Carl's Blog for more info on these projects.

Rocking Dino

Purple Rain

Spencer Organ had a Raspberry Pi radio player with touch screen control and the Pipsta project, a Raspberry Pi selfie cam. This used a Raspberry Pi camera, button and a thermal printer, when you pressed the button the camera took your picture and printed it out on receipt paper.  See Spencer's blog for more info on these projects

Pipsta Selfie Camera

Raspberry Pi Radio player

Brian Corteil had a Raspberry Pi powered retro game console which had a joystick and arcade buttons so you could play various retro arcade games.  There was also a digital zoetrope which used 12 oled displays, this was very cool.

Retro Game Console

Zoetrope

Steve Upton had a low res video wall which you could play space invaders on.  There were 32 strips of WS2812 addressable LEDs connected to Fadecandy boards all controlled via a Raspberry Pi. See Steve’s website for more info.

Stewards Academy had a Pi in the Sky project on display.

I spoke to several vendors including.

Kano had their computer kit using a Raspberry Pi on display. 

 gPiO who had their gPiO control box on display.  

gPiO Control Box

IQaudIO were showing off their audio accessories including their new Pi-DigiAMP. 

Redfern Electronics had the Crumble controller on display. The Crumble is an easy to use programmable controller with built in motor control and 4 inputs/outputs.

Nevil Hunt from Innovations in Education had his new PiDapter on display which is a GPIO adaptor allowing you to connect two PiTrol games controllers to the Raspberry Pi. Visit the http://www.pidapter.com website for more info.

I brought a super cool Blinky Tape from Makersify.  See http://blinkinlabs.com/blinkytape/ for more info.

A collection of DiddyBorg's from PiBorg

Workshops

I had agreed to help out with the soldering workshop. We showed people how to solder using scrap boards or kits they had brought.

Talks

I attended a couple of the talks, first up was.

Jim Darby who talked about using Java for real-time tasks like a 7-segement display clock, he showed us how control the Pi hardware using Pi4J. He had made a bedside clock using an old clock 7 segment display which connected to the Raspberry Pi via some 74HC595 8 bit shift registers.

Jim's Bedside clock project

The next talk was by Graham Hastings who talked about using a Raspberry Pi for physical computing in KS2 and KS3. 

Finally Joseph Birks talked about the history and development of his Crumble controller, he demonstrated how it worked.

Joseph demo's his Crumble controller

Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend

On Saturday 28^th February I attended The Raspberry Pi Big Birthday Weekend which was held at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. I arrived with some time to kill so I had a look around at all of the Show & Tell and Marketplace stalls, there was plenty on offer.  A new official Raspberry Pi case was being given away, bonus.

I spoke to IQaudIO who make a range of audio accessories for the Raspberry Pi.  They had their Pi-DAC and Pi-Amp on display, the Pi-DAC plugs on top of your Raspberry Pi giving you full HD Audio and the Pi-Amp can sit on top of the Pi-DAC which gives you 2 x 20W Class D amplifier.

The following vendor’s were present

The Pi Hut

Pimoroni

PiBorg

4tronix

ModMyPi

Ragworm

RyanTeck

IQ Audio

Wireless Things (formerly Ciseco)

Watterott

RealVNC

While there I brought a Unicorn HAT from Pimoroni which has 64 super bright RGB LEDs in an 8 x 8 matrix, super shiny and a NOOBS SD card from the PiHut.
 

Nevil Hunt from Innovations in Education had his Seven Segments of Pi and PiTrol on display for people to try out. 

Mike Cook had various gadgets on display including, Free Jazz for the Raspberry Pi, The Light Fantastic which was a 4 x 4 matrix of RGB LED’s allowing you to play 5 interactive games, Stomp which was another interactive game using a Neopixel ring, a transistor checker which would tell you which type of transistor was connected and finally he had RISC OS running on a Raspberry Pi.



Grumpy Mike's Electro Gadgets

David Saul had his Chicken Water Heater project on display, which monitors the temperature and if it gets too cold switches on a 12v lamp to warm the water and prevent it from freezing. It also Tweets pictures of their Chickens, so they can check on them while they are away. You can find out more here.

Martin Mander had converted an 80’s Sharp VC-2300H portable VCR into a Raspberry Pi Media Centre, see here for more info.

I saw a couple of Big Trak’s which were powered by a Raspberry Pi and a Gerbil entertainment system using a Raspberry Pi which used a PiCamera to detect when the Gerbil was running in the wheel and then would play some music.

Dan Aldred was showing off his Pi Glove which had switches in the fingers of the glove, this connected to a Raspberry Pi so that you could play music,  take your picture and then upload it to Twitter and finally control a party light when you pressed the switches, see here for more info.

Workshops

I attended a couple of workshops; the first workshop was showed us how to create a GPS tape measure. It used a GPS module which was connected to a Raspberry Pi.  We wrote some Python code and then went outside for a short walk while it measured how far you had been.   The next workshop was an Introduction to Linux which gave us a brief overview of some of the Linux commands.   Finally I helped out with the PiCamera workshop which was run by Dave Jones who wrote the Python PiCamera module.