On Saturday 6th 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.
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| Rocking Dino |
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| 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
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| Pipsta Selfie Camera |
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| 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.
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| Retro Game Console |
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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| Joseph demo's his Crumble controller |
