Newcastle Raspberry Jam 30th October 2012

October 31, 2012

Last night saw the first Raspberry Jam in Newcastle. I’m pleased to say it went very well.

It was organised by Newcastle’s Maker Space and held at the Centre for Life. Around 40-ish tickets were booked and about 2/3’s showed up on the evening.

We started early at 5.30pm and continued late into the night finishing at about 9.00pm. The format for the evening was informal with a number of maker space membersĀ  giving demonstrations and show and tells for their Raspberry Pi projects.

For the demonstrations and show and tells, we had Jon showing his retro video gaming Pi running a NES emulator. Jon was also show and telling about his adventures in getting the RPi and mobile 3G dongle to work together. Glen, had set up his XMBC media server on the large TV the Centre for Life had provided us for the evening. Alistair was discussing interfacing to his RPi and Chris was showing off not one but two RPi’s.Where one Pi was controlling the on’s and off’s of the row of LED’s connected to the second RPi via a web-browser over the internet. Cool.

Myself, I had a RPi running scratch which saw a lot of attention for the younger audience . I also had my Pi robotic car on show but still not quite ready to give it a spin.

Final, I mustĀ  say thanks to all those Makers who helped out with the demo’s and show and tells. Thanks to all the people who came along to support us. And, a final thank you to the staff at the Centre for Life for the room and helping out during the evening.


GertBoard arrives

October 25, 2012

My GertBoard kit finally arrived last week. For a while I was getting deja-vu of Raspberry Pi delivery saga again.

I’ve taken some pictures of what came but I’ve not had a chance to build it yet. I think we’ll have a GertBoard building session / workshop at the Maker Space on evening or weekend.