The Raspberry Pi is an inexpensive lightweight computer designed for teaching programming to school children.

At the moment it is available as a bare-bones processor board, but there are plans for a cased version in future. In the meantime there are some 3rd parties that have created or are in the process of creating cases.

Here is a case of my own which is inexpensive and would be ideal for a young child’s bedroom. I’ve called it the “Raspberry Pirate”. Full details of how to create your own are included.

The Raspberry Pirate – Treasure Chest

This is a cardboard case which has been hand-painted. Access is provided to all the ports.

Where to buy

The inspiration for the case came from seeing the basic cardboard box at a Hobbycraft store. I bought the box before I got my Raspberry Pi so I was taking a bit of a gamble that it would fit, but it turned out to be a perfect fit.

The unpainted box is available online: Papier Mache Treasure Chest

Sealing and decorating the case

I first “painted” the box inside and out with a watered down craft glue. This helps to seal the box. I then painted it using children’s ready mix paints.

Creating the holes

Once my Raspberry Pi arrived I then cut out the relevant holes starting with the TV out connector (as it would not fit into the box until that was in place).

I found that in most cases the holes needed to be larger than the connectors as the thickness of the edge of the box otherwise prevented the cables from being fully inserted.

In use

It is easier if the SD card is connected before the cables as that helps to line up the Raspberry Pi with the rest of the slots, but the SD card can still be removed and re-inserted after the other cables are in place.

There is a little bit of movement of the Pi when inserting / disconnecting cables, but it seams to work pretty well.

The instructions that came with the Raspberry Pi from Farnell recommend that it is used in a well ventilated area to allow for cooling. You may therefore want to run with the lid open, although I don’t know if that is really necessary.

Alternative designs

There are other boxes that may be suitable for the Raspberry Pi. I particularly like the book shape, which is large enough to fit the Raspberry Pi side by side with an Arduino. They also do a Teddy bear or animal shapes which would be good alternatives for a child’s bedroom.

The treasure chest works particularly well as all the ports are still accessible allowing cables to be connected and disconnected, without having to go inside the box. With the other designs then I suspect that the cables will need to be left connected to the Raspberry Pi and just run outside of the case.

• More about the Raspberry Pi

What is the Raspberry Pi?

The Raspberry Pi is a small computer. It’s about the same length and width as a credit card and costs only $32. It has been designed as a educational computer for school children to learn to program, but is also hugely popular due to it’s small size and amazing low cost. To understand more about the reason behind the Raspberry Pi then read this story.

The specification of the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is an ARM based personal computer. It uses a broadcom System On Chip (SOC) processor that has integrated graphics capability. It has 256Mb of RAM (not upgradeable) and uses an SD card in place of a hard disk drive. There is a mini-USB port for power which needs to be connected to a USB or mobile phone charger to power the device. Video output is handled by a HDMI port or a composite video out. This allows the Raspberry Pi to be connected directly to a TV (either digital or analogue) without needing a dedicated monitor. If you would rather connect to a monitor then if it has DVI (unlikely on budget monitors) then that is compatible with HDMI; those with only vga input will need a convertor which are fairly cheap but with varying results. There are two USB ports for connecting to a keyboard and mouse or to a USB hub for connecting to other devices. There is insufficient power available at the USB ports to run any USB devices that need to pull a lot of power (eg portable hard disk drives), but those can be connected to a powered USB hub.

There are two versions of the Raspberry Pi. The model A is as defined above, the model B has the same spec, but also includes an Ethernet port. The Raspberry Pi does not come with a case. There are 3rd party cases available and there will be an official case in future.

Up and running

To get the Raspberry Pi working an SD card needs to be prepared with the Linux operating system installed. This can be done on a computer running Linux, Mac OS X or Windows with an SD card reader. There are different distributions available, I used the Debian image for this initial review.

The computer boots into a text prompt where you can then login and start the GUI (if required) by entering startx. This boots into X with the LXDE desktop environment. The look and feel will be familiar to most computer users looking a little similar to Windows XP, although with the addition of some Linux features such as the Virtual desktops.

The installed software is a little limited, mainly a browser and some programming languages. This is however Linux and is capable of running much of the open source software. There is a lot of open source software already ported to the ARM processor.

For those used to running a modern personal computer the Raspberry Pi may seam a little basic, but remember this is a very low spec computer. In terms of processing power and memory it’s the equivelant of what computers were like several years ago. It is however truely remarkable that something so small and inexpensive can still run a modern day operating system and be useable. This is a thanks to both the hardware and the flexibility of Linux and the LXDE desktop environment. If this is your first look at Linux then you may be mistaken into believing that Linux looks a bit dated and lacks some of the features of other operating systems. That would be wrong, Linux is capable of far more and is much easier to use if regular distribution is installed onto a more powerful computer see beginners guide to Linux and choosing a distribution. For the purposes of learning to program (and also learning system adminstration skills and for providing a processor linked to electronics projects) then the Raspberry Pi is ideal.

Getting the Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi has been a huge success since it was launched. I was up early on the launch day and managed to get one just over 2 months after the launch. Those that ordered later may be waiting up to 4 months for theirs. They have now ramped up production so in future the availability should be much better.

The Raspberry Pi is available from Farnell Element 14 or RS, although at the time of writing there is still a long waiting list.

• More information about the Raspberry Pi Linux computer

Make: Electronics is a practical guide to hobby electronics. It’s very much a hands-on guide encouraging learning by experimentation.

Some of the experiments involve deliberate damage to components. Whilst I understand that this can be a good way to learn I think there are other ways of teaching which don’t encourage deliberately overloading components. My real concern however is that one of the experiments involves soldering mains electrical wires together. Mains electricity is very dangerous and I wouldn’t recommend this as an exercise for beginners to soldering.

The book includes circuit diagrams, but rather than following the traditional circuit diagram layout the diagrams are positioned as though they are placed onto a breadboard. Whilst this makes it easier to transfer the designs onto a breadboard it makes it harder to understand how the circuits work as it does not show the relationship of how the components are interconnected.

A number of the circuits are based around the 555 timer integrated circuit and there is a very good explanation of how the 555 timer works internally as well as how to incorporate it into circuits.

The book does cover a programmable integrated circuit (PIC) / micro controller unit (MCU) called the PICAXE. It is however only a very short section and doesn’t give justice as to what can be achieved with these PICs. In particular the Arduino has shown the potential of what can now be achieved, but is hardly mentioned in the book.

Summary

A good book that provides an easy start for anyone starting out in hobby electronics. Some things are different in their approach, but I think that key thing in the book is that it will leave the reader wanting more.

Well it’s taken me a few days, but I think I’ve finally got Kubuntu 12.04 64-bit installed on my laptop with the graphics drivers working correctly.

Why Kubuntu?

I have been a fan of Ubuntu since it first came out, until they forced Unity on us. I’ve tried to get on with Unity having tried it when they first pushed it onto the netbook remix, but just find it frustrating. It’s far too slow for my netbook (where I think the concept actually works), and I don’t like the interface for my main laptop. For the last year I first tried KDE, before I found what Linux Mint had done in combining the Gnome 3 and MATE to try and get the best of both the old and the new. I liked Mint except for two things. First there is some inconsistency, which is a little annoying. For example if you use the pull up menu rather than the pull down menu then only supports right click on the icon (I still don’t remember which one does and which doesn’t). The real problem with Mint though was that it was not stable enough for me. On a regular basis X would freeze and then one or more components would restart themselves. On a few occasions it crashed completely, which on one occasion was quite embarrassing as I was using it for a training session at the time and was hoping to show off how stable and great Linux is.

So I therefore decided to give KDE another go. I’ve used KDE on and off in the past, but really followed the Ubuntu default of Gnome for some time. KDE is now even better than it ever was. There does seam to be a few bugs in some of the applications / services, but none that compare with what I have had. As I wanted to stick with the wide choice of applications and easy of install that I’ve come to expect with Ubuntu I decided to go with Kubuntu. I also still run Ubuntu (but with xfce) on my other computers so it helps to maintain a bit of consistency.

Problems installing Kubuntu / Mint KDE and Fedora KDE

The first ting I did was tried to install Kubuntu using a USB memory stick. I was able to boot from the memory stick but when trying to install the install failed. I thought this was a problem with the installer, but now think that this may have been something else.

Leaving Kubuntu to one side for a while I then tried Mint KDE and Fedora KDE installers. Mint was the same as Kubuntu failing at the same point (Manual partitioning), but Fedora got further in the install and managed to trash my install of grub before it died on me. On the plus side there was no actual data loss (except for the partition I’d specifically asked to reformat), but being dropped to a grub prompt would have been enough to scare off newbies trying this for the first time.

After almost installing Ubuntu (that wouldn’t boot initially, but I fixed that through the bios), and almost trying the 32-bit distro, I decided that I shouldn’t really give in so easily. I thought it a bit suspicious that so many distros were failing to install and I’d also seen a few errors from Jockey (used for 3rd party drivers), so I got the feeling it had to be something to do with my laptop, either the wireless card or the graphics card. It turns out it was the latter…

Alternative install disk

So the next thing I tried was to use the Alternative install disk. This is a text based installer instead of the graphical installer used by the desktop versions. A text based installer is not nearly as bad as it sounds. It asks you all the same questions, and it just needs a bit more use of the keyboard and cursor keys rather than the mouse (a far cry from when I first started using Linux and you had to manually enter things like video refresh rates).

Once the install was complete I could login to the desktop etc. In addition my Windows partition (well I do occasionally boot into Windows – perhaps once every 3 to 6 months or so) still worked and my home and data partitions were all still intact. I did however get an error message from Jockey and I was not able to install the proprietary graphics drivers.

Don’t blame the operating system

So far this has not gone particularly smoothly, and in fact it was to get much worse before it gets better.

It is however not fair to blame this on Linux. In the defence of Linux, KDE and the various distros

Proprietary drivers do not have public source code that Ubuntu developers are free to modify. Security updates and corrections depend solely on the responsiveness of the manufacturer. Ubuntu cannot fix or improve these drivers.

If ATI (now AMD) had opened up their source code then the Linux developers would have had an opportunity to fix this.

I could have chosen to just use the free drivers, but I wanted to be able to get the most out of my 3D hardware.

If you are following this with the hope of installing the proprietary drivers yourself then I strongly suggest that you don’t unless you have a good understanding of Linux. This is not a walkthrough that can be followed by beginners without risking locking you out of your computer.

Where to go for support?

Having established that this was out of the hands of the Linux developers I went in search of updated proprietary drivers. My first port of call was the Dell website. Perhaps I was being a bit too hopeful, but Dell servers do run Linux and perhaps Dell had started to provide a bit more Linux support. Unfortunately they weren’t much help, but I was able to find out my graphics was a ATI Mobility Radeon HD (5???). I’m not sure the exact model as there are 3 different types listed in the manual depending upon the exact model, but that was enough information.

Next stop was to the AMD website. After a bit of searching I found the following driver: AMD Catalyst™ Proprietary Display Driver – Linux x86 & Linux x86_64 (Radeon)

There is a new version of the driver that was released at about the same time as Ubuntu 12.04. I downloaded that and tried to install. Unfortunately that failed with error message “DKMS part of installation failed. Please refer to /usr/share/ati/fglrx-install.log for details”. In the log it referred to a reboot being required, which I tried. Unfortunately this left me unable to login to the computer. It would go as far as the login screen, but whenever I tried to login it returned to the login prompt.

I was able to get a terminal up <ctrl> <alt> <f1> and login to that to attempt the fix. First problem then was that the wireless network didn’t come up, as that was configured within X, rather than in the init scripts. Rather than trying to configure the wireless manually using iwconfig I just connected to the Ethernet instead.

After a bit of searching I found that whilst I’d installed the headers for the basic kernel the headers that were needed were in package linux-headers-3.2.0-24-generic. I installed this using
apt-get install linux-headers-3.2.0-24-generic

and then attempted to reinstall the graphics drivers. Fortunately they installed this time using a text based setup tool.

Another reboot and I was able to login to the desktop again.

Radeon Graphics AMD Catalyst Control Center

One last problem I encountered was in trying to configure the Radeon Graphics AMD Catalyst Control Center. I could launch the read only version, but the administration link asked for a password. I entered my login password and got a failed login.

After a bit of head scratching I figured out that instead of asking for my password (as gksudo and other administrative Linux applications do) it was asking for the root password. Of course being Ubuntu based there is no root password. It is however quite simple to add a root password, although that undermines the security policy a little.

To set a root password in Kubuntu (or other Ubuntu based distribution) enter the following:

sudo -s
<enter own password>
passwd
<enter new root password>
<repeat new root password>


I was then able to use that new password to get into the AMD Catalyst Control Center

Summary

I’ve now got Kubuntu 64-bit 12.04 running on my laptop. It’s taken some getting there, but as I say it’s not the fault of the Linux developers that there was a bug in the proprietary drivers. At least AMD (ATI) have created an updated version, but installing it is far from easy and it doesn’t integrate well into most modern Linux distributions.

Unfortunately I would not recommend this method for any new users as it’s quite involved and can leave you unable to log in to Linux.

After a long wait the Harry Potter books are now available as ebooks.

I wrote in an earlier blog post that these were expected to be available as DRM free ebooks in October 2011, but it is now 6 months later and quite a long time since many other books became available as ebooks. The good new is that unlike many other ebooks available online, purchasing the books directly provides a DRM free copy as well as allowing you to read the books in a variety of different readers. This is good news as it prevents vendor lock-in to the ebook readers which is similar to the lock-in that used to exist with audio players before mainstream retailers switched to DRM MP3s.

The ebooks are available directly from the Pottermore shop. The Pottermore website (interactive exploration of the Harry Potter books), is now open for everyone to join as it was previously available under limited invites only.

Once purchased you can download the books up to 8 times, either direct to the PC or via a number of ebook providers (eg. Amazon / Google Play etc.). Hopefully in future all ebooks will be available like this or at least available as DRM free downloads in multiple formats that Smashwords and some other ebook publishers already provide.

It’s not all good news. I think that the ebooks are expensive when you consider that they have been available on paperback for several years already and that many of us already have a copy of the print version. In fact some of the paperback editions are available from Amazon.co.uk for less than the ebooks, which is not something you would expect considering the cost of producing ebooks is so much less than print versions.

The convenience of being able to download all the ebooks onto my Kindle, which is far easier than carrying around the print version (especially some of the later books), combined with the fact that I can view this on my Android Tablet, Android smartphone, Kindle and Linux laptop convinced me to buy these ebooks even though we have a set of hardback versions on our books shelf. It will make them much easier to read when I’m travelling.

• DRM Free ebook reviews

This years giant Easter picture is above. For various reasons we left it until Easter Sunday to finish the Spring picture this year, but that gave an opportunity to include crafts from a Day Out we had during the Easter holiday.

The Daffodils on this picture were created as part of the heritage crafts at the Black Country Museum over the Easter holiday (we visited on Good Friday).

See more Children Arts and Crafts including tips for making large wall pictures.

We visited the Heritage Motor Centre at the request of my daughter after she visited on a school trip. She’d clearly enjoyed her visit as she kept talking about it. When we got to the museum she insisted on being our personal tour guide.

I had visited the museum before, but it had been several years before. We visited on a weekend during February. Entrance fee was reasonable (although doesn’t compare with free entrance at Coventry Transport Museum). I was pleased to see that along with some other museums if you gift aid the entrance fee then you get a years free entry for the price of one visit, which makes it great value for money.

The museum is an indoor collection of cars primarily based on cars made by Austin, Rover, Land Rover and other British vehicles from early cars to current vehicles and future prototypes. Most of these vehicles are marked “do not touch”, but there are some hands-on exhibits, including games and computer screens around the museum. One particularly good area is the “Under the Skin” exhibition which looks at the inner workings of a motor car.

As well as many permanent cars on display there are several temporary exhibitions throughout the year. At the time we visited this included a record breaking exhibition including a record breaking steam car and the worlds fastest diesel car.

The outdoor activities were not running on the weekend we attended, but we will return later in the year. The activities include a miniature roadway for children aged 3 to 7, 4×4 passenger experience and driving experience for 15 to 17 year olds.

There is a cafe at the museum which had a good choice of food for adults and children, including healthy options such as a fresh salad bar.

Well worth visiting at any time, but look out for the temporary exhibitions and events, or if you are a UK tax payer gift-aid your entrance fee and return for free later in the year.

• Heritage Motor Centre

I’ve now released an alpha version of the new PHP version of wQuiz – an open source web quiz program.

This is still in alpha so it is not yet suitable for running on a production system, but is ready for general testing.

It has taken about a year and over 8,000 lines of code to completely rewrite the entire code from perl (version 0.3 and earlier) to PHP. This will allow for easier integration into PHP web sites and will make it easier to incorporate new features in future.

Known issues at the moment:

• No upgrade option from earlier versions
• Limited documentation
• CSS improvements required for the default theme
• Further testing necessary

This new version is close to the previous version, but in PHP rather than perl.
There are some new features. The main change is that there is no longer a need for an “answer” button on each page as the navigation buttons instead submit the answer (the answer button can still be enabled if required). The offline option now uses Javascript print pop-ups rather than being a page click away.

There are also improvements in terms of administrating the site as the configuration is simplified and more of the settings can be handled through the web page rather than editing the configuration files.

The main benefits will be realized in future versions. The modular OOP based code will make it easier to update and add new features in future. This will include better integration with social networking sites.

Code is currently available from Google code project wquiz.
The alpha version is available in the download section or the latest update is available from the svn repository. Now the project is stable I hope to only commit updates that don’t break the program.

More details will be made available in future through the wQuiz project home page.

Ever since I first heard about the Raspberry Pi I’ve wanted one. I saw the advance announcement and woke up early on the day of the launch in an attempt to get one of the first batch. I was unsuccessful, but after waiting so long a few more weeks is not really going to be a big problem. I think that what the Foundation has achieved is amazing. They have designed and manufactured a product that brings the cost of a computer down to less than many spend on one month’s mobile phone and/or broadband.

There has however been a lot of criticism due to websites unable to deal with the load, lack of availability and that the community has been ignored by a commercial product launch. Whilst it didn’t go as smoothly as it could I think the launch was in fact a success and considering what they have achieved is very promising.

I wrote a Facebook comment in defense of the Raspberry Pi foundation against a pretty damningblog post and some unpleasant social networking comments about what has happened (note I am not involved with the Raspberry Pi in anyway other than very eager to get my hands on one). I suspect these posts were all from people that had not gone through the process of trying to launch a product with only a self-funded charity to support them. My comment was a bit long – so here it is for the benefit of others

Sounds to me more that it’s a victim of it’s own success. I was one of the ones that got up early (I’m in the UK so only 1 hour before I normally would) and I was frustrated that by the time I finally got through (6 hours later) the ETA is mid April.

I don’t think that the retailers handled it too well, but then how many other retailers have been hit by a big product launch that crippled their servers (not the first time I’ve had timeouts from overloaded websites). In this era of social media frenzy thousands of supporters can find out about the launch within a very short period of time.

From the foundation’s point of view I think this was a good way of handling the sales and future production. Whilst it may not reward the loyal supporters partnering with these suppliers is in the medium to long term going to get the production lines rolling out products much faster than the 10,000 product batches that the foundation would be able to support. I can’t see how the foundation’s online shop could possibly cope with the amount of demand that crippled these big retailers.

The real test is going to be the future success. How popular will the Raspberry Pi be in 12 months time, when the foundation and the community have already had their chance to provide more details about what can be achieved and how to program. And crucially, as I put on my blog, whether they can convince the politicians and education system to adopt this as part of the curriculum. As this is not intended to be just a cheap PC, but as a educational tool that can be used in schools.

Just one thing though I think they do need to get the normal website back up and running. Even if I’ve got over a month to wait to get hold of one, it will be useful to see what is available so far (although Farnell have the datasheets and some more information on their website). At the moment it still says: “The full site will return once traffic levels have subsided, hopefully later on today.”

This isn’t the end game for the Raspberry Pi – this is just the end of the hardware design and initial manufacturer phase and the start of the real journey that could see a dramatic change in the way computers are seen by the programmers of the future.

One of the reasons I am so excited about the Raspberry Pi, other than the opportunity to get a cheap PC in every room in the house , is that the aims of this are similar to what I’ve been trying to achieve with my PenguinTutor web site. My site is more about learning system administration skills and whilst it was more intended for adults wanting to learn Linux, it is a useful thing that could provide a more vocational side to school IT learning. This could be a further educational benefit in addition to learning programming as the Raspberry Pi is designed for.

It seams like everyone is trying to get hold of a Raspberry Pi, but what exactly is it and what is all the fuss about?

What is the Raspberry Pi?

The Raspberry Pi is a small computer about the size of a credit card. The initial version is only available as a bare motherboard, but future versions will be available with a case.

The Raspberry Pi is similar in processor and memory to some smartphones and includes a HDMI (and analogue) TV output as well as USB connectors and on one version a Ethernet network connection.

It is powered using a mobile phone charger plug.

An important aspect of the device is that it is inexpensive. Starting at just $25 for the basic model making this affordable for schools and pupils alike.

The Raspberry Pi as an education tool

The aim behind the Raspberry Pi is to get school children excited about computers and to help create computer programmers for the future.

This is similar to what the BBC Micro and similar home computers did back in the 1980s. Back then computers were simpler and made it easy to tinker and learn how to program. There was no risk of breaking anything as if anything went wrong you just powered it off and started again.

These days computers are complex and expensive. Many computers also restrict what you can and can’t do with them through closed source software and other technical restrictions (eg. games machines). Even if you could tinker with them then many parents would not like to risk their children damaging the home computer that the family has become so reliant.

By making the device so cheaply it means that pupils can have their own computer that they can tinker with and the worst that could happen is that they need to re flash the SD card back to it’s original settings. As it can plug into a standard TV (in many children’s bedrooms) there is no need to take turns in using the computer monitor or main computer.

Powered by Linux

The board is supplied without any operating system, but images of the open source Linux operating system are available. This has to be installed onto an SD card which is plugged into the slot on the board.

Linux is an ideal operating system for the Raspberry Pi as it is a freely available popular operating system. Crucially it is also open source, so rather than being restricted to creating programs on top of the operating system, more experienced programmers can get into the basics of the code that make it run and improve on the operating system.

Incredible demand

The initial launch is not for schools but for hobby enthusiasts. This will help to build a community of ideas and support which will hopefully help encourage and support the adoption within schools.

There has been a huge demand for the initial release of 10,000 boards. The Raspberry Pi was available to order from 6am on 29 February. The websites of both retailers that are selling the devices have struggled under the huge demand for these which far outstrips the initial batch from production.

New stock will be arriving in due course, but this is a frustrating wait for availability. Unfortunately there have been a lot of negative comments on Twitter etc. It’s completely unfair to place criticism at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, whose website continued to work fine (in reduced launch day mode). Whilst the suppliers websites it is very hard to deal with the kind of demand that was thrown at them, although disappointingly the RS website only allowed for showing an interest rather than taking pre-orders.

It’s obvious that this is in high demand and has all the potential to be a huge success.

What’s next?

The real challenge going forward is getting the Government to listen and getting a good IT curriculum into schools that can turn this huge potential into a great learning tool. Teaching children that a computer doesn’t have to run an expensive proprietary operating system, and that learning to write software can be fun.

Once I get hold of one I’ll be posting a proper review and will be providing details of my own projects that I’m looking at running on the Raspberry Pi.

More details

• Official Raspberry Pi website

or watch this space for more details in future.