In the UK, Year 9 (age 13 to 14) is an important stage which can influence the student’s future career. It is during this year that the students first decide on what subjects to pursue, and in particular whether they will continue to study computer science. I recently attended a computing and IT careers fair […]

Around Halloween 2016 Element 14 ran a Costume Competition for wearable tech projects. Boo! Pi Costume Contest I was already working on a Wizard of Oz costume so I submitted my project to the competition. You can find out more about the Raspberry Pi – PiZero NeoPixel bow tie here. My costume was one of […]

Another year and another Pycon UK. For 2016 the UK’s community Python Conference was held in Cardiff, Wales. It’s also the fourth year that they’ve included a special Children’s day on the Saturday. This included a day of kids coding on Raspberry Pi computers (Pi-Top CEED) and this year each child received a micro:bit to […]

During my visit to the Raspberry Pi factory arranged by RS I also entered into a competition to win a Pi-Top computer. After a close run vote, I won. So I now have a Pi-Top Raspberry Pi laptop. The Pi-Top is a similar size to a regular laptop, but involves some assembly and uses a […]

RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) and NFC (Near Field Communication) provide the ability for devices to talk to each other by touching them together. This could be between two smart devices or between a smart device to a simple tag embedded into a card or sticker. In my case my requirements were quite basic as I […]

Click the image above for the slides for the Disco Light talk at the Pi Birthday 2016. Worksheet for Raspberry Pi NeoPixel practical session 2017 Below is a worksheet giving hands-on with connecting up NeoPixels to a Raspberry Pi using a breadboard. This uses breadboard NeoPixels. These do need a little soldering initially, but once […]

The BBC micro:bit includes an accelerometer which allows you to track the movement of the micro:bit. This means that it can be used to as a controller similar to how the Wii remote control tracks it’s movement through the air. For this project I used the micro:bit as a wired device to control my existing […]

One of the things I’ve been doing with the micro:bit is to have it relay messages to a connected host computer. This is fairly easy within python on a Linux computer (such as the Raspberry Pi) thanks to the pyserial module which supports sending and receiving serial communication over a serial USB device. It’s even […]

The BBC Micro:Bit will be going out to school children in the UK during 2016. In the meantime I have been given a sneak peek as part of the microbit world tour. The aim is to put the micro:bit into the hands of some Python programmers that can find out what is possible and create […]

The Raspberry Pi foundation has made a new Raspberry Pi computer called the PiZero. It’s a smaller version of the version 1 Raspberry Pi that’s been stripped back to the bare essentials with price that’s an amazing $5 (currently £4 in the UK including VAT). Not only that but they are so inexpensive they’ve been […]