One of the things I’ve been doing as a STEM Ambassador is to help support a Raspberry Pi club at a local high school. At first the club was led by the sixth form students, with the teachers and myself helping out as required. This was working well at first, but with many of the […]

When I first showed my Raspberry Pi based “Ruby Robot” at the Raspberry Jam at Pycon UK, I promised a guide would be forthcoming. I’ve now finished the first draft of my guide to creating the robot. The guide does more than just take the reader through the steps to create a robot. It also […]

As an adult I often try and imagine myself in my children’s shoes to try and think about how appropriate something would be for their age group. Usually I can get a reasonable idea of how well they will pick something up, but this review is one where my daughter has helped me to see what it is like to learn programming through a child’s eyes.

This is a review of the Fuze Raspberry Pi based computer.

In the past few years we’ve created a family craft project at Christmas. This has normally been a large Christmas picture. This year we have created a craft project using electronics and programming on the Raspberry Pi.

For my latest Raspberry Pi project I wanted to be able to detect when a person was in the room. I happened to have a Zilog PIR sensor from SK Pang that I’d bought, but not used. This provides details to get the PIR sensor working with the Raspberry Pi. The data sheet for the […]

The PiFace is a digital input output board that fits on the top of the Raspberry Pi computer. The board provides an element of protection for the Raspberry Pi. Connections are made to external devices through screw terminals mounted on the board. This is easier than connecting wires to the GPIO ports on the Raspberry Pi.

A feature of the Raspberry Pi is that it uses very little power for a computer. Admittedly it takes a lot more power than a micro-controller (such as an Arduino), but it’s still low enough to consider running it from batteries. I first did some testing with using a battery powered Raspberry Pi to help […]

Congratulations to the Raspberry Pi foundation as the Pi is now 1 Year old today! The $25 (or $32 for the model B) computer that has been a run-away success. I’m celebrating by ordering my 5th one exactly a year after my first. Hopefully delivery should be a lot quicker this time – ETA 1 […]

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 […]

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 […]