Tag Archives: #picademy

NeoPixels, DotStars and Raspberry Pi

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We took the family away to Camp Bestival this summer (as we do most years) and as we have three young children we took a festival trolley with us to help move the youngest child and associated paraphernalia around with us. Each year we try to decorate the trolley a little bit to brighten it up and this year I thought I would use a 1 m strip of 144 NeoPixels I had at work which were sat around not being used!

Having used these in class before I knew that they were sometimes a tricky beast to get working with a Raspberry Pi, but also having recently completed a chapter in my book using a similar DotStar strip to create a LED matrix across the front of a laptop bag; I felt sure that I could get a portable solution up and running for the NeoPixels and a Raspberry Pi. Now this solution is perhaps more involved than how you could get things going in the lab; but to get it working for our festival trolley the whole solution needed to be portable and powered from battery packs.

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#Picademy take 2!

Computer Science,

So I was lucky enough to be asked to come along to a second Picademy event, not something many people get to do unless they are facilitating the event…

It started a while back when James Robinson from Raspberry Pi put a production company working for Google in touch with me. They were keen to get some interviews and video footage to demonstrate the impact that their support for the Raspberry Pi Picademy training programme had generated. James suggested they speak to me and I was more than happy to oblige. So after many email exchanges and phone calls between myself and the production company a plan was formed to get the video footage Google wanted to tell the story!
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#Picademy Day 2 – The results

Computer Science, Reviews,

So as I went into day 2 of #Picademy I had decided upon a “motion activated camera which tweets the photo taken along with a random poem, giving you a LED countdown indicator” for my project.

Some of this I had previously coded (the random poem part) which you can see running in this Trinket app below:

My thoughts were that I could make use of this to create the text of my tweet adding the #Picademy hashtag to the end too.

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#Picademy – Day 2 Planning

Computer Science, Reviews,

So after day one of #Picademy my evening was spent thinking about, and reading about what I could do for my project on day 2.

My initial thoughts was to use a USB microphone to get an audio feed into a Raspberry Pi to then try and use Python to “listen” to the microphone and react to different audio levels coming in; a kind of graduated analogue switch if you like… So between #Picademy finishing and meeting up for the evening meal I spent my time walking (quickly!) around Manchester trying to find a shop selling basic USB microphones; to no avail!

So over the evening meal I was discussing this idea more with Les and we thought it maybe possible to use the Jack Audio Server to flip the Pi’s inbuilt headphone jack into a microphone jack. This is possible on Ubuntu, as a quick search on our phones verified; so I thought we were on to a winner here. However after a little playing around with my Pi back at the hotel, it turns out that the HDA-Jack-Retask application just does not work with the Raspberry Pi soundcard 🙁

This left me back at square one… What do to on day 2?

So I wake with this thought… “A motion activated camera which tweets the photo taken along with a random poem, giving you a LED countdown indicator” – Should be easy!

Watch this space for progress!

#Picademy – Day One

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This February I was one of the lucky few to be accepted on the Picademy event at Google’s Digital Garage in Manchester. More details about the event can be found here: https://www.raspberrypi.org/picademy/google/manchester/

This post is a summary of my thoughts after day one – more as a memorandum for me than anything else. Apologies if I have forgotten any of the sessions or put them in the wrong order; to coin a phrase used in the training, I reached “cognitive overload” fairly quickly!

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