Raspberry Jam II at the Madlab

Nathan Rae's Raspberry Pi setup with UnicornOn Saturday Ben Nuttall organised the second Raspberry Pi event at Madlab.  Here's what happened in his own words.  To read his the full story which covers the first Raspberry Jam and more of Bens story check out his blog.

I’ve now run two Raspberry Pi events in Manchester, affectionately known as the Raspberry Jam. The first in June, which was the first Raspberry Jam in the UK, and which featured on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s website where we gained recognition for getting people together to share ideas, demonstrate what we’ve been doing with the Pi, and getting kids interested in building games and writing code as well as inspiring people all over the UK (and the world) to set up their own groups. Continuing the success of the Jam, our second event took place a month later in July, which was equally enjoyable. The July event took place on the same day as the first Cambridge Raspberry Jam – a huge event attended by 300 people and hosted by the Raspberry Pi Foundation at Cambridge University. A number of the attendees from the first Manchester Jam went along to the Cambridge for this, so we look forward to hearing from them about what went on there.

I've edited the section where Ben talks about the first event including how a young girl started programing with Scratch.

The second event was much like the first, except I introduced an idea I saw at another event I attended at MadLab recently – LAMP & Beyond – run by Jeremy of PHPNW / Magma Digital, whereby attendees were asked to contribute post-it notes of skills they had to share and skills they wanted to attain – with the intention of matching groups of people up with a person to lead them in learning a new skill, be it language, development tool, source control package or the latest hipster technology! This worked really well and everyone got a lot out of it. With the Raspberry Jam I hoped this would allow beginners to get started, others to share ideas and help each other with a leg-up without having to figure everything out for themselves and overcome initial issues and get on with something cool. A few people wanted to learn Python so I tutored a few people through some basic constructs of the language compared to what they’re used to in their own languages. Some people needed an OS image loaded on to their SD cards so we had a few people helping them with that, others were making games again (Amy returned to continue with her projects) and some others had the Pi running on an old serial terminal! Towards the end I finally got chance to do something for myself – I got my Pi talking to a breadboard using the PyPi GPIO library! We figured out which pins were which and hooked up an LED with a resistor and controlled its on/off status with a Python command – followed by a few functions (let_there_be_light() and such) which could be called to turn the light on or have it flash. A pretty cool start to external hardware controlled by the Pi. The interesting thing about this ability is that it would be possible to program the Pi to do something and have it do it without use of an external display – just listen to events happen and do things according to the state of those inputs – anything from controlling water sprinkler systems based on soil moisture to … well, anything!

I think it’s fair to say that everyone who comes to one of these events finds something out about the Pi they didn’t know before – the skills sharing nature of the Jam is to be praised and I would encourage anyone of any age or experience to attend one – or start their own!

The next Raspberry Jam is at Madlab on 11th August.  Make sure you are there!

Do you have a Raspberry Pi?  Are you doing anything interesting with it?  What are your Raspberry dreams?  Let us know in the comments.