Author Archives: liz

New in the Swag Shop: recycled CD case pencils!

via Raspberry Pi

These feel lovely when you sharpen them, have a beauteous Raspberry Pi logo at the end, and are made in solid colours from recycled CD cases. Buy some, look funky when you doodle, help fund computing education, and save the planet too – what could be better?

Amazingly, we have not yet sold out of our first batch of Babbage the Bear. (He has stayed on the shelves longer than the camera boards, which we find shocking and remarkable.) Get him while he’s snuggly!

Raspberry Pi for Dummies: sample chapter

via Raspberry Pi

If you’re wondering about introducing your kids to Scratch, but aren’t quite sure where to start, here’s a handy resource for you. Sean McManus, one of the authors of Raspberry Pi for Dummies, has sent me a link to a couple of sample chapters of the book, including the first chapter on Scratch. You’re welcome to download it to find out whether the book’s for you.

Raspberry Pi For Dummies PDF Sampler

 

Frederik and Ernest’s Europe – Middle East – Africa roadtrip

via Raspberry Pi

Frederik and Ernest Lotter from Blue Horizon Embedded Systems in South Africa are driving from the UK to South Africa via Russia and the Middle East, taking in seventeen countries on their way.

They are making the journey in a Land Rover Defender which is fitted with a Raspberry Pi-based distributed light control system. The Raspberry Pi, and their lighting rig design, will be put to the test over 22000km of harsh conditions and rough terrain.

The Lotter brothers are experienced electronic engineers and are offering to meet up with groups of potential Raspberry Pi or ARM enthusiasts along the way. There may even be a Pi-themed reward available if you can find them using the live GPS tracking system they have installed.

You can track them live online, and if you want them to come and talk to your school, business or another group about Raspberry Pi and ARM processors while they’re in your country, they’re inviting you to email them - please get in touch as soon as possible if you’d like them to visit. Watch the video to learn more, and to find out what their route looks like. Thanks Fred and Ernest; we’re looking forward to tracking your progress!

Welcome to the Swag Shop!

via Raspberry Pi

You may have noticed that a little while ago, we quietly withdrew Raspberry Pi branded t-shirts from sale. Since then, we’ve been working on a reboot of the store. Shirts have been totally redesigned, and are now screen-printed rather than transfer-printed, which gives a much higher-quality and tougher finish; we’ve also listened to your requests for more colours and thicker material. [Edit to add: a few of you have asked about the larger sizes. At the moment they're available in black (up to 3XL), and chocolate (Eben's favourite), red and sport grey (2XL). We'll add more if the demand's there, so please let us know what you want.]

Every purchase you make goes to fund the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s educational activities, so you’re not just making yourself look swanky; you’re directly helping kids.

T-shirts, just calling out for you to buy them so they can escape their cruel imprisonment in plastic crates.

So today we’re relaunching the shop, under a new name, with new management (things are being run by our friends at Pimoroni), and new goodies for you to buy.

Babbage the bear needs a home.

Shirts (for ladies, men and kids) aren’t the only thing we’ve got in stock: you can now buy your very own Babbage the bear, and we also have Raspberry Pi mugs, bags, and travelcard holders for you to sip from, carry things in, and wave at turnstiles proudly.

A holder for your Oyster card (or your library card, bus pass or ID). Thanks to TfL for allowing us to mess with their map, and to Paul Beech for the design.

A tough drawstring bag for your hacking tools, about twelve Babbages or your overnight gear.

It’s a mug. You put coffee in it.

We’ll be introducing more goodies to the store as time goes on, and announcing them here when we do. We hope you like it! Please get buying – every penny of profit we make goes straight back into the Raspberry Pi Foundation, where it’s used directly to help educate kids in computer science.

 

 

Camera board project: time lapse video

via Raspberry Pi

Our friends at DesignSpark have produced a really beautiful time-lapse video with one of our new camera boards. It doesn’t start very beautifully, because it was filmed on a day whose start can best be described as “sodden”, but by afternoon the clouds parted and England started to look exceptionally green and pleasant. If you want to skip the rain, fast-forward to 1m46. (There’s a guest appearance from a double rainbow later on, too.)

You can find detailed instructions on how to make your own time-lapse video with your own camera board over at DesignSpark. Big thanks to Andrew Back for the vid and the tutorial!

Guest post from Mythic Beasts: how we dealt with those DDoS attacks

via Raspberry Pi

Do you remember the distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks this website was undergoing a few months ago? They made the news (partly because it was just so bizarre to see someone attacking an educational computing charity) – if you want to refresh your memory, see this, this, or this.

Pete Stevens, who runs marathons and our hosting company, Mythic Beasts, thought you’d be interested in what he’s been doing to try to ensure this can’t happen again. (Famous last words, Pete.) Here’s what he did. Over to Pete!

–

In the past we’ve had occasional trouble with denial of service attacks against the Raspberry Pi website. In particular, simply overflowing us with traffic has proved not that difficult – the server only has a 1Gbps uplink. When your admin (me) cocks up, it turns out you can saturate a core calculating syncookies leaving the other cores idle because he should have configured IRQ balancing properly.

Pete, pounding the pavement. Click the image for what is possibly the funniest local news story to come out of Cambridge in the last decade.

We briefly investigated cloud based DDoS protection which we still hold in reserve, but it has a habit of declaring that Liz can’t post things because apparently she’s a spambot. We also had to switch off IPv6 access to the website to use them, which, for an educational project, was unfortunate as there is going to eventually be a large network transition to IPv6 and allowing people to learn about it and use it is desirable.

So we’ve scaled out the hosting infrastructure out to a distributed cluster of machines. We’ve installed four additional little dual core machines, two in our Telecity Sovereign House site, two in our Telecity Harbour Exchange site. Each of these runs a load balancer and forwards connections back to the main webserver. This means the inbound load is now shared over 4 separate 1Gbps links and there’s rather more CPU available to calculate syncookies when required and rather more bandwidth to saturate.

We load balance over the load balancers using DNS round robin, as you can see from our public DNS.

$ dig www.raspberrypi.org AAAA +short
lb.raspberrypi.org.
2a00:1098:0:80:1000:13:0:5
2a00:1098:0:80:1000:13:0:6
2a00:1098:0:82:1000:13:0:5
2a00:1098:0:82:1000:13:0:6

$ dig www.raspberrypi.org A +short
lb.raspberrypi.org.
93.93.130.39
93.93.130.214
93.93.128.211
93.93.128.230

Now, everybody knows that this is a stupid way of load balancing, and you don’t get anything like even usage across your sites. This isn’t even slightly born out by the bandwidth figures for the last few days:

93.93.128.211 347.04 GB
93.93.128.230 341.61 GB
93.93.130.39 349.58 GB
93.93.130.214 347.88 GB

That’s agreement to within 2%, which is a pretty even split. So much for commonly held wisdom, we prefer science.

We’ve set the entire internal network up with IPv6. So when you connect to one of the front end machines, it’ll connect back to the main webserver over IPv6. One of the reasons for this is so we’re now running mission critical services over IPv6 – a move to IPv6 worldwide is happening at a glacial pace, and we want to make sure that our support works well. Having an angry Liz phone you up if it doesn’t is a very effective motivator.

You may have seen odd forum and comment issue while we were setting this up. One of the forum spam filters allowed filtering people based on source IP address. The move to the new setup means that clicking the filter by IP address feature resulted in dropping all new comments from that load balancer – a quarter of our traffic. *Oops*. We had to fix that to read the forwarded-by headers.

Now of course the real question is, why aren’t we fronting the site with a massive cluster of Pis? Testing with hping3 suggests that a Pi starts to struggle at around 2500 syns/sec. The front-ends we have are absolutely fine at at 50,000 syncs/sec (reading roughly 10% cpu), so with four of them we can probably handle around 1,000,000+ syns/second. That’d require 400 Pis to keep up, so it’d be a very very large cluster of Pis, not to mention 5 switches in each site.

Of course a very stern warning has been given out to people who have access to the front end machines – not only can they receive a million syns/sec, they can also send them, and that could seriously upset other internet users if it was directed at them.

Now, a side effect of this scale-out is we’re left with a bunch of machines that have a reasonable amount of excess CPU. Eben has *strong views* about wasting CPU cycles, it makes him very sad. So we’ve put them to use.

Rob Bishop and Gordon Hollingworth at Raspberry Pi spend quite a lot of time building software. Compiling it is time-consuming, and their laptops get hot and make fan noises. So we’ve installed a set of dual core VMs on the five core servers running under KVM. When everything is fully operational the software team can kick off a build from the master VM which will then use distcc to farm out the compile across all five machines. This means there’s effectively 10 cores available most of the time for building software. When the website gets busy, the lower priority VMs slow down and hand the cycles back to the load balancer/Apache/PHP/MySQL.

Now, the Raspberry Pi is an educational project. It’s not just about educating children: adults still need to learn things, and that includes me. We’ve run many dual stack IPv4/IPv6 machines before, but we thought we’d try IPv6 only machines and discover the difficulties in order to improve our support for IPv6. So the distcc VMs are IPv6 only – they can’t access anything on the internet that isn’t accessible over IPv6. In reality this means they can see Google, Facebook, lots of mirror servers and a small fraction of other sites.

In the process of setting this up I discovered that I was unable to get the Debian Squeeze network installer to install from an IPv6 only network, so I had to do the initial install to the VMs from a full install image rather than the cut down one. I then realised that Mythic Beasts still doesn’t have an IPv6 aware resolver yet, which we need to sort out, so I had to use Googles public resolver. This is still on my todo list along with full DNSSEC resolver support.

Happily Debian appears to work fine with IPv6 only. The mirrors are v6 enabled, so the VMs recieve updates and can install packages fine, and so far it appears to be going well.

There’s still some things to do and questions to answer: should we move apache/php processing to the front end nodes? Will WordPress Supercache and the other plugins cope in a distributed environment? Will file uploads still work? Can we solve that with NFS? Does NFS even work over IPv6? Should we install a varnish cache on the front end nodes and disable WordPress Supercache? Should we do both? Will it confuse people if we have two layers of caching that expire at different times? Is that better than what we have now? Instead of having tcp-syn cookies on the whole time we could only enable them when under attack. Have we made a dreadful mistake with the build VMS, and is it all going to go offline when Rob tries to compile OpenOffice? Should we stop worrying about all of these questions and instead work out whose job it is to buy the first round at the Cambridge beer festival?

If this is the sort of thing you’d find interesting, and you would like to be paid to solve exactly these sorts of questions, Mythic Beasts is recruiting.

http://www.mythic-beasts.com/cgi-bin/job.pl

We’re looking for both junior and senior people, we very strongly like bright motivated people who get things done, and we’re not overly impressed by certifications. We’d really like a full time person or two but are not averse to taking on summer or gap year students providing they’re smart and they get things done.

Homemade GPS receiver

via Raspberry Pi

A slightly abbreviated post today – we’ve just driven 380 miles to Phoenix from LA for Intel ISEF, where Eben’s talking tomorrow, and we’re ready to drop. But I was mailed this amazing piece of work this morning, and it really deserves your attention.

Andrew Holme is a member of the Systems Group at Broadcom Cambridge. He’s friends with several of Raspberry Pi’s engineers, and he’s been working on a homemade GPS receiver in the evenings for the last few years. Recently, he’s added a Pi to create a truly portable, battery-powered receiver.

It’s a remarkable piece of work. It shouldn’t be possible to build a GPS receiver like this out off-the-shelf parts. There is no custom silicon in this build; it’s all very, very clever use of an FPGA (field-programmable gate array) to implement the digital logic sections of the pipeline. My electronics isn’t good enough to really understand much of what’s going on here: all I can really tell you is that there’s an analogue front end and 1-bit ADC (analogue to digital converter) followed by all kinds of mad-clever digital stuff. So I’m not going to summarise what Andrew has done, but fortunately for us all he’s written the project up in incredible detail, so you can have a poke around yourself. Please do visit the link; this is one of the most impressive projects we’ve ever seen attempted with the Pi.

A bit of housekeeping: please be aware that posts this week will be a bit (or, as today, a lot) later in the day that you’re used to, because I’m several thousand miles further to the left than normal. There also won’t be quite as much Twitter activity from us as usual while we’re travelling, but the official Facebook and G+ pages will be forging ahead as normal. (Thanks Lorna!)

Guest post from DesignSpark: Oxford Raspberry Jam

via Raspberry Pi

Here’s a guest post from our friend Pete Wood at RS Component’s community arm, DesignSpark. Pete is one of the organisers of the Oxford Raspberry Jams. This post was first published at www.designspark.com.

Raspberry Jams are now being held all over the world; I’ve been trying to go to about one a month, and am lucky enough to be in Tokyo for some press and meetings while the Tokyo Jam is on later this month. There’s a list of events in each month’s MagPi, and if you’re looking for something near you, it’s worth checking the events page on our forums. If you can’t find a Jam near your home, why not look into setting one up? There’s information on how to get started at the Raspberry Jam website, which Alan O’Donohoe tells me will be getting a redesign in the coming months.

Over to Pete!

This month’s Jam held at DesignSpark HQ in Oxford UK was our biggest turnout yet, with over 30 Pi Geeks crammed into the room!

Raspberry Pi Camera

I kicked off the event by showing the new Raspberry Pi camera module, which will be available from RS Components later in May. In the picture is a pre-production module, the production version is a couple of millimetres taller. The camera gives stunning HD video from a 5MP sensor at 30 FPS.

Digital Signage

Next up was one of my RS colleagues, Pete Milne, who showed us his Digital Signage application. Pete has connected up a network of Raspberry Pis to flat screen TVs here at the RS Oxford Offices and at our main facility in Corby, Northamptonshire. The Pis run a libreoffice slideshow in a continuous loop and display Health and Safety messages for RS employees. He’s been running these continuously for over 8 weeks without having to re-boot, so it’s very robust. The Pis runs without a keyboard or mouse and the content can be updated remotely over the network.

If you want to create your own Digital Signage Application, Pete has shared how to do it on GitHub. Just follow the INSTALL file for setup details.

Wii Controller Car

Oxford Raspberry Jam regular Alex Eames presented another cool little project using a Wii controller and Nunchuck. This one was for controlling a remote control car that has an on-board Raspberry Pi with Bluetooth dongle. It also allows the control of brake lights, headlights and indicators and also drives an aircraft propeller. Alex plans to build all this into the car itself, which would need to accommodate the Pi, the electronics hanging of the GPIO, some model aircraft batteries and the motor and fan. Alex, I think you need a bigger car… how about a Monster Truck?

You can read more about Alex’s project on his blog.

Giant Video Wall

Our next demo was one that has been featured on the Raspberry Pi site a few weeks ago for a Raspberry Pi powered video wall. Alex and Colin from the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy (CCFE) have built this system in C and some Python Code. It has clever features like bezel compensation to accommodate different styles of screens. They showed a 4 screen setup, but have also run a 9+4 configuration. The software is scalable to any size or shape. Each screen needs a Pi, and one separate Pi is used as the master. This is a classic example showing that you can build your own video wall for a fraction of the price of a commercial solution that would certainly cost a lot more! Chaps, I can see a business opportunity here for screening big screen sporting events on a budget down my local pub. ;0) They expect to licence the software/design at some point. More details are available on their website.

Motion Detected Camera

Another Oxford Jam regular, Dave R, showed his Pi with a webcam motion detection system and linked to a DSLR. Dave created this for his bird table, to capture pictures of birds when they land on the table, I think I need to build a similar solution to stop my kids from stealing my Haribos…

Touch Screen Display

Paul had two projects to show. The first was a simple touch screen for the Pi to allow control and display. Paul was reading and displaying temperatures. The screens are semi-intelligent, storing screen images and having a sound output available. The screen images are loaded via a Windows app and USB connection. The Pi can then control the display of those images.

Sky Remote Controlled LED Lighting

The second demonstration was a programmable LED strip and infrared receiver, controlled by a Sky TV remote control. A simple Python script reads the codes from a remote control. He could the use this to flash the LEDs in various patterns and colours. The LEDs are driven by SPI and can be daisychained up to 1024 LEDs.

ChiPhone

Paul M and Annierei L, showed us their ChiPhone box. ChiPi is an Electronic messaging system for children allowing them to send and receive voice messages. They have designed a child friendly box with large buttons and microphone. With simple record and ‘To/play’ buttons it makes for an easy messaging system connected to the internet via WiFi. You can find out more about their project on their website.

Pi Keyword Cruncher

Pi Jam regular and Data Geek John finished off our live demos by showing us his Pi based RSS feed collector and keyword analysis tool. The Pi collects data from various RSS feeds every 30 minutes and stores the results in a MySQL database. The data is then used to monitor trends in keywords, which over time show either peaks of activity or trends of ‘chatter’ about specific topics. The advantage of John using his Raspberry Pi Instead of his 50W laptop, is that it the Pi only takes 2W and can be left on all the time. It also frees up his laptop to do other tasks.

RaspBMC Toddler In-Car Entertainment System

The final presentation of the evening from one of my Jam co-hosts Alex Gibson, who in true Hollywood awards winners style couldn’t attend in person so sent a video message! Alex’s video featured his project for a Pi based RaspBMC In-Car Toddler entertainment system. One of the most impressive bits was a headrest bracket he had printed out on his Raspberry Pi-based 3D printer.

Thanks to all those who showed their projects. Looking forward to the next event!

We have loads more excellent Raspberry Pi content on DesignSpark, check out our Raspberry Pi Design Centre.

Techradar compares five Raspberry Pi operating systems

via Raspberry Pi

There’s a really fantastic piece in Techradar and Linux Format, going into considerable depth to compare, contrast and review five Raspberry Pi operating systems. If you’ve been thinking about trying out a new distro on your Pi, it’s a great place to start. (And well done, Raspbian!)

Troubleshooting: so easy a ten-year-old can do it

via Raspberry Pi

The ten-year-old in question is Jessica, Gordon’s daughter, who dropped into the office last week to give us a hand testing some Raspberry Pis that customers had sent back to the manufacturers as “faulty”. Whenever this happens, the Pis are passed on to us or to the Sony factory in Wales where the Pis are built, and we test them to find out what’s going on and to ensure that there isn’t a bug in manufacturing.

At the moment, we see returns in the order of about 0.02% of all units (the ones Jessica is working on are on the right of her desk). The factory processes are always being refined, and we hope to see this number come down even further as all of our production transitions to the UK. As usually happens when we troubleshoot returns, though, we found that around half of Jessica’s Pis weren’t faulty at all. We can’t emphasise this enough: before you decide you’ve got a broken unit, check out the troubleshooting forum and the wiki. If your Pi doesn’t work, the first check you should make is that the power supply you’re using is a branded, reliable 5v supply. Many no-name supplies (especially in the US, for some reason) do not actually provide the voltage that they claim to, and that’s been causing all kinds of problems.

Jessica finds another working Pi. Later, we’re sending her up that ladder to clean out the asbestos tube.

You should also ensure that you’re running the latest version of Raspbian. (Lorna just mailed me this morning with another handful of emails from a group of people swearing blind their Pis are broken. They weren’t. The people in question were using SD cards with an out-of-date image that they’d bought from a third-party vendor, that didn’t work with the newer chipset on their Raspberry Pis.) If you aren’t sure about your SD card image, see this post from March. Pre-flashed cards from third party dealers on Amazon or eBay are a bit of crapshoot, and they’re something we can’t police; if you need one, get your pre-flashed card from one the companies we licence to sell the Pi itself. (See the top right of the page.) Several of Jessica’s test cases had been sent back to Farnell and RS because of this issue, and while that’s great for Jessica, it’s really frustrating for the customer who ends up without a Pi for a week and who will probably find their next Pi has the same problem, because they’re using the same card. (I am aware of one person who sent SIX Raspberry Pis back to Farnell one after the other, insisting that they were all broken, that we/Farnell were charlatans, etc. etc. In the end it turned out that he hadn’t actually flashed the SD card at all. This is an extreme case.)

We did make sure that Jessica was rewarded for all her hard work: this is what we were doing on Monday.

Thanks Jessica!

Gigapi: a Raspberry Pi rig for gigapixel photography

via Raspberry Pi

We’ve seen a number of photographers who have taken to the Pi as a way to bring down the cost of the sort of kit that was, pre-Pi, outside the budgets of mere mortals. Case in point: gigapixel photography. A gigapixel image is made up of (at least) a billion pixels, which means you’ve now got access to the sort of fine and vivid detail on your monitor that we mere humans with our shonky eyeballs could only dream of until recently.

At the moment, a camera that can take a gigapixel image all in one shot is the sort of fantasy hardware that the military is pouring millions into. But if you’re not in charge of a defence silo, you can still take your own gigapixel images by stitching together many megapixel-sized images from an SLR camera on a motorised mount into a giant, seamless mosaic with very fine detail. You’ll need something approaching a defence budget if you’re going to do this yourself without building your own hardware, though; I spent a few seconds googling and found that off-the-shelf motorised rigs for your camera can cost nearly $1000.

Tim and Jack Stocker thought this was daft, so they built their own out of MDF, some Lego turntables, and a Pi with a cheap stepper motor attached.

Gigapi in use. (We love the yellow paint job – it’s a beautifully made piece of kit.) Click to enlarge.

This is the instrument box Tim is holding in the photo above, opened so you can peer inside. Click to enlarge.

The Pi has a lot of computation to do here: Jack’s software (which you can download on GitHub) works out the horizontal and vertical angles required, the camera sensor size, the length of zoom used and the image overlap required to stitch everything together into a tidy mosaic later on. It figures out how many photos are needed to complete the picture, when the stepper motors should be moved, and by how much and in what order; and when and for how long the shutter should be opened – it also deals with the focus.

You’ll find a long description of how to reproduce the Stockers’ setup, with a parts list, enough information for you to make your own shutter control circuit and more at GigaPi.

For obvious reasons, I can’t host a sample gigapixel image here. But you can find some pictures taken with the Stockers’ rig, one of which is a simply ridiculous 15.2 gigapixels (and enormous fun; it’s full of Easter eggs, and the detail’s so good that you can count how many peanuts are left in the bird feeder) at gigapan.com.

Bonus fact of the day: Sophie Wilson, of ARM and BBC Micro fame, is also a gigapixel photographer, and she’s created some really beautiful pictures using the technique – the architectural photos are my favourites. She occasionally gives talks in and around Cambridge on the subject, minus the Raspberry Pi (I spotted an advert for one in my local post office last week). Keep an eye out if you’re in town.

 

Tokyo: Big Raspberry Jam 2013

via Raspberry Pi

Eben and I are going to be out of the UK for much of the rest of May, doing press, meeting partners, visiting Raspberry Pi fans, hanging out with science fair kids and giving talks. We’ll be in Phoenix for Intel ISEF, San Francisco for Maker Faire (come and listen to our talk! We don’t have a stand this year, but Raspberry Pis will be on sale in the Make Shed), and, most excitingly for both of us, in Tokyo for the Japanese Raspberry Pi User Group’s Big Raspberry Jam on May 25.

Masafumi Ohta, who moderates the forums here (he’s most often to be found in the Japanese language forum, but also pops up in the English sections every now and then), is running the event. Admission is free. We’ve heard from people who don’t even live in Japan who are making the trip to Tokyo; it promises to be an amazing day, with lots of hacking sessions, tutorials, talks and opportunities to meet like-minded Pi enthusiasts. We were last in Tokyo back in November; the Pi has become much more easily available in Japan since then, and we’ve even seen an official Japanese translation of the Raspberry Pi User Guide appear since our last visit. Masafumi-san’s been sending me artwork for displays and badges, and notes about the day: we can’t wait to get stuck in. RS Components, who have a large presence in the far east and are one of our two manufacturing distribution partners, will be sponsoring the event.

Eben in Akihabara Electric Town last November.

Masafumi-san has asked me to publish the following information here on the blog. If you’re in Tokyo on the day, please come and see us!

–

Japanese Raspberry Pi Users Group will hold the event to welcome Eben and Liz Upton, Founder of Raspberry Pi Foundation coming to Japan. It is for encouraging Raspberry Pi users and community in Japan, now growing up rapidly.

Gathering 150+ people at the big event – 4 sessions, 1 mini session,3 LTs and more. It is also not only for Raspberry Pi users and geeks, but also the Raspberry Pi beginners. RS Components and some companies help the event, and have booths exhibiting Raspberry Pis and some stuff (books,boards,cases…and more).

13:00-13:30 Door Open
13:30-13:40 Greeting from Japanese Raspberry Pi Users Group and RS Components
13:40-14:30 Keynote by Eben Upton of Raspberry Pi Foundation
14:30-14:40 break
14:40-15:10 Session:WordPress Home Server with Raspberry Pi by Yuriko Ikeda
15:10-15:40 Session:Scratch Hacking with Raspberry Pi by Kazuhiro Abe
15:40-15:50 break
15:50-16:20 Session:Let’s play ‘Eject Command’ with Raspberry Pi – CD-ROM Cooking with Raspberry PI by Akira Ouchi
16:20-16:50 Session:Gadget Colloquia for Unix Natives by Hiroyuki Ohno
16:50-17:00 break
17:00-17:15 Mini Session:Raspberry Pi Lego Cases Cooking by Keika Komura
17:15-17:30 Lightning Talks (5 min x3)
17:00-17:50 Introducing Raspberry Pi by RS Components
17:50-18:00 Closing event
19:00- Raspberry PIe after-party for the attendees

For more information please check Japanese Raspberry Pi Users Group website.

Registration: http://atnd.org/event/E0014486 (for Japanese)

http://bigraspberryjamtokyo2013.eventbrite.com (for Non-Japanese).

Live motion tracking

via Raspberry Pi

It is a bank holiday, and we are all quite…cheerful, post company barbecue, so I will keep this brief. Here’s a motion tracking demo from Erik Haberup. He says:

In case the Raspberry Pi team would like another example of the versatility of their product.

This is my capstone project for the University of Nebraska – Lincoln (Computer Electronics Engineering) which uses a Raspberry Pi to wirelessly transmit live motion tracking data from a set of 13 inertial measurement units.

I’ll ask Erik for some more information, but in the meantime, I thought you might like to enjoy this *outstanding* video.

A very happy first birthday to The MagPi!

via Raspberry Pi

The MagPi is a free magazine made by Raspberry Pi fans for Raspberry Pi fans. It’s the example of just how remarkable the Raspberry Pi community is that we point to most often: volunteer enthusiasts with no publishing experience have been producing a really tight, entertaining, and educational magazine for twelve months now, and it’s just getting better and better.

The MagPi is a community magazine, which is not produced or otherwise fiddled around with by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. This month’s issue is a little more Foundation-heavy than usual, though, because it’s a celebratory edition: you’ll find an article from me, and (rather more interestingly) a very in-depth interview with Pete Lomas, our Grand Vizier of Hardware.

Most excitingly of all, there’s a birthday competition this month, where you can win £1000 of Pi hardware to play with. You’ll find a really helpful comparison of Raspberry Pi operating systems, a musical tutorial, an exploration of just how the Sweetbox guys went about bringing their case to market, and much more.

I don’t have enough good things to say about the MagPi team, and the crazy amount of work they’ve put in over the last year to help people get to grips with our little computer. All of us at the Foundation are full of admiration for the year’s achievements; running a magazine isn’t trivial, and with a staff of only volunteers it’s near impossible. That the MagPi is now in a position to start offering print copies (we know of many schools which are buying up bound copies of the first few volumes as a teaching resource) is an extraordinary thing, and we couldn’t be prouder to be associated with them.

Thank you so much, all of you: the writers, editors, layout and graphics, production, distribution team, proofreading army and advertising. The Raspberry Pi would not be where it is today, with about 1.3m units sold, without support from people like you showing everybody what can be done with it. We couldn’t be more grateful.