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Your votes have been counted: there was a clear winner. Congratulations to Fergal Butler, who was the first person to respond to the original post with the name Babbage.
Well done Fergal! Emma will be in touch with you next week to get your address. The prototype bear has already found a home with Clive’s little girl, and production Babbage won’t be with us for a couple of weeks, but we’ll make sure yours is the first to be sent out.
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We’ve been choosing bear names for the competition today.
A name has been chosen! See our latest post to find out what it was.
We ended up with a shortlist of the best names, and set to voting.
Thirty seconds after this, the shouting started. Note that Gordon has drawn a Darlington pair (badly) to explain things to the software guys, who are slow to catch on.
Unfortunately, we ended up in deadlock, with four votes each for Darlington and Babbage. Eben went so far as to try cheating, and added some extra ticks when he thought nobody was looking.
So we’ve decided we need your help. The two choices we’ve boiled things down to are Babbage and Darlington. We’d like you to let us know which you prefer. Please leave a comment letting us know which is your favourite! (Babbage and Darlington only, please; we know some of you want to call the bear Pinus after Linus Torvalds, but there were all kinds of problems with that.)
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In about a month’s time, we’re going to be launching a brand-new range of Raspberry Pi merchandise. (My desk is currently awash with notebooks, gym bags, pencils, mugs, umbrellas and…stuff.)
This little guy is going to be one of the additions to the line-up.
He’s soft, he’s cuddly, he’s only about 20cm tall, and he doesn’t have a name yet. That’s where you come in.
To win a bear, as well as some other goodies I’ll select from what’s kicking around in the office, and to have your choice of name used in the shop, leave a comment below with your chosen name, with an explanation of why you selected it. (Make sure the email address you log in with is a genuine one, so we can get in touch with you if you win.) The competition ends at midnight on Tuesday April 16.
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We’ve sent the first camera boards to production, and we’re expecting to be able to start selling them some time in April. And we’ve now got several pre-production cameras in the office that we’re testing and tweaking and tuning so the software will be absolutely tickety-boo when you come to buy one.
Gordon is in charge of things camera, and he’s got ten boards to give away. There is, however, a catch.
The reason we’re giving these cameras away is that we want you to help us to do extra-hard testing. We want the people we send these boards to to do something computationally difficult and imaginative with them, so that the cameras are pushed hard in the sort of bonkers scheme that we’ve seen so many of you come up with here before with your Pis, and so that we can learn how they perform (and make adjustments if necessary). The community here always seems to come up with applications for the stuff we do that we wouldn’t have thought of in a million years; we thought we should take advantage of that.
So we want you to apply for a camera, letting us know what you’re planning to do with it (and if you don’t do the thing you promise, we’ll send Clive around on his motorbike to rough you up). We want you to try to get the camera doing something imaginative. Think about playing around with facial recognition; or hooking two of them up together and modging the images together to create some 3d output; or getting the camera to recognise when something enters the frame that shouldn’t be there and doing something to the image as a result. We are not looking for entries from people who just want to take pictures, however pretty they are. (Dave Akerman: we’ve got one bagged up for you anyway, because the stuff you’re taking pictures of is cool enough to earn an exemption here. Everybody else, see Dave’s latest Pi in Space here. He’s put it in a tiny TARDIS.)
So if you have a magnificent, imaginative, computationally interesting thing you’d like to do with a Raspberry Pi camera board, email iwantacamera@raspberrypi.org. In your mail you’ll need to explain exactly what you plan to do; and Gordon, who is old-school, is likely to take your application all the more seriously if you can point to other stuff you’ve done in the past (with or without cameras), GitHub code or other examples of your fierce prowess. (He suggested I ask for your CVs, but I think we’ll draw the line there.) We will also need your postal address. The competition is open worldwide until March 12. We’re looking forward to seeing what you come up with!
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To celebrate our first anniversary, RS Components, one of our two main manufacturing distributors, are releasing a limited edition of 1000 blue Raspberry Pis. These Pis are very cute: there’s something really handsome about that blue. They come with a certificate of authenticity signed by Eben and a matching blue case from One Nine Design in Wales; and blue, as drinkers of Slush Puppy should be aware, is the canonical colour of raspberry flavouring. (Do not eat this Pi.)
There’s a catch. You won’t be able to buy these Pis. The majority of them are being donated to charitable causes involving kids and education. But some are also being held back as competition prizes, and you can win one yourself.
For four weeks from today, everyone who tweets #bluepi to @RSElectronics along with a suggestion for uses for a blue Pi, or with a great Pi design idea, will be entered into a competition to win one. (Please tweet your entries to @RSElectronics – don’t leave your entry here in the comments, because it won’t be counted.) Every week, the top ten entries will be selected by a panel from RS and the Raspberry Pi Foundation, and those ten winners will be sent a blue Pi. Easy! There will be another competition when these four weeks are up – RS will be running Blue Pi events until June.
Terms and conditions are available at RS’s website.
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We first met Paul Beech in 2011, when he won a competition we were running to find a logo design. (That’s it, up at the top of the page.) Paul, Eben and I hit it off immediately over a shared love of toast and dripping. Since then, Paul’s become a familiar face here at the Raspberry Pi farm, especially since he set up a small business called Pimoroni with his friend Jon Williamson, and started making the Pibow, which we still think is the best-looking case that’s available for the Raspberry Pi.
This is a bit of a special time for us. It’s the first anniversary of the Raspberry Pi’s launch on Friday (or Thursday, depending how you count; we launched on a leap day last year). You’ll be able to read more about that on Friday, but to celebrate, Pimoroni have launched a competition with one of the most drool-worthy prizes I’ve seen. Paul says:
A lot of you have asked for custom Pibows. Alas, we’re not set up for it, but you can always grab the design and get your own cut. For everyone else, there’s this competition.
The aim is simple, show us your tasteful/useful/insane* vision for your own custom Pibow.
The person who comes up with the best design wins a customised Pibow – and everything that’s in this box. (And the box.) Click the image for the entry page.
What’s in there? You’ll get a special Pibow, made to your custom design, AND:
Jon adds:
This is a totally spiffy and positively super collection of useful stuff to pimp, mod, and extend your Raspberry Pi with. Even better you can tote it around with you as your own awesome mobile hacker space! This is all stuff we use ourselves at Pimoroni Towers so we know you’ll love it.
Paul interrupts:
Gotta mention the mini-servos and the 7-seg displays, and the range of resistors and caps. anna anna pony anna anna hekiloptor!
(Have to admit, I have absolutely no idea what Paul is on about – I’m not sure if you get mini-servos, and I’m almost certain you don’t get ponies or helicopters as part of the prize.)
So get to it, and submit your designs for the competition. We’ll be featuring the winner here so everyone else can sulk jealously at your good fortune.