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A screenless programming language: putting it all together
More background on this project here. This is the finished Raspberry Pi interface board, most of the circuitry here is an LED driver to light up one of the 32 programming blocks as they are being scanned, or in any pattern required depending on the needs of the particular programming language in use. The small…
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Screenless programming language: assembling the plug panel
Never seen so many VGA ports, ironic perhaps. It’s great that it’s transparent, but I’m regretting the material choice for the panel – acrylic is horrible to work with and leaves behind lots of microplastics pollution I have to carefully collect up. Lesson learnt for next time, lots more soldering to do now – then…
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Migrations in django 1.7
For the wild cricket tales project I’m using django again, the all new 1.7 version which has amongst lots of other shiny things has an all new migrations system. This is so you can change the underlying database ‘model’ for your site and it automatically tracks your changes and applies them to the data (via…
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Symbai field site testing
Some photos from Shakti Lamba who is currently testing Symbai in the Chhattisgarh state in north eastern India. The whole system is solar powered, and provides it’s own networking via the Raspberry Pi synchronisation node shown here. The android tablets also recharge from the same power source. The Raspberry Pi networking is a direct descendant…
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Wild Cricket Tales
We have a brand new citizen science project starting with the wild crickets research group at Exeter University! These researchers are examining how evolution works with insects in their natural environment, rather than in lab conditions. In order to do this they have hundreds of CCTV cameras set up recording the burrows of field crickets,…
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Building a screenless programming language for the Raspberry Pi #6
Following on from the last in this mini series, the giant 16 byte multiplexer is finished and tested – lots of head scratching due to shorts and wonky solder joints (it’s amazing how sensitive CMOS logic is, interference on accidental free pins causes strange effects) and I’ve replaced the breadboard with a new interface board…
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Hindi translations in Symbai
A couple of screenshots of the hindi version of Symbai – our solar powered Raspberry Pi/Android anthropological research tool. As is usual we’re still having a few issues with the unicode but it’s nearly there. We’ve been working on this software for the last few months, making sure the data (including photos and audio recordings…
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Screenless programming language #5
Update after the last post. After many hours soldering 75% of the board is complete! The Pi can now address a whopping 12 bytes of data. After thinking about it for a while, and checking with the languages I’m planning to use – I’ve decided to double the number of instruction ‘slots’ by halving the…
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Screen-less programming language (#3)
Since the last update I’ve connected the Raspberry Pi to the board, and after a bit of debugging I have a python script that polls bytes (more accurately 4 bit ‘nibbles’) via the GPIO ports from 16 addresses. I didn’t blow up the Pi, although I did cause hard resets a couple of times with…
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A talk on citizen science games and teaching programming
From earlier in the year at Thinking Digital 2014 in Gateshead.