Tag: raspberry pi
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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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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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Thinking outside of the screen (#1)
I’m starting a new exploratory project to build a screen-less programming language based on two needs: A difficulty with teaching kids programming in my CodeClub where they become lost ‘in the screen’. It’s a challenge (for any of us really but for children particularly) to disengage and think differently – e.g. to draw a diagram…
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dBsCode summer school
At the end of July I helped out with the dbscode summer school. The idea of this two week course was to encourage algorithmic literacy, with focus on employment – agile methods and test driven development (TDD), and aiming at people about to enter, or re-enter employment rather than the teenagers we focused on in…
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Mongoose 2000: Group composition
I’ve recently been building the Mongoose 2000 “group composition” tool that the researchers will use for recording information about a whole pack of mongooses (and synchronise data via a Raspberry Pi providing a local wifi node) in their field site in Uganda. As I wrote a bit about before, one of the interesting things about…
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Why teach Kids Coding? (Royal Cornwall Show update)
On Saturday I teamed up with Falmouth University’s Makernow team to do a kids coding event at the Royal Cornwall Show with a new Raspberry Pi cube (based on the one used at the DeerShed Festival last year). We had a constant stream of families and kids wanting to try Scratch coding, and we had…
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Thoughts on teaching programming with Minecraft and Python
Saturday saw the first dBsCode taster workshop, for budding programmers between 11 and 16. We set up 20 Raspberry Pi’s, which we networked together and used our new procedural Minecraft 3D shape primitives to build a number of projects in Python involving castles, spiders and an infinite house generator. Networking was very important – it…