Introducing a new breadboard and component kit

Breadboard & Components Hobby/Education Kit for Raspberry Pi (Chapter 6 Hardware Kit)

 

The mini breadboard kit includes some of the components used in Chapter 6 of my book, plus are ideal for a number of starter projects (traffic lights, RGB colour mixing, timed response challenge, memory game etc).

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Mini-Breadboard Kit

The mini-breadboard kit includes all the components needed to complete several small hardware projects.  This kit is intended to provide all the parts you need to complete the following recipes from my book:

• Controlling an LED
• Responding to a Button
• Controlled Shutdown Button

Add a Self-Solder Combo Kit

The Mini-Breadboard & Self-Solder Combo Kit contains everything to complete all the examples in Chapter 6 of the book, including two self-solder kits (the RGB-LED and D-Pad modules used in the more advanced recipes).

Mini-Breadboard & Self-Solder Combo Kit – For everything in Chapter 6

The Mini-Breadboard & Self-Solder Combo Kit contains everything to complete all the examples in Chapter 6 of the book, including two self-solder kits (the RGB-LED and D-Pad modules used in the more advanced recipes).

RGB-LED Kit B (Includes GPIO Cable)

Used in the following sections in Chapter 6 of the book:

• Multiplexed color LEDs
• There’s more… Hardware Multiplexing
• There’s more… Displaying random patterns
• There’s more… Mixing multiple colors

There are also lots of lessons already on the site for the RGB-LED kit

D-Pad / Game Controller Kit B (Includes GPIO Cable)

Used in the following sections in Chapter 6 of the book:

• The GPIO keypad input
• There’s more… Generating other key combinations
• There’s more… Emulating mouse events
• See also – Can also be used with the game examples created in Chapter 4

I hope by providing these kits people can try out all the examples and material now available, and enjoy using hardware and electronics with the Raspberry Pi.

See the Breadboard & Components Kit (Ch6 Kit) product page for more details, or the Shop to purchase.

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Note regarding the hardware in other chapters of the book:

I currently do not have plans to release kits for the other chapters 7, 8, 9 and 10.  This is because these chapters mainly make use of existing hardware modules which are available to buy directly from other retailers.  If I were to stock all of the modules used I would need to buy for them for the same price and then add extra (to cover my time, cost of stock etc etc).  I would have to take an existing product, add a markup and sell it on.  Unfortunately I don’t have the time and resources to do this cost effectively, therefore, it would not provide good value for money for people.

The book contains details on the places which stock the items, but let me know if you have difficulty getting a particular item so I can find an alternative and provide details on the website.

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New RGB-LED Lesson 5!

I am pleased to announce a new lesson for the RGB-LED kit.

The RGB-LED Lesson 5 – Creating a Graphical User Interface shows how to create a GUI using Tkinter and use it to interface with the RGB-LED kit (or with some adaption your own hardware).

This lesson provides an excellent introduction to Tkinter, mapping keyboard keys to the screen and finally interfacing graphical objects directly to hardware.  All of which are extremely useful skills!

This lesson will be followed up soon with another one which will make use of this GUI and the RGB-LED kit further, so watch this space!

As always, let me know how you get on.

MagPi Birthday Presents!

We all love Birthdays (well at least until the number of years get too high)!

Happy 1st Birthday to the MagPi

Latest MagPi with Massive Birthday Competition

As some of you may know the Raspberry Pi celebrated their 1st year of selling the Raspberry Pi during the ‘Witching Hour’ of 28th Feb this year (having released on 29th Feb 2012) and selling well over 1 million units in their first year.

This month it was the turn of the MagPi, as one of its founders I am very pleased to see we made it through a whole year.  Massive credit to the whole team, each and everyone have put in crazy hours at some stage or another to get the magazine produced and I really feel the results are well worth it.  It is important to remember that it is down to the combined effort of the team from all over the world, that the melting pot of skills produces such an excellent result.

Anyway, as proud of the magazine as I am, please do make up your own mind about it and feel free to read, share and hopefully enjoy its content with as many as you can (the whole point of the magazine is to share the skills/knowledge/enthusiasm which drives the Raspberry Pi community as a whole).

We encourage contributions, feedback and assistance from the community, as we want you all to have a magazine which you can all be proud of too!  Contact details: editor@themagpi.com

If you don’t already know by now, the magazine is 100% FREE to download (from www.themagpi.com) or view online at Issuu.com (in HTML5/Flash).  There are 12 Issues of Raspberry Pi filling, and a new issue is released at the beginning of each month, so don’t miss the next one!

You can follow @TheMagP1 on twitter (or more informally from the team @MagPiTeam).

Also, if you like to hear about what I am up to too then I am on twitter too @RSSTab (and I will be using @PiHardware for this site).

Birthday Presents…for you!

What are your thoughts… hungry for hardware, lusting for lessons or gaga for guides?

I thought I would see what the world thinks, and let you choose what I should do next.

I’ve set it to allow you to vote on more than one thing if you want to.

Thanks, I look forward to seeing the results.

Using C to control the RGB-LED kit!

It is always a pleasure hearing about what people are doing with the kits.

I met Andy and Carlos at the workshop I ran in Bristol (the other week).  Since then they have built their kits and have been experimenting with driving it with C to great success.

Andy has provided a link to the github, where you should be able to download and try the code they’ve created. andywarduk / LEDs on GitHub

If you’ve not used GitHub before, you can browse through the source files directly on the site, as well as download a source zip file by clicking on the little cloud icon on the page.

You can even grab the latest to the Raspberry Pi with the command:

wget https://github.com/andywarduk/LEDs/archive/master.zip
unzip master.zip

They have used the basic GPIO examples which Dom and Gert (from Raspberry Pi foundation fame) posted on the Raspberry Pi wiki way back (in fact, it may have been me who added it for them…I used to do the wiki for a while).

Andy and Carlos have provided some excellent examples here, called “rainbow”, “shades”, “knightrider”, “coloursweep” and “spectrum”.  I’ll leave you to try them out, see what they do (in case you couldn’t guess) and of course adjust and learn from!  Just follow the instructions in their README file.

I’ve been intending to cover C at some point myself (having time to do so is always an issue), since often C provides that little bit of extra speed which Python can lack (and as you can tell looking at the code, it isn’t a million miles apart from Python syntax).  I highly recommend trying a little C programming, since you will find that many embedded processors can be programmed using code which is complied from C.

Multi-Colour RGB LED Workshop Follow-up

Multi-Colour LED Workshop Follow-Up

The Multi-Colour RGB LED kit connected to a Raspberry Pi

This relates to the workshop which was held on 20th April 2013:

Raspberry Pi @Bristol Boot Camp

Early Saturday morning, ready for the workshop!

Thanks!

First a big thanks to BCS (British Computing Society), @Bristol, and Bristol University for organising the event.  Big thank you for everyone who turned up for the event (I’ve no idea of the actual numbers, but over 200+ at least throughout the day).

A special thank you for my wife, who worked just as hard as me preparing for the workshop (she was clipping LED legs into the early hours), and also to my brother who was kind enough to help out on the day (despite never having held a Raspberry Pi before let alone used one).

An extra thank you to the people who attended my workshop!  You were all very patient and keen, an excellent combination.

As far as I am aware, everyone had a great time.  The whole place had a real buzz of energy and excitement.

Fellow MagPi Colin Deady, set up an extensive MagPi stand and drop in clinic (yes with sweets! GENIUS).

The workshop

It was my first workshop, and I had little idea of what to expect.

A major challenge of the workshop, was running it without any Keyboards and Monitors, so it was down to people either bringing their own (I did manage to get most working but this did detract from the workshop itself and took me away from helping people getting started with the workshop itself).  Everyone was great, and we managed to get most sorted out and running.

I loved running the workshop, some wonderful people and some exceptionally clever kids!  It really underlined to me, that if you provide the means and the information, they will take and run with it!

As it happens, I provided far more material than most were able to work through in the time available (although a few groups stayed and worked through it anyway).

One group even took it a stage further wiring the RGB-LEDs up to become a treasure detector in Minecraft!

Getting everything wired up!

Multi-Colour RGB LED Workshop @Bristol Science Centre Tomorrow

Multi-Colour LED Workshop

The Multi-Colour RGB LED kit connected to a Raspberry Pi

I’m really looking forward to the workshop tomorrow where we will be setting up the RGB-LED Units and learning GPIO, Python and perhaps even some Scratch (if we have time).

If you are in Bristol (UK) tomorrow, then make sure you grab one of the remaining tickets for FREE and get some Raspberry Pi training at the BCS Bootcamp!  I’ll see you there (along with The MagPi, Bristol University and PiCars to mention a few).

For more details see the following link:

Raspberry Pi @Bristol Boot Camp

As part of the workshop, I’ve written two more lesson’s for the Multi-Colour RGB LED Kit, which will join all the others on the site in the next few weeks (just see the bar at the top for the full list).  Yet more python skills!

Our very colourful RGB-LED Rainbow!

Don’t forget you can order your own kit, from the Shop!

Introducing Scratch GPIO Universal Translator

As mentioned at the end of the last Scratch lesson, using the bit patterns to control the RGB-LED kit can get a little confusing, and it really does not fit in with how user friendly Scratch is intended to be. So, we need to help our friend Scratch talk to the RGB-LED kit in a way that is slightly more natural.

Scratch still can’t make him self understood by his new friend, we need to help him!

So how do we translate what Scratch is saying into a format that the scratch_gpio_handler can understand?

MORE New Lessons!

Another New lesson available:

RGB-LED Lesson 3 (Scratch GPIO) – Some Simple Steps

This lesson takes you through the basic steps of getting started using Scratch and in particular creating your first Scratch GPIO script.

Quick Scratch script for testing the RGB Kit

There should be no reason now why you can’t have a go and allow a small bit of the virtual world to become real!

New Lesson! Scratch On.

New lesson available:

RGB-LED Lesson 2 (Scratch GPIO) – Getting Started

With thanks to SimpleSi – http://cymplecy.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/scratch-controlling-the-gpio-on-a-raspberrypi/

We can now attach the RGB-LED kit to Scratch and interact with the real world!

Scratch gets a friend to help with GPIO hardware.

With a little help from the scratch_gpio_handler.py, Scratch can control REAL things!

Perhaps soon Scratch will turn your lights off at night, and make you breakfast in the morning!

There will be a follow up soon which will introduce some new methods to customise the interface for controlling hardware.

Note: This is different to the lesson which I mentioned before, that one (python) is still in development, so watch this space!