Sunday 7 June 2015

CamJam June 2015

On Saturday 6th June I travelled up to Cambridge to attend another excellent CamJam.  I had a good look around the market place as well as some of the show and tell items.

Carl Monk had couple of IoT projects on display, there was a Rocking Dino which was controlled by people sending Tweet’s, which would activate the dinosaur and play a random sound effect. The Tweeting Dino allowed the dinosaur to be activated by pressing the PiBrella button. In doing so a picture is taken and posted to a Twitter account. Cheerlights is an IoT based light control system, which works by sending a tweet containing Cheerlights and a supported colour name.  See Carl's Blog for more info on these projects.


Rocking Dino
Purple Rain















































Spencer Organ had a Raspberry Pi radio player with touch screen control and the Pipsta project, a Raspberry Pi selfie cam. This used a Raspberry Pi camera, button and a thermal printer, when you pressed the button the camera took your picture and printed it out on receipt paper.  See Spencer's blog for more info on these projects



Pipsta Selfie Camera


























Raspberry Pi Radio player
















Brian Corteil had a Raspberry Pi powered retro game console which had a joystick and arcade buttons so you could play various retro arcade games.  There was also a digital zoetrope which used 12 oled displays, this was very cool.

Retro Game Console















Zoetrope


























Steve Upton had a low res video wall which you could play space invaders on.  There were 32 strips of WS2812 addressable LEDs connected to Fadecandy boards all controlled via a Raspberry Pi. See Steve’s website for more info.



























Stewards Academy had a Pi in the Sky project on display.


























spoke to several vendors including.

Kano had their computer kit using a Raspberry Pi on display. 

















 gPiO who had their gPiO control box on display.  


gPiO Control Box
















IQaudIO were showing off their audio accessories including their new Pi-DigiAMP. 




























Redfern Electronics had the Crumble controller on display. The Crumble is an easy to use programmable controller with built in motor control and 4 inputs/outputs.



























Nevil Hunt from Innovations in Education had his new PiDapter on display which is a GPIO adaptor allowing you to connect two PiTrol games controllers to the Raspberry Pi. Visit the http://www.pidapter.com website for more info.

I brought a super cool Blinky Tape from Makersify.  See http://blinkinlabs.com/blinkytape/ for more info.


A collection of DiddyBorg's from PiBorg

















Workshops

I had agreed to help out with the soldering workshop. We showed people how to solder using scrap boards or kits they had brought.


Talks
I attended a couple of the talks, first up was.

Jim Darby who talked about using Java for real-time tasks like a 7-segement display clock, he showed us how control the Pi hardware using Pi4J. He had made a bedside clock using an old clock 7 segment display which connected to the Raspberry Pi via some 74HC595 8 bit shift registers.


Jim's Bedside clock project
















The next talk was by Graham Hastings who talked about using a Raspberry Pi for physical computing in KS2 and KS3. 


Finally Joseph Birks talked about the history and development of his Crumble controller, he demonstrated how it worked.


Joseph demo's his Crumble controller