We can hardly keep up with everything going on with Raspberry Pi and PiFace! We know the blog has been quiet for a while, but it’s because so much has been going on behind the scenes.
We’ve got lots planned, an enclosure for PiFace, some tutorials and projects and a new website, so check back soon.
Congratulations to Richard Pate School for their super entry that uses PiFace Digital, in the “PA Consulting Raspberry Pi Competition”. This video features the children showing a school assembly how their invention works. http://www.richardpate.co.uk/raspberrypi/index.html There’s also a link to a write up about their achievement. As well as budding computer scientists they’re clearly confident communicators too.
The BBC have covered it here: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21882845 .
It’s really great to see this — the PiFace was designed to make it really easy for anyone to control things and sense inputs. In this case the children have used it to control the lock on the door and drive LEDs to indicate the status. The young inventors have used Scratch, and it shows what we’ve seen at workshops — no one is too young to learn to program!
So, congratulations to all involved, I’m sure that in the future we’ll see some of these youngsters as the engineers of the future, and who knows what they’ll go on to achieve.
Last week, Raspberry Pi received an amazing response at Bett http://www.bettshow.com, a huge show about educational technology at ExCeL centre, London. For some teachers, it was the first time they’d seen a Raspberry Pi.
On Thursday, Robert Mullins, co-founder of Raspberry Pi gave a talk to the vast Bett Arena. Mark Dorling from CAS, and Christine Swan also shared their experiences of teaching in schools. This showed that teaching with Raspberry Pi was achievable, and it can be used in the classroom. On a personal note I was pleasantly surprised to see Christine showing her use of PiFace with her students to build Raspberry Pi controlled Lego buggies. Mark Dorling described his experience of teaching computing at primary level, including getting computational concepts across through dance activities with Scratch.
OCR, a UK exam board, were there showing their support for the Raspberry Pi, and how it was livening up lessons in ICT and computing. As the photo shows, their presentation was rammed with standing room only.
I was amazed by Rob Bishop’s energy as he did demo after demo on the overflowing OCR stand. OCR have produced some lesson resources, with more being added soon. http://www.ocr.org.uk/qualifications/by-subject/ict/raspberry-pi/ It was personally a great honour to bump into Raspberry Pi founder Jack Lang on the stand. As Liz describes him at http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/2926, he truly is a brilliant man. I do hope that Raspberry Pi inspires youngsters to go off and reach equivalent achievements.
I’ve always felt that activities should fundamentally excite young people, so they want to learn about computing – it’s the same motivation for the twittering chicken http://www.itv.com/news/granada/update/2013-01-08/computer-tells-world-when-you-raid-the-cupboards/. The screaming singing jelly baby is a fab, really simple but imaginative example of interfacing with the Raspberry Pi. A couple of paper clips are inserted into a jelly baby which when squeezed complete the circuit, triggering the playback of a scream song. Clive Beale, the new Director of education for the Pi Foundation was also on hand and discussing plans to get the Pi in the hands of more children.
At the Computing At School http://www.computingatschool.org.uk/ discussion, Raspberry Pi was high on the agenda – the main theme being the importance of giving teachers an idea of what can be achieved with embedded computing. To that end, carried along by the enthusiasm in the room, in less than 30 seconds Rob Bishop had proposed an event, OCR had generously offered to support it, and I’d offered to host it! The event will likely be in the next couple of months, to help teachers realise the potential for Raspberry Pi as an embedded platform, and how this can help them teach computing/ICT. More details will be published when finalised.
Despite an exhausting few days, one of the big pluses about these events is the energy that comes from meeting other like-minded and passionate people and seeing how they are improving education. Miss Philbin aka http://www.ictwithmissp.co.uk/ and the founder of http://www.geekgurldiaries.co.uk gave a number of talks, including her development and use of e-portfolios with Google Apps.
I truly am amazed by the energy and dedication some people (especially teachers) have and hope their efforts encourage other teachers to excite youngsters about computing and ICT, and undoubtedly this is helped along by the Raspberry Pi.
PiFace Digital is one of the quickest and easiest way to connect your Raspberry Pi to the real world. Follow this guide and you’re Raspberry Pi will be reacting to switches and controlling motors and lights in less than ten minutes!
Always disconnect the power before connecting anything to your Raspberry Pi or PiFace Digital.
PiFace Digital sits neatly above the Raspberry Pi and connects using the expansion connector. Take care to ensure all expansion pins are lined up with the holes on the PiFace socket. Check the alignment for left and right and front and back and never force the boards together if they don’t slide smoothly.
The fastest way to get started is to download a prepared operating system image and copy it to an SD card. Images are available from http://pi.cs.man.ac.uk/download.
Alternatively, you can install the necessary libraries to your own Raspbian image with the instructions below.
PiFace Digital communicates to the Raspberry Pi using the SPI interface. The SPI interface driver is included in the later Raspbian distributions but is not enabled by default. You can always enable the SPI driver, or you can load it by hand when required.
Always enabling SPI
To always enable the SPI driver:
sudo nano etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf
#blacklist spi-bcm2708
Alternatively, to load the SPI driver by hand (will not be loaded on reboot):
· Type in a terminal:
sudo modprobe spi-bcm2708
Next, you we need to install the PiFace Digital libraries and change the permissions of the SPI interface. The following script automates this into one command.
To install and setup the software, ensure your Pi can access the Internet and type:
sudo apt-get update
wget -O – http://pi.cs.man.ac.uk/download/install.txt | bash
The software will complete installing in a few minutes.
Reboot your Pi by typing:
sudo reboot
After installing the software and restarting, login and startx.
Start the PiFace emulator by typing in a terminal:
piface/scripts/piface-emulator
1. To manually control the outputs, in the PiFace Emulator window, click Override Enable.
2. Toggle Output Pin 1 on by clicking on it. The PiFace interface will click as the relay turns on and the corresponding LED will illuminate. Notice the graphic onscreen updates to show the LED being on, the contacts have changed over on the relay and the first output pin is on.
The LEDs are in parallel with the outputs terminal connectors and indicate when the output is enabled.
1. We want to observe the inputs so click Keep inputs updated checkbox so the emulator reads the buttons and updates the screen. The interval sets how often the inputs are read, for most cases, it is fine to leave it on 500ms.
2. Press one of the buttons on the bottom left of PiFace. Notice how the onscreen representation changes to indicate the switch has been pressed.
To use Piface with Python import the piface.pfio module:
import piface.pfio
Before use, the board must be initialised with a call to init() .
There are three main functions to control the interface
· digital_read(pin_number)
o returns 1 or 0 depending on the state of the input numbered pin_number
· digital_write(pin_number, state)
o sets the output numbered pin_number to state 0 or 1. State 1 turns the LED on and enables to open collector to sink current
· digital_write_pullup(pin_number, state)
o sets a 10k pullup on input numbered pin_number to be state 0 or 1. State 1 is pullup enabled
PiFace appeared on TV news. It’s behind the latest workshop to allow children to connect a Raspberry Pi up to monitor a cupboard. It’s a fun example that shows what’s possible.
http://www.itv.com/news/granada/update/2013-01-08/computer-tells-world-when-y…
A reed switch is connected to the PiFace and a magnet is stuck on a cupboard door. When the door is opened the circuit is broken and PiFace causes the Raspberry Pi to tweet and issue a verbal warning. The whole project only took about 20 minutes to make and reusing a previous workshop that used an animatronic chicken to follow and read out on twitter.
The first in a series of tutorials ‘Easy as Pi’ describes how you can make your own.
Sometimes an event really energises me and makes the hard work worthwile. London’s Raspberry Jam at Mozilla’s offices was one such event. The jam was slightly different to others in that it was aimed at children. Everyone seemed to have a good time and it was good to see children clearly engaged with the Pi and getting creative. I presented a session on using Scratch with PiFace. There were some great questions, loads of ideas, and I’m proud to say my Scratch is better after picking up tips from some real Scratch experts, some of which were less than ten!
Mozilla’s space is fab and truth be known I was slightly awestruck being in a company that supplies a browser that’s used by millions of people every day. It shows how rewarding computing to be and how it makes a real difference to the world. It’s these sort of reasons that make us realise why we’re trying to get more people interested in coding and sharing our passion.
It was great to meet GeekGurlDiaries creator, aka teaching ICT with Miss P, aka C. A. Philbin demonstrated her box of geek which is really neat. Rob Bishop from the Foundation was suitably inspiring, (buy a t-shirt from him!). Meeting such enthusiastic and passionate people is really energising. Alan O’Dononhoe, aka teknoteacher was there, father of Raspberry Jams.
The twittering chicken had a bit of a make over and travelled to Electronica in Germany, where it was a huge hit with visitors on the element14 stand!
We’d love to see an army of twittering soft toys — instructions for building will be available soon — so if you build your own please send us a video and we’ll showcase it here!
If you want your own PiFace board then I’d suggest you sign up now at
http://piregistration.element14.com/signup.html
so you secure your place in the queue. The sooner you sign up the sooner you’ll receive your interface!
