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I realise I have slightly disappeared from the blogging scene here for a bit.  I blame those monstrous things known as coursework assignments!  I don't think there is as big a barrier to creativity and innovation in schools as having to force pupils through a a standardised assessment system.  Perhaps a longer term question of philosophy for the Pi and its community is could it be used as a basis for establishing assessment systems in schools which encourage true creativity and innovation?  Nothing wrong in thinking big here :-)

Anyways back to the Pi and its progress in school.  All I can really say is I have the kit to plug it in and switch it on and come Friday we will do just that.  I have found the linux images suggested through the Raspberry Pi site and will be loading these on to the SD card in the next day or two.

So all friday will be is simply switch the Pi on and see what happens.  No lesson plan - just go for it. Read more

My son Ben is 9, a mirror image of myself at his age, into Lego, Star Wars and computer games.  We’ve been following the Raspberry Pi story together for sometime now with great interest.  The great thing about the Pi, is that it allows him to experience computing as I did back in the 1980’s with early home computers like the BBC Micro, where we actually played with the computer itself rather than just playing games on them.

We were lucky to get our hands on one of the first few Pi’s and so I’d like to share with you how we got on with it.

Setting up the SD card was relatively straight forward using the instructions on the official site's Downloads section, but obviously beyond the average 9 year old.  We went with the Debian image as it seemed to work well and isn't too complicated.  Having said that, there are a lot of menu options within the LXDE menu and it is not immediately obvious what most of them are for.

The biggest hurdle we faced initially was that the image did not fit on the screen properly.  This turned out to be due to something called "overscan" (which I had never heard of) which seems to affect televisions more than monitors.  This meant that the login prompt and the menus were all off the screen which made life difficult.  Luckily, the RPi website contained some instructions for creating a file called config.txt which, amongst other things, can be used to specify how m… Read more

RS Components is delighted to have participated in a full day of academic engagement with the Hong Kong University of Science & Technology (HKUST) Department of Electronics & Computer Engineering, which hosted a half-day curriculum consultation with leading companies in the industry including RS Components, followed by a half-day student presentation of Final Year Projects (FYP).

During the morning discussion, HKUST Head of Department of E&CE, Prof. Ross Murch, introduced the new 4-year curriculum of the department that will start the offering in September, and that contains 3 undergraduate programs.  After sharing the "engineering minds" of how the curriculum was constructed, APAC General Manager of RS Components, Mr. Richard Huxley, commented the importance of allowing cross-discipline selective classes to be offered, as the world nowadays is highly interconnected.  An example is how much software is needed to enable hardware design, so an electronics engineer cannot just study all classes related to hardware only. Other than discussions of the curriculum, participating companies also exchanged views on the skillsets of talents that they desire to see the university to cultivate.

The fun part came in the afternoon, when representatives of the Industry Advisory Board were invited to walk around the 11 booths of Final Year Project and listen to students present their year-long project.  Here is HKUST's Final Year Project website tha… Read more

So there are lots of development boards out now. And since the introduction of the Arduino there are lots of clones around too which is good in my view. So this is what I have to say is the smallest development kit I have come across so far, The Freetronics LeoStick.

For just $29.95 this is in the pocket money area for cost, or a round of pints. The board runs on a Atmel ATmega32u4. The LeoStick is all you would expect from a Arduino clone with 4 analog inputs and 14 digital I/Os along with all the 3v3 and 5volt access oh and a Piezo on the back. LEDs however have a little bit extra to offer. There are two tri / RGB LEDs. Once acting as the power / RX / TX connection. The other is connected to three of the digital outputs. However the thing that makes the LeoStick standout is its design.The board is a little thicker than normal as the end of the board is a USB connector. Thats is PCB is the connector that will plug straight into your computer so no cables needed! But what was it like to use?

Well first off I downloaded the standard Arduino 1.0 environment. There are then instructions on how you can download and update the environment so that you can ‘just’ select the LeoStick from the list of boards. You will also need to download the LeoStick USB drivers. This does make it compatible and very easy to use. However was a t… Read more