Manchester Raspberry Jam

For Digital Makers

March 2020: Advice regarding Coronavirus(COVID-19)

Hi All, We just wanted to create a post clarifying the situation in regards to the Coronavirus(COVID-19) illness.

This months event, this Saturday 14th March will still be taking place. Raspberry Pi have passed down a few points of advice, which we would ask you follow:

If you are unwell and cannot attend, please get in touch for a full refund to your ticket, even on the day of the event.

Both we and our hosts at MMU are monitoring the advice being given by Public Health England, and will be following the recomendations provided by them. This may affect Jams in the coming months, so we’ll keep you up to date on any schedule changes as they arise.

In the meantime, we hope to see you at this weekend’s event!

Summer Holiday 2019

Manchester Raspberry Jam is on summer holidays between July and August. Our next event will be this September, with dates being confirmed in the near future.

Summer Holidays 2017

Manchester Raspberry Jam is going on summer holiday, and will not be running in July or August. Our next event will be on Saturday 9th September, the details of which can be found here.

Show and Tell Interviews

Interviews by Hayley Walsh, @moses_walsh

Show and Tell interviewees at Manchester Raspberry Jam

Despite the oh so quintessential Manchester weather this Saturday, it didn’t stop the ‘summer’ Manchester Raspberry Jam Show & Tell.

Saturday 11th June 2016 saw another successful Manchester Jam held at its home The Shed, Digital Innovation Manchester Metropolitan. This month’s Jam was different to the previous 36 as we invited the community, old and new, to come and show and tell their projects, creations and ideas with one another alongside the traditional hack style activity.

As the rain bounced down outside the Pi projects and activities flowed inside, from robots that follow lines to Dr Who’s TARDIS consoles. The wealth of imagination and passion was awesome, and it’s safe to say that MCR has a burgeoning Digital Maker Community.

For those of you who missed it don’t worry we’ll be holding another show and tell in the Shed in 2017. For now, check out some of the project and people who made them…

Continue reading

Schedule change & Workshop Materials

Upcoming Manchester Raspberry Jam events will now be occurring every other month. As before, the provisional date of each event will be the second Saturday of each scheduled month.

Following the success of other Raspberry Jam events with a less frequent schedule, such as Cambridge Raspberry Jam, we have decided to trial a bi-monthly schedule, with events held every other month. Our goal is to have several different activities and workshops at each event in the near future.

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Dave Jones’s picamera Python Module

Manchester Raspberry Jam and Python North West regular Dave Jones has been working hard on a pure Python implementation of the Pi camera module – of which he recently released a feature complete v1.0. The announcement was made by Ben Nuttall on the Raspberry Pi blog, along with example usage and demonstration of its application in a web app:

If you have a Raspberry Pi camera module, you’ve probably used raspistill and raspivid, which are command line tools for using the camera. Dave Jones, a Database Admin, software developer and SQL know-it-all based in Manchester has been working on an equivalent, feature complete implementation of these in Python. This means you can access the camera module directly from a Python script, without using os.system or executing a subprocess.

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Continue reading » A pure Python interface for the camera module: meet picamera! (raspberrypi.org)

Jam #16 Videos

A huge thanks to our AV Team for filming all of the talks at Manchester Raspberry Jam XVI in November – Les Pounder, Dan Lynch, Olly Clark and Tony Hughes.

Pi-powered Ping Pong Pursuit

Manchester-based sysadmin Will Jessop, who presented his robot (mostly made at the Manchester Hackspace) at our 16th Jam last month – has had his story featured by Ben Nuttall on the Raspberry Pi blog:

Will Jessop is a systems administrator for 37signals and he runs the North West Ruby User Group in Manchester. I bumped in to him recently and discovered he was working on a personal project with a Raspberry Pi. The aim of the project is to solve the problem of ping pong balls on the floor at the 37signals office in Chicago. The solution is a web-enabled robot with mounted camera allowing people to collect balls in to a basket.

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Continue reading » Pi-powered Ping Pong Persuit (raspberrypi.org)

Bullet Time Effect – by Andrew Robison

Andrew Robinson and the PiFace team wrote up their bullet time project, which was demonstrated at Jam 16:

Some people said we were trying to build a Raspberry Pi time machine. In some ways they were right. Others compared it to the LHC at CERN and said we would warp time and space when they saw our pictures on Facebook. They were partly right too.
And on the Friday night before the Jam it felt like we were building the LHC! With nearly half a kilometre of network cables, 48 Raspberry Pis fitted with cameras and PiFace Control and Displays we wondered if we’d finally been too ambitious with a project!

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Continue reading » Bullet Time Effect – Frozen Raspberry Pi (pifacedigital.wordpress.com)

Jam 16 Photos – from Olly Clark

Some more photos from November’s Jam – from supporter and AV Team member Olly Clark.

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Continue reading » Ben’s Last Manchester Raspberry Jam (flickr.com)