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.
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!
Our Founder, Ben Nuttall, recently moved to Cambridge to begin working at the Raspberry Pi Foundation. He’ll be doing web development work and some outreach – including education, workshops, talks and projects.
We’re welcoming a new member to the team at Pi Towers today. Some of you already know Ben Nuttall from his work on the Pi Weekly email newsletter (if you haven’t signed up already, you should), his hosting of the Manchester Jams, and his STEM activities.
I learned a lot, and it was great to meet most of the Pi foundation people for the first time.
Two things in particular stood out for me, one about how to work with schools and one about the mobile hot-swap UPS battery gizmo that we’ve been building (and which I demo’d in various applications at the Jam).
Charlotte Godley’s write-up of the big Manchester Jam:
Unlike normal Mancunian Jams, this one included talks from several different people who write and create things using the pi, including a Q&A with Liz and Eben Upton, as well as Clive Beale, the education manager for the Foundation. Personally I signed up for doing two: one on GPIO, which I pretty much always do, and another on the Adafruit WebIDE. Heh. Both went wrong
