Just a quick note for those commenting on posts. There will now be a Sweet Captcha at the bottom, with 4 pictures plus another picture on the right. The instruction will say something like drag the milk to the coffee. It’s easy, and actually takes more time to describe it than to do it.
Please let us know how the new feature works for you. Other than bots or Mechanical Turks, I look forward to your comments!
Ripples on a pond
Besides the normal, expected interest from adult tinkerers, engineers and programmers, Raspberry Pi – the computer and the Foundation – have generated quite a stir in the education community. It only makes sense the greatest effect so far is in the UK, since that’s where the idea originated. But the interest, the “stir” is definitely there, and may be instructive to us on the other side of the pond.
Back to basics for a moment: the reason the Foundation came up with the idea of a $35 computer is to ensure a better supply of truly prepared high school students ready to major in Computer Science in college. This could succeed in two ways. First, as we’ve seen, adults and children, clubs and home-schoolers, buy the Raspberry Pi on their own, experiment, then share their experience with a growing but informal community. Next, after some time, the idea catches on with the formal educational community, that is, with schools and their curricula.
Frankly, I thought the second phase would take several years, but I guess that’s just my linear thinking. The Pi has gathered quite some momentum, with sales, talks and demonstrations, roadshows and other events. Now, the following two news items appeared.
Google donates funding, not just for 15,000 computers but for the accompanying instructional materials to help get kids up to speed. I also think it’s telling that the funding for the instructional materials is not donated to the government at large but to several different but related organizations with proven records in this area: CoderDojo, Code Club, Computing at Schools, Generating Genius, Teach First and OCR.
To bring British high school curricula up to date, the new qualifications add computer science on an equal level with Physics, Biology and Chemistry as core science subjects. This will have a huge impact.
The statement release by the Department for Education is comprehensive and I’ll quote just a couple of items.
Michael Gove
Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years… Instead of children bored out of their minds being taught how to use Word and Excel by bored teachers, we could have 11-year-olds able to write simple 2D computer animations using an MIT tool called Scratch. By 16, they could have an understanding of formal logic previously covered only in University courses and be writing their own Apps for smartphones.
Ian Livingstone, Life President Eidos and Chair of Next Gen Skills
Enabling children to become digital makers as well as digital users is like them learning to write as well as read.
I’ll try best I can to anticipate some questions. One is “what’s wrong with Word and Excel?” Another is “didn’t they (England) have computers in schools before? Don’t we also, in the US, have computers in schools already?”
Nothing is wrong with Word and Excel. It’s very useful to use word processing and spreadsheets. However, it is not computer science, though are sometimes confused. This is the answer to the second question too. This may sound like ICT (Information and Computer Technology) against Computer Science, but it’s not. We need both. We need tools, and that implies we need to be well trained users, sure. But who makes the tools? We also need the makers, whether their encouragement comes from a big local splash or a few quiet ripples from across the pond.
DFI Group, Norco
I attended a greeting and networking meetup at breakfast this last week. During announcements, a woman mentioned an “electronics recycling” event coming up, sponsored by the county. I’m all for correctly recycling things, but I have a slogan: the best way to recycle is to reuse. Rather than crushing and melting products down for materials, if the product lifetime can be stretched a few more years, that’s great. That’s even before considering where it goes, who it benefits.
Back to my story. I located the lady, Christy Interrante, Marketing Director at DiGerolamo Family Insurance in Norco, after the meeting and thanked her for the announcement, adding that some of these electronic items were just what Riverside Raspberry was looking for. I explained what we intend to do with the equipment, put it in the hands of kids, either in learning centers or direct donation to families. She asked what kinds of things exactly, and if I’d like to look at the equipment they were phasing out. Yes, please! Due to her thoughtfulness and generosity, we received several sets of monitors, keyboards and mice, all working, clean and in good shape. Thanks Christy!
Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation
The Introduction to Raspberry Pi at the Norco Library went very well, especially when considering I didn’t really know what to expect. Everyone learned something (me included), got to ask questions, play with the hardware, restart, discuss ideas, plan future events, everything I could have hoped for. Thanks go to Ms. Luz Wood, the branch manager of the Riverside County Library, Norco Branch, for approving our application and providing the meeting space. It really is a good facility.
Donna and her husband related their experience working with and teaching Squeak, derived from Smalltalk and a predecessor to Scratch. Squeak and Scratch are both environments designed specifically for teaching programming to children, including under ten years old. She is a principal with the Hawthorne Center for Innovation. I will be helping at their booth during the upcoming SCALE 11x conference at the LAX Hilton, Saturday, February 22. At least one other person and I will be demonstrating Raspberry Pi. She will be there for Sunday coverage as well.
Back to our own recent experience. I had set up two full workstations, “full” in that each of them had a separate display of its own, plus mouse and keyboard, to get the whole workstation feeling. I did demonstrate sharing Internet over Ethernet and an SSH session, including when you don’t know the IP address of the Pi to start with. All this put together is what I call Starbucks mode, and all you need is the Ethernet cable plus power.
We discussed how this works, and whether kids could use it. The consensus was that older kids would adapt, and find it useful. Younger children really benefit from having a display and accompanying graphical user interface.
Forwarding an X session over SSH provides some of the benefits of a GUI, letting us use our favorite Linux editor to work with files actually residing on the Raspberry Pi. However, it is even a couple steps more in addition to figuring out the SSH setup in the first place, so again, it would help older students most.
For everyone else, a full setup with display, keyboard and mouse should be considered standard. This includes adults who just are not that comfortable with the Linux command line. In any case, we had the displays set up. As mentioned, one Pi had Internet service via a hard Ethernet cable from my laptop, but the other Pi did not.
To the rescue: Jacob. He had his netbook with him, small enough that it didn’t actually have onboard Ethernet but came with a USB dongle. Also apropos, he was running Ubuntu with the Unity interface, very similar to my setup, so I was able to show him the steps I followed from a handy tutorial. It worked, and now the second Pi had not only its screen and keyboard, but Internet service as well. We installed htop to get color coded readings on how much memory we were using, then experimented with how many Web pages we could open. Also, there was some discussion on what is Midori – answer, it’s a Web browser, simple but not too bad. I’ve found it useful. On the other hand, Dillo was a little too simple, downright primitive. It looked a little like Web browsing in 1996.
To clarify, the library’s WiFi provided the Internet service in the first place, which we connected to wirelessly, then shared onward via the cables. Works great, I’ve done it a lot. If we wanted to support 4 or 6 Raspberry Pi computers, I would bring a 10/100 Ethernet hub, though of course that means more cables and another power adapter.
Anyway, long story short: it was a very productive day. Thanks to all!
things you can connect to your Raspberry Pi
I got approval from Norco Branch Public Library to use their meeting room for a beginning class, intro to RasPi. It’s a start 
The date is January 19th at 10:30 AM. I will use the remaining time to gather signups of kids, and of adults wanting to help. Anyone wanting to help may get in touch with me here at this blog, or through the Google Plus group. Or, as of now, at the Riverside Raspberry meetup on meetup.com.
Rob Bishop at 23b Shop
Rob Bishop gave a presentation last night in Fullerton, at 23b Shop. I had never been to a hackerspace before, so it was an educational, and very nice, experience on all counts. They even had food! John Norman, one of 23b’s “keyholders” explained that they hold regular monthly potlucks, plus the occasional special event like this Raspberry Pi demonstration. Otherwise, 23b has informal hours, arranged in cooperation with a keyholder.
On this occasion Rob spoke to an overflow crowd, maybe 50-60 attendees. There was some seating, plus an invitation for everyone to bring their own chair, which many did. It still spilled out of the entrance of the building. In addition to telling us his own experience and history of joining the Raspberry Pi team fairly early on, he brought us up to date on the current state of affairs and plans for the near future.
For most of this, I’ll leave to the audience to read the official blog. Some current events stood out, though.
Rob knew to ask the crowd if there were any who really didn’t know much about the Raspberry Pi at all yet, and there were a few. In talking about the history of the project and motivations of the founders, he brought up a couple of points worth reiterating. First, they are passionate about getting people, especially kids, interested in electronics, in tinkering, in writing software, starting with the Pi and going on. This was evident in his speech, and also in the business decisions taken by the Foundation.
The second thing is that they know what they can do and what they can’t. Paraphrasing roughly, they’re six guys who design circuit boards. After that, they’ve done a pretty reasonable job of explaining the Raspberry Pi board, promoting it, and turning it over to some partners to manufacture and ship it. When it comes to designing and writing the educational curriculum for classrooms full of students learning and using classrooms full of these small computers, uh, no. Period. Teachers or people in touch with the education community have asked this very question – in fact, someone brought it up last night. However, the answer is still no, and for good reason. The Foundation needs to focus on what they do best; classroom materials will have to come from the education community, with help from the tech community.
In addition to speaking and leading question and answer, Rob also demonstrated Quake 3 running at 1080p, at 60 frames per second. More importantly, he also showed Scratch programming environment, and running Python directly from the command line. It was not the time to get into great detail, and debug this or that hardware and software issues. Those might be better addressed at a full day Raspberry “Jam” type event. As an introduction to the Pi, though, it was a great success.
As part of his Raspberry Pi Foundation US Hackspace Tour, Rob Bishop will be speaking at 23b Shop in Fullerton. 23b Shop, the Hackerspace of Choice for Discerning Geeks, has kindly extended the invitation to outside visitors, so this is a great chance to see what goes on in these caves of electronics. The time is 7-10 PM, on October 3, 2012. Last I heard, a sign up was not required, but the organizers might appreciate an RSVP just so they have an idea how many will show up.
Rob Bishop
Rob indicates his presentation is not so much a speech with PowerPoint, but rather a question and answer session with live demonstrations–much more interesting! Anyone who wishes is encouraged to bring their own Raspberry Pi, for some hands on working. I interpret this to mean bring your A/C adapter, monitor and keyboard too. Depending on how many attend and how much table space is available, there should be quite a good opportunity to network and see real projects in development.
See you there!
Testing is going well. This does not mean everything I plug into the Raspberry Pi works first time. It does mean I’m learning a lot, and getting most of the peripherals to work. A lot of this is just nit-picky research, following the posted information, asking questions.
I’m not sure if this counts as a “peripheral device,” but I did test the North American Power Charger from HP. It is actually sold for an HP Touchpad, but works great here, rated at 5 volts, 2 amps. With several things connected, it still delivered 4.9 volts across the TP1-TP2 measurement. Definitely recommended.
While we’re on the subject of power, my first attempt at a battery pack worked too, though with some caveats needed. I talked with Glen Rineer and company at UAV Rotor King. They fixed me up by sacrificing one of my micro-USB cables to terminate with an industry standard (in the remote helicopter industry, anyway) connector. They also, and this is important, gave me the source information for the matching connector on the other end, and pointed me to a local store that has it, along with a little plastic case to hold 4 AA batteries.
I’m quite grateful for this kind of help, since the information and a nudge in the right direction make all the right difference, vs. wandering the aisles at Fry’s. I did try Fry’s; what a sad place, so many empty shelves. I asked three people for help, no luck. Glen’s tip for Hobby People in Riverside paid off, though. Thanks!
From my earlier reading I knew enough to proceed carefully. I waited till some AA cells had gone down enough that the total wouldn’t be over 5.5 volts, measured separately from the Pi. All I cared was that once hooked up and running, the measured voltage on the board itself would be under 5.25, the USB specification. It was.
Undervoltage is not nearly as much of a problem. The batteries run down. It may not function well, and in fact it crashed and went into a kind of endless reboot loop. That’s no big deal, compared to a flash of smoke.
Anyway, it was a good test; I know I need to learn more about regulated power supplies, and am in the process.
Next, on to wireless networking. Every day a challenge, but that’s a good thing.
Debugging WiFi for the TP-LINK TL-WN722N
Raspberry Pi computer, surrounded by typical, normal peripherals
I’ve had the good fortune to find an active and interesting bunch, in the form of the Linux User Group of the Inland Empire. The members have been quite encouraging, supportive and helpful; special thanks for all manner of command line help to Jonathan Marsden.
I gave a presentation of my own at the July meeting. Given the group, it was natural that most of the questions were technical in nature. However, some questions and comments dealt with educational issues; for instance, “Wasn’t this supposed to be for kids? Aren’t most of the machines ending up with guys like us?”
I had heard that question before, online, and had given it some thought. My answer is strictly my own opinion, though based on a lot of reading of relevant sources, official and otherwise. Basically, yes, the goal is to interest children, and get at least some percentage of them interested enough that when they are university age they’re well prepared. For the second part of the question, aren’t the machines ending up with anyone except kids? I’d answer this question with a question: Don’t you suppose they (the Foundation) knew this? So what? Where else would the early testing come from? The FAQs and mini-tutorials and the oh-so-tedious documentation of which SD cards work well with which operating system releases? From adults, from the community. To be sure, this also includes a few precocious learners, but it’s all to the good. The hardware’s been built, and the documentation will follow. By the time teachers start requesting their schools to purchase 20 or 50 units at a time for complete classrooms, we’re all a lot further toward a usable curriculum or at least a list of projects doable by middle-schoolers.
I handed out a postcard size version of the graphic at the top of this article. Kimberly gets the credit for producing this item. The term “typical, normal peripherals” was intentional. These are the things that usually come to mind when we ask “What can you connect to a computer?” Keyboard, mouse, monitor, webcam.
Now imagine taking an eraser and wiping them all away. Given just the bare board, ask a room full of kids “What do YOU think should be connected to a computer?” The excitement begins.
Tuesday, 24 July 2012, we will have a meeting at Carrow’s Restaurant, corner of Magnolia and La Sierra. The meeting will run from 10:00 through noon, so if you can’t make the entire time feel free to just drop by and give your input. If you want to RSVP, email info@riversideraspberry.org or call 949-281-6321.
The purpose is to meet like minded people, identify topics for possible events, demos and such, pick meeting places suitable for a “Raspberry Jam” type event, and so on. This is not a technical meeting, more of an organizational one. Come on down!
Carrow’s Restaurant