Raspberry Pi fun and Games

The room just before we started.

Today we had a bunch of folks from a local school come and see us and play with our Raspberry Pi systems. To say we had loads of fun would be a bit of an understatement. Great stuff. With kids like these I can see why folks become teachers.

I said I’d put some links on the blog if you are thinking of getting a pi. You can get the Raspberry Pi, plus cases, power supplies, keyboards and mice (or a kit with all those) from CPC. Follow the link here. You can get the wiring kit that we used in the labs from SK Pang, here.

Simon and me with a couple of satisfied customers. We’ll post the notes for the labs once we’ve finished tidying them up a bit.

Simple Calendar for Windows Phone

The Windows Phone calendar tile is nice enough. But it could be better. It could be like the one from Simple Calendar. This gives you the date and day in a nice, funky, format, along with details of your next two appointments. I really like it. When you run the program you also get a view of your entire month with teeny tiny text showing the appointments which is surprisingly useable. I can’t show you an example of that because I’ve already given away two top secret appointments for tomorrow in the screenshot above, but there are some sample screenshots on the Windows Phone Store page.

The application is free, although if you want the fancy tile above it will cost you a little bit. I actually don’t mind this. I find that adverts in an application are distracting and I like the though of paying the author a reasonable sum for a useful program. Seems somehow fair. Just for fun (and because number one wife likes it) I’ve changed the background and foreground colours for my phone as well. My Lumia 920 has an IPS display, which means that displaying lots of white doesn’t actually cost me any battery life.

One little Windows Phone tip: If you like to read your emails as black text on a white background, but you are using the Dark theme you can select this from the mail settings page, which is nice.

Facebook Picture Fun and Games

While I was away last week I was stupid enough to try and log in to Facebook from my phone to respond to a message. Facebook saw that I had left Hull for a little while and went into a high security mode, locking my account. Thanks for that.

To recover things I had to go through and identify pictures of folks that I know, which is always a problem for me as I’ve got a terrible memory for faces. Not that it would have made much difference in the picture above.

Windows Phone Picture Workflow

Not too shabby for a phone camera, eh?

My plan was to spend today writing content for a Raspberry Pi course that we are doing next week. The idea of my session is that we connect a Raspberry Pi to a bunch of LEDs and switches and then have fun writing Python programs that read the switches and flash the LEDs. Of course, the content needs lots of pictures of the hardware and the wires. And of course this is the one day of the week I didn’t bring my camera to work. So I used the one in my Lumia 920 and the results were astonishingly good.

To make things even better, I could take the pictures on the phone and then, when they appeared on Skydrive a few seconds later I could cut out the images that I wanted and paste them into the document on my PC. This made for a really fabulous workflow. If I had been using a “proper” camera I’d have had to take the pictures, get the SD card out of the camera, plug it into the computer and then drag the pictures off one by and drop them into the document in the right order.

Mobile phone cameras are great for close up photography. This is mainly because the focal length of the lens in a mobile phone camera is very short, which means that it has good depth of field (near things are focused as sharply as far things). This is great when taking pictures which are very close to the lens, when it is hard to make sure that everything in the frame is the same distance from the sensor.

The bad news with mobile phone cameras is that tiny cameras make for tiny sensors, so that images can be grainy. But my Lovely Lumia doesn’t seem to have that problem and so I was able to get good quality pictures into my document much more quickly than if I’d remember to bring the camera in. I’m definitely going to work this way again, it might even be worth making a little macro stand for the phone.

Logitech Bluetooth Adapter

I’m finding that most of my music listening now starts with my phone. I’ve signed up for the “all you can eat” Xbox Music service and so when new albums come out I can just download them to the phone and listen to them. Very nice. Of course, I also want to play music through the Big Speakers and that is where the little black box you can see above comes in.

It provides an endpoint for anything that puts out Bluetooth audio. You pair the adapter with the thing you want to play music from and it then sends out good quality audio to go into your amplifier. I’m not sure it is totally High Fidelity, but then again as the source of the music is a compressed file I’m not sure what High Fidelity means any more. All I can say is that if sounds fine to my ears. You can get the device for around twenty five quids or so from Amazon, which to me makes it a worthwhile purchase.