Category Archives: Bodgers

Bodgers – Getting started with Python

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Hi Everyone

It was great to get back again with a full year to look forward to and it was also great to see so many people interested in getting involved with CoderDojo Athenry.

In the Bodgers group we got off to a great start, we installed the Mu Python editor, and we wrote our first few programs.

Bodgers

The Mu editor can be downloaded from here: https://codewith.mu/.

You can find our code from last Saturday on the last couple of slides from this week’s notes here: Bodgers Day 1

We also decided we’re going to do a few small projects between now and Halloween and then start on a bigger project after that.

Next week we are going to make a Space Invaders style game, you can find some images for it here: https://www.dropbox.com/home/Bodgers/Space%20invader/Images.

Looking forward to seeing you all next week.

Declan

Bodgers – A Look Back At 2020/2021

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Hello everyone,

I would like to thank all the Bodgers who joined me this year. I really enjoyed the sessions and I’m really grateful to you all for your attention, patience and your willingness to help me and each other out.

It’s a pity we couldn’t get together for even one session but hopefully when CoderDojo Athenry gets back to in person sessions I can meet you all then. I would also like to invite you all to our first post-COVID pizza party (hopefully before Christmas).

I have put together a video of the games we made this year.

Special thanks to everyone who created levels for our Red Runner game. You can find a copy of the code and images for this game on Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/sj6hil242d3fxmk/AAAHPnEVjw5IGWqs_G3eTXkDa?dl=0.

Thanks also to Kevin who helped us get up and running.

Enjoy the summer and hopefully I’ll see you in the autumn.

Declan

CoderDojo Athenry Information Session 07-Nov-2020

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Hello again everyone.

It was great to speak to you all last Saturday.

Here are some notes with information all about CoderDojo Athenry in PDF form.

coderdojoathenry-infosession-2020Download

Here’s a quick recap of everyone’s notes;

Martha told us all about the Explorers group, you can contact Martha at Martha@coderdojoathenry.onmicrosoft.com and you can find her slides here.

online-sessions_week_01_information-sessionDownload

Oliver spoke about the Advancers group and you can contact Oliver at Oliver@coderdojoathenry.onmicrosoft.com

I talked about the Bodgers group, you contact me at Declan@coderdojoathenry.onmicrosoft.com and you can read all about the Bodgers group here.

bodgers-2020-2021-1Download

Kieran then spoke about the Modellers group. Here is his presentation.

coderdojoathenry-modellers-kickoff-nov2020Download

Kieran can be contacted at Kieran@coderdojoathenry.onmicrosoft.com.

Finally Michael spoke about the Hacker Group which will be starting in the new year. Here are his slides

hackers-intro-2020Download

Mike’s email is, yes you guessed it is, Mike@coderdojoathenry.onmicrosoft.com

We will be posting information for our first session next Saturday in the next day or two, so keep an eye out for that.

Looking forward to seeing you all again next Saturday.

Declan and the CoderDojo Athenry Mentors

Bodgers –Magic Ball

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This week in the Bodgers group we revisited Pygame Zero and worked on a fortune telling game based on a Magic 8 ball.

I gave the group some artwork I prepared in the Paint.NET graphics editor and we wrote some code to animate them.

I’ve added the code and images to Dropbox here.

See you all on Saturday for Belts and Pizza, don’t forget to bring drinks.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh.

Bodgers – Soldering & Crimping

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Usually in the Bodgers group we use breadboards and jumper wires to connect our components together which is fine for prototyping, but today we looked at some techniques for making more permanent connections.

Soldering is a process in which two or more metal items are joined together by melting and then flowing a filler metal into the joint—the filler metal having a relatively low melting point. The metal to be soldered is heated with a soldering iron and then solder is melted into the connection. Only the solder melts, not the parts that are being soldered. Solder is a metallic “glue” that holds the parts together and forms a connection that allows electrical current to flow.

We started by soldering some header pins on stripboard, then we looked at using a desoldering pump to remove excess solder. Then we looked at stripping insulation from wire, soldering two wires together and using heat-shrink to re-insulate the wire.

An electrical crimp is a type of solderless electrical connection. Crimping is normally performed by first inserting the terminal into the crimp tool. The wire is then inserted into the terminal with the end of the wire flush with the exit of the terminal to maximize cross-sectional contact. Finally, the handles of the crimp tool are used to compress and reshape the terminal until it is cold-welded onto the wire. We crimped both insulated and uninsulated terminals onto some wire.

 

See you all next week.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – Cool Projects

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Hello again everyone.

In the Bodgers group we’re starting to put our projects together for the Coolest Projects Showcase.

“Coolest Projects International is a world-leading showcase for young innovators who make stuff with technology. If you’re up to 18 and you’re making something with technology for fun, to solve a problem, or as a creative outlet, then we want you to come out and share your project with us! This free event will take place in the RDS Main Hall, Dublin, Ireland on 5 May 2019.”

Find out more here: https://coolestprojects.org/

If you have any questions you can contact me at coderdojoathenry@gmail.com.

Don’t forget we’re off for the next 2 weeks, we’re back on 27-Apr-19.

see you all then.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – RFM69 Radio Modules

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DSC00227

Hello again everyone.

This week we looked at the Adafruit RFM69HCW Radio Module, these modules allow us to send messages between Arduinos without using Wifi or Bluetooth.

Adafruit have a tutorial here on setting up the module. The basic steps are:

  1. Solder on the header pins.
  2. Solder antenna or wire cut to the the proper length for the module/frequency
    • as our frequency is 433 MHz  we cut the wire to 16.5 cm.
  3. Wire up modules to your Arduinos
  4. Download the RadioHead library to your Arduino IDE.
  5. Load the RadioHead69_RawDemo_TX code from this library to the Arduino you’re using to transmit.
  6. Load the RadioHead69_RawDemo_RX code from this library to the Arduino you’re using to receive.
  7. Test

Next Saturday we will be putting all of the different components from our projects together and testing out how they work.

see you all then.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – Texts & Emails

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This week we looked at sending texts and emails from our python scripts.

To send text messages you will need to set up an account on Twilio which is a platform that allows coders to make and receive phone calls, send and receive text messages from their programmes. You then install the Twilio python library which will allow us to send texts from our script using code like this.


# Download the helper library from https://www.twilio.com/docs/python/install
from twilio.rest import Client

# Your Account Sid and Auth Token from twilio.com/console
# DANGER! This is insecure. See http://twil.io/secure
account_sid = 'your account_sid'
auth_token = 'your auth_token'
client = Client(account_sid, auth_token)

message = client.messages \
                .create(
                     body="Hello Bodgers",
                     from_='+440123456789',
                     to='+353123456789'
                 )

print(message.sid)

To send an email we use smtplib which is an email library that’s built into python and which works well with Gmail. We need to change our Gmail setting to allow insecure apps and then we can use the code below to send our message.


import smtplib

server = smtplib.SMTP('smtp.gmail.com', 485)
server.starttls()
server.login("my.email@email.com", "myPassword")

msg = "Hello World"
server.sendmail("my.email@email.com", "some.email@email.com", msg)
server.quit()

See you all on Saturday

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – GPS

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This week we looked at GPS which stands for Global Positioning System. The idea behind GPS is based on time and the position of  a network of  satellites. The satellites have very accurate clocks and the satellite locations are known with great precision.

Each GPS satellite continuously transmits a radio signal containing the current time and data about its position. The time delay between when the satellite transmits a signal and the receiver receives it is proportional to the distance from the satellite to the receiver. A GPS receiver monitors multiple satellites and uses their locations and the time it takes for the signals to reach it to determine its location . At a minimum, four satellites must be in view of the receiver for it to get a location fix.

We used the Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout connected to an Arduino as our GPS receiver. It’s very easy to set up, all we did was install the Adafruit GPS library on our Arduino and this gave us a load of programmes to chose from. We used the parsing sketch which gave us Longitude, Latitude and our location in degrees which we used with google maps to show our location.

See you all again on the 23/Mar/19

Declan, Dave and Alaidh