Tag Archives: astro pi

Bodgers – FreeCAD and Fritzing

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Hello again everyone

This week we continued working on our Astro Pi entries and we also looked at FreeCAD and Fritzing which are tools that will help us with building our projects.

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FreeCAD, available for download from here, is used for 3D modelling and allows us design very complicated things from simple 3D shapes such as cubes and cylinders. Here are a couple of quick videos to get you started.

Then we looked at Fritzing, download from here, an application for drawing very easy to understand circuits, here’s how to draw a simple circuit using it.

 

Dave will be leading next Saturday’s session and I will see you again on the ninth of Feb.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh.

Bodgers – Mission Zero & Projects

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Hello again everyone.

This week we started getting our entries ready for the Astro Pi Mission Zero Challenge by looking at whose aboard the International Space Station now and what they’re doing. We followed this up by taking another look at programming the Trinket Astro Pi emulator.

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We also had a small brainstorming session to come up with ideas for projects that we will be working on for the rest of the year.

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See you all next Saturday.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh.

Bodgers – Making Pictures With LEDs

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Hello again everyone.

We started of this week’s session by looking at the recent Soyuz rocket launch which was to send two people to the ISS. During the launch one of the booster rockets failed and the launch had to be aborted. Both crew members, astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin, escaped without injuries.

Official astronaut portrait of Tyler (Nick) Hague – Blue Flight Suit Picture. Photo Date: January 13, 2014. Location: Building 8, Room 183 – Photo Studio. Photographer: Robert Markowitz

We then continued to work on our pictures and messages for the Mission Zero Challenge. I made a video of some of the work we did, but it’s very hard to film LEDs so the quality is very poor.

If you want to find out more about the Soyuz incident and have another look at how to make pictures and messages with the Sense-hat LEDs my notes are here day 4.

Next Saturday we’ll start looking at Pygame Zero. See you all then.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – Making With Trinket.io

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Hello again everyone.

In the Bodgers group,  we’ve been working on code for the International Space Station. To do this we are using on online Sense Hat emulator, the Sense Hat is a special piece of hardware designed to be deployed with a Raspberry Pi on the ISS.

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The online emulator is available at https://trinket.io/sense-hat and there’s a good tutorial on the Raspberr Pi website here https://projects.raspberrypi.org/en/projects/astro-pi-mission-zero.

Here is our Trinket https://trinket.io/python/04b90b70cf.

You can play around with these and we will probably finish up with the Mission Zero Challenge for while after Saturday. My slides from last Saturday are here day 3.

See you all on Saturday.

Declan, Dave and Alaidh

Bodgers – Making a start

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making

This week we got things off to a flying start with Bodgers Bingo where the Bodgers had to look out for various phrases as I went through a very long slideshow that introduced them to what we do in the Bodgers group, it went very well with lots of Starburst and Chewits for everyone. My slides are here Day 1 (PDF).

We are going to start of the year by working on the Astro Pi Mission Zero Challenge in which the Bodgers will use a Raspberry Pi Sense Hat to write a greeting and display the temperature inside the International Space Station to the astronauts on the ISS. Here are the guidelines for Mission Zero Astro_Pi_Mission_Zero_Guidelines_2018_19 (PDF).

If you’re interested in buying a Raspberry Pi I’d recommend the following sites:

https://thepihut.com/

https://shop.pimoroni.com/

For electronics components and for breadboards etc. I’ve found https://www.bitsbox.co.uk/ are good value, they also do cheap Arduino clones.

That’s all for this week, we’re really looking forward to next week.

Declan, Dave & Alaidh