This week in the Bodgers group we looked at controlling motors and robots withe the Raspberry Pi.
You can find the code for this weeks session here and my notes are here motors and robots
We also talked about ideas for the projects we will be working on for the rest of the year. Tomorrow we will continue to look at robots and we will also do some brain-storming for our projects.
See you then.
Declan, Dave and Alaidh
This week we continued working with GPIO Zero, at the end of last week’s session we had started working on a simple LED traffic light, we finished of that this week and we added a buzzer to it.
I had hoped to work on the HC-SR04 distance sensor but there seems to be an issue with them on the Raspberry Pi at the Moment.
Here is a video that demonstrates what we covered on Saturday.
See you all next Saturday (08-Dec) for our Christmas party.
Declan, Dave and Alaidh
Hi again everyone.
This week we started looking at physical computing and the Raspberry Pi. This involves attaching various components such as sensors, motors or controllers to the GPIO pins on our Pi. This week we connected a LED and two buttons, and we used the GPIO Zero module for Python to control them. I’ve made a video, it’s a little bit long, that covers everything from Saturday’s session.
At the end of the session the group started working on a traffic light idea and we will combine this with HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor next week to create a measuring device.
I don’t have any slides this week as we worked directly from the GPIO Zero Documentation available at https://gpiozero.readthedocs.io. This is also available on Dropbox, along with this week’s code and a sheet that contains a drawing of our circuit and drawing of the GPIO pin layout, here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/k26mbrfmdvq9tro/AAB5jfjkIlBqLhfnUAVVUvtJa?dl=0.
See you all next Saturday.
Declan, Dave and Alaidh.
Hi again everyone.
This week we put the final touches to our game.
We added some code to increase the speed of the alien sprite as the score increased to make the game a little more difficult.
We then added some code to control what happens when the game is over.
You can find our code on Dropbox here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ccfaycpa1zluh8l/AAAA4dQH8EPNJicsQj7RwGgsa?dl=0
Next week we will do a quick recap of this game and then we will start looking at hardware on the Raspberry Pi.
See you all then.
Declan, Dave and Alaidh.
Hello again everyone.
We continued working with Pygame Zero this week, we began by getting everyone up to date with where we were with the game. I forgot to mention we were following the tutorial at https://pygame-zero.readthedocs.io/en/stable/introduction.html. We then changed the screen size and added a score to make our game more fun.
Next week we will add some elements to make our game more difficult and even more fun.
I don’t have any slides this week but the code for both versions of the game are available here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/ccfaycpa1zluh8l/AAAA4dQH8EPNJicsQj7RwGgsa?dl=0
See you all next week.
Declan, dave and Alaidh.
Hello again everyone.
This week in the Bodgers group we started working with Pygame Zero. Pygame Zero allows us to write our own games quickly and easily by doing a lot of the work involved in setting up and running a game in the background. This allows us to focus on the more creative aspects of the game.
You will have to install Python and Pygame Zero if you’re going to use Pygame Zero at home, details on how to do this are in my slides. A few of us had installation problems on Saturday, so don’t worry if you have issues we will help sort it out when we return after the break.
We followed the first few parts of this tutorial: https://pygame-zero.readthedocs.io/en/stable/introduction.html. I gave everyone a folder with images and sounds for our game which you can find here: https://www.dropbox.com/sh/3q14pg3huev4pwb/AADjDuB0FBVZXM4ChqN8qRx2a?dl=0. Copy this folder on to your own computer and you’re ready to go.
Here are my slides from Saturday: day 5
See you all on the 10th of November.
Declan, Dave and Alaidh
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.
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
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.
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
Hello again everybody.
This week in the Bodgers group we started working on our code for the Mission Zero Challenge.
We began by writing a simple text message on the 8×8 full-colour LED display, then we changed the text and background colours. We then coded a picture by assigning a colour to each of the 64 LEDs on the display. We finished the session by taking a quick look at using the temperature sensor to read the temperature. Here are my slides from this week day 2.
Next week we will recap what we covered this week and we will start to personalise our code for the challenge.
In the meantime, here’s a couple of fun videos on how the Astro Pi computers got to the ISS.
See you all next Saturday
Declan, Dave and Alaidh
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:
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
CoderDojo Athenry 