Cambridge-based hosting company Mythic Beasts — long-time friends of Raspberry Pi people and products — launched a unique service back in 2016: Raspberry Pi hosting, what they call their “Pi Cloud“. When I developed the first version of piwheels, it made sense to make use of this service to...
Dave and I just did a release of GPIO Zero, our Raspberry Pi GPIO library. It's been over 18 months since the last release, and as well as plenty of small bugfixes and corrections to the documentation, there are a few nice new features too. The highlights: Rotary Encoder Multi-segment displays,...
Last time, I did a video tutorial introducing Anvil, a web-based tool for building web apps. Today I have a new video in which I build a new app in Anvil, and then deploy it to be hosted on a Raspberry Pi, to make use of some Raspberry Pi specific features. This app features a grid of information...
Issue #91 of the official Raspberry Pi magazine, The MagPi, has just been published and it features an interview with me, about my time at the Foundation (and a bit before), letting the community know what I’m moving on to at the BBC. You can buy or download the issue here: Issue #91 Here’s what...
Just a quick note to say I'm leaving the Raspberry Pi Foundation to start a new role at the BBC. I've been at Raspberry Pi for over six years, and it's been great. I'm excited to join an innovation team called BBC News Labs. They find new ways to solve problems with technology, making lives easier...
The piwheels project provides pre-compiled Python packages for Raspberry Pi users, saving them considerable time and effort. I wrote about piwheels a little over a year ago - I remember Red Hatter Jeff Mackanic telling me at ATO 2018 how impressed he was with the project. Back then, piwheels was...
Mythic Beasts is an awesome hosting company based in Cambridge. They host the Raspberry Pi website, including the Raspbian archive and download images, and like to make sure we eat our own dog food by hosting the website on new Raspberry Pi hardware for product launches. Pete Stevens of Mythic...
Today the Raspberry Pi 4 is released, featuring a new 1.5GHz Arm chip and VideoCore GPU. It brings some brand new additions to the board: dual-HDMI 4K display output; USB3 ports; Gigabit Ethernet; even multiple RAM options up to 4GB. The Raspberry Pi 4 is a very powerful single board computer and...
Last week I covered terminal multiplexer byobu, and this week’s tool is quite similar. Terminator is a single-window split-screen terminal multiplexer that allows you to send identical keystrokes to all terminals at once. This means you can SSH into any number of machines, and run the same commands...
I was recently introduced to ranger by Dave Jones. It’s an incredibly handy terminal based file navigator that’s written in Python and is available in Debian, Raspbian and Ubuntu. Ranger allows you to navigate your filesystem using the arrow keys on your keyboard: up/down to select files in the...
It’s become customary for me to summarise what each new GPIO Zero release brings. This one’s been a long time coming. It’s been a quite while since our last release (a whole year since the last point release and 18 months since v1.4). I mostly attribute the lack of development to the launch of my...
One of the great things about the Python programming language is PyPI - the Python Package Index, where third-party libraries are hosted, available for anyone to install to gain access to pre-existing functionality without starting from scratch. These libraries are handy utilities written by...
"Hello world" is the beginning of everything when it comes to computing and programming. It's the first thing you learn in a new programming language, and it's the way you test something out, or check to see if something's working because it's usually the simplest way of testing simple...
Got an old Raspberry Pi lying around? Hate seeing ads while browsing the web? pi-hole is an open-source software project that blocks ads for all devices on your home network by routing all advertising servers into nowhere. What's best is it takes just a few minutes to set up. pi-hole blocks over...
The recent announcement of the latest release of the Raspberry Pi Desktop x86 image alongside Raspbian Stretch for Raspberry Pi included mention of a GPIO expander tool, which was followed up by another blog post explaining how it works and how to use it. Since it uses pigpio to control the GPIO...
I have attended and spoken at the EuroPython conference for the last few years, and this time I focused on physical computing with Python and Raspberry Pi, including GPIO Zero, Picamera and the Sense HAT. The slides are on speakerdeck and you can watch the video here:
Databases are a great way to add data persistence to your project or application. You can write data in one session and it'll be there the next time you want to look. A well-designed database can be efficient at looking up data in large datasets, and you won't have to worry about how it looks,...
Twitter is a wonderful communication and social media platform. It has everything: breaking news, political opinion, humor, celebrities, entertainment, special interest chat, and, well, anything. Individuals, companies, departments, projects, and more—really anyone or anything—can have a...
While preparing for a workshop last week, my colleague Marc and I started brainstorming ideas. One of the ideas I came up with was to use the mini joystick on a Sense HAT (a sensor board add-on for the Raspberry Pi) to remotely control a robot using GPIO Zero’s remote pins feature. I soon started...
The title may have given away the article contents, but feel free to read on pretending you don’t know the ending. Background: I work for the Raspberry Pi Foundation and I do a lot of Python stuff on Raspberry Pi. I presented this project recently in a lightning talk at EuroPython. Motivation:...
It’s been a while since the last GPIO Zero release, so it’s with great pleasure I announce v1.4 is here. Upgrade now on your Raspberry Pi: sudo apt update sudo apt install python-gpiozero python3-gpiozero Or on your PC: pip install gpiozero Why on your PC? Run Python code on your PC to remotely...
The Raspberry Pi computer can be used in all kinds of settings and for a variety of purposes. It obviously has a place in education for helping students with learning programming and maker skills in the classroom and the hackspace, and it has plenty of industrial applications in the workplace and...
Earlier this month, I spoke on the Python track at FOSDEM 2017. My talk introduced the Raspberry Pi as a tool for physical computing and IoT to Python programmers in the free & open-source software community. I talked about the Raspberry Pi Foundation's mission, our education programmes, introduced...
Over the last four years, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has put a great deal of effort into optimizing Raspbian, its port of Debian, for Pi hardware, including creating new educational software, programming tools, and a nicer looking desktop. In September, we released an update that introduced PIXEL...
I recently attended All Things Open, an open-source conference in Raleigh, North Carolina, run by Red Hat. I was invited by my friends at opensource.com – and it was a great opportunity to meet the team and some of the moderators, columnists and contributors. #ATO2016 pic.twitter.com/Tdk8wqzWcB —...
I was invited to give the closing keynote at PyCon Russia, which took place in Moscow in July. It was my first visit to Russia – and I had a great trip. Today I am mostly being the Raspberry Pi Community at @PyConRu pic.twitter.com/U88J1rcMNZ — Ben Nuttall (@ben_nuttall) July 3, 2016 I travelled...
One year ago today, I started the GPIO Zero project. We now have a core team of three (Dave Jones, Andrew Scheller and me). There have been 587 commits, we’ve released four major versions, and published a book. The library has great coverage of GPIO devices, and contains features I never even...
Today the MagPi team released a new publication: Simple Electronics with GPIO Zero. This 100-page book takes you from the basics, like lighting an LED, all the way to building projects like an Internet radio using the GPIO Zero Python library. This book is available as a free PDF, but you can also...
Did you know you can adorn your Raspberry Pi with HATs? Of course we're not talking about hats like people put on their heads, but rather HATs: hardware attached on top. These are add-on circuit boards and accessories that add functionality to your Raspberry Pi. You can, of course, use the Pi on...
GPIO Zero is a Python library I created to make physical computing on the Raspberry Pi more accessible, particularly for use in education. Read more about it on raspberrypi.org, or about how it was created in an article on this blog, GPIO Zero: Developing a new friendly API for Physical...
One of the most exciting starter activities to do with a Raspberry Pi is something you can't do on your regular PC or laptop—make something happen in the real world, such as flash an LED or control a motor. If you've done anything like this before, you probably did it with Python using the RPi.GPIO...
I contributed to the 2015 Open Source Yearbook, created by opensource.com, which you can download as a PDF or view the individual articles online. https://opensource.com/yearbook 6 creative ways to use ownCloud – by Jos Poortvliet, ownCloud community manager 10 tools for visual effects in Linux...
The original Raspberry Pi went on sale four years ago, and more than 8,000,000 units have shipped since then. Raspberry Pi computers are used in schools and universities, in factories and other industrial applications, in home automation and hobby projects, and much more. Today the Raspberry Pi 3...
Back in 2013, inspired by PyCoders Weekly, a great Python email newsletter, I created Pi Weekly, the same sort of thing for Raspberry Pi. Each week I curated a collection of links to news, projects and articles from the Raspberry Pi community. Its subscriber base grew steadily and within a few...
For about the last 3 years, the de-facto method of accessing physical components via the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins has been a Python library called RPi.GPIO, created by Ben Croston, who originally built it to control his beer brewing process. Despite its humble beginnings in a personal hobby...
Starting today, shops and newsagents are stocking a computer magazine called The MagPi, and as a world's first, this magazine comes with a free computer—literally stuck to the front cover. It's the newest Raspberry Pi release, called Pi Zero. This computer also goes on sale around the world for...
I now have a monthly column on opensource.com – a brilliant website for all things open source. I’ll be writing articles about Raspberry Pi – particularly its use in education. My first piece was published last week, covering the Astro Pi competition – we’re sending two Raspberry Pis to the...
Last month the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced the second generation of its affordable single board computer: the Raspberry Pi 2 Model B. I’ve been working at Raspberry Pi for over a year now and this is the fourth product launch I’ve been involved with: first there was the compute module for...
Last December I started my job at the Raspberry Pi Foundation and this time last year, having just completed my first month, I wrote my review of 2013 and all the events which led up to that move. Here is a round-up of all that’s happened since then. Talks & Conferences This year I gave my first...
In the last two months I've attended and spoken at five Python conferences around Europe. EuroPython – Berlin I submitted a proposal to EuroPython in Berlin for a talk explaining what the Raspberry Pi Foundation are doing in education. Luckily it was accepted and I got to go to...
I drove 4,500 miles across America visiting schools, universities and hackspaces telling people all about Raspberry Pi. New York City to Salt Lake City, the long way around Read all about it at https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/bens-mega-usa-tour/
Back in February at the Raspberry Jamboree, my colleagues Carrie Anne, Clive and I were interviewed by the Linux Voice team about Raspberry Pi's views on computing education. Linux Voice is a fantastic new free software magazine which was funded by a crowdfunding campaign on Indiegogo at the end of...
While I was in Manchester, I shared an office with two guys, Sam and Scott, who ran an animation studio called Saladhouse. Me being me, I used to talk about Raspberry Pi all the time – and my enthusiasm rubbed off on them both. Scott ordered a Pi kit from Pimoroni and once used it to display some...
This year I’ve learned lots, run events, helped mentor young people, contributed to open source, engaged in much community activity, made and developed some strong friendships and built myself a new career. OH Digital I began this year working as a web developer at OH Digital, having started there...
Pi Weekly is an email newsletter I run with fellow Raspberry Pi enthusiast Ryan Walmsley. Recently it occurred to me that for such a small project, it's evolved a lot since we launched – and that it's quite impressive that we launched it so soon after the idea came about, and how it landed me my...
I’ve heard lots lately about how cool Berlin is — my friend Martin goes there regularly and hangs out in coffee shops working on projects, and he really enjoys the atmosphere and culture around the city. Another friend Sam recently moved here, and he loves it too. There seemed to be a thriving tech...
Two weeks ago I had an idea – to launch a weekly Raspberry Pi email newsletter. I had a think about how it would work and what it would entail. I subscribe to a handful of similar ones for programming topics, notably a Python one called PyCoders Weekly, which is a simple link aggregator with short...
I organised an event with the STEMNET (Science, Technology, Engineering & Maths Network) team at the Museum of Science and Industry (MOSI), based on the Manchester Raspberry Jam I run monthly at Madlab. The STEM Raspberry Jam was to be a new activity the STEM Ambassador network could offer to...
Manchester recently held the first ever Raspberry Pi conference – Raspberry Jamboree, held at Manchester Central. It’s been a year since the launch of the Pi, and this event was to review what we did in the last year, and look forward to what we’re going to do this year and in the future. The day...
I’ve now hosted four Raspberry Jams in Manchester. I posted about the first and second, here’s a summary of what went on at III & IV. The August Manchester Raspberry Jam kicked off when Kat opened up the Madlab and I gave an opening talk about what had been going on in the news in the Raspberry Pi...
I’ve now run two Raspberry Pi events in Manchester, affectionately known as the Raspberry Jam. The first in June, which was the first Raspberry Jam in the UK, and which featured on the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s website where we gained recognition for getting people together to share ideas,...