I was back in Cardiff for PyCon UK recently and gave a talk on a BBC project I’ve been working on, called Live Highlights. I’m not doing as many conference talks as I used to – this is my only one of the year! I spoke about how we prototyped an idea and built it […]
I’ve now completed my second full year working as software engineer in the News Labs team at the BBC. Another year working from home; the team officially moved into BBC R&D; and I was promoted to senior engineer. In 2021 I worked on: mosromgr, a Python library for managing TV and radio running orders, which […]
Following the success of my article The surreal experience of my first developer job, which made it to the top of Hacker News for a whole day, I was invited to tell the story on the excellent podcast Client Horror Stories. The video is available on clienthorrorstories.com: Thanks to Morgan for having me on!
Nearly ten years ago I graduated with a degree in Mathematics & Computing, with a keen interest in pursuing a career involving maths and programming, but with little idea how. First and foremost I had decided to stay in Manchester after uni, rather than risk getting stuck at my parents’ if I moved back home. […]
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, including custom “font” support […]
I’ve now completed a full year working as software engineer in the News Labs team at the BBC. It’s been an odd year, obviously, but we’ve been cracking on with all kinds of projects – finding new ways to help journalists do their jobs; innovating around user experiences in news products and experimenting with other […]
I’ve had a blog since 2006. I started using Blogger — Google’s 2003 acquisition — allowing 17-year-old-me to publish my thoughts and share my adventures with the world in my own corner of web space at blogspot.com. I spent countless hours writing HTML and CSS from scratch, or tweaking custom styles from other Blogger users. […]
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 […]
A few months ago I was looking through questions posted to the Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange site. If you’re not familiar, Stack Exchange provides Q&A sites like Stack Overflow for specific areas, such as particular programming languages, technologies or other topics. And while observing the erratic nature of the way people post questions to the […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 pins, that means […]
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:
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: space If you […]
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 control a […]
My review of the Google OnHub router, and some tips on setting up advanced options like port forwarding. While in the US for a trip in October, I decided to pick up a Google OnHub router, which is only available in America, and has since been superseded by Google WiFi, also only available in America. […]
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 the GPIO pinout, HATs, GPIO Zero, Remote […]
During this Christmas break I decided to have a go at implementing the card game Uno in Python. It’s a fun and simple game for all ages, and the rules are easy to pick up and follow – but there’s quite a challenge in implementing the rules in a program! I spent a few hours […]
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 — Ben Nuttall (@ben_nuttall) October 25, 2016 I was […]
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 with David […]
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 dreamed of. In […]
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 pay to […]
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 Computing. Background GPIO Zero is […]
I was sad to hear the news of the death of Ronnie Corbett. I’ve always been a huge fan of The Two Ronnies and much of the other work the duo had done both together and individually. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oaGpaj2nHIo Within moments of the news breaking, tributes such as photographs of four candles and fork handles, and […]
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 with Kdenlive – by Seth Kenlon, independent multimedia artist, free […]
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 weeks it was featured […]
Last year I was invited to speak at PySS in San Sebastian, Spain, and I met a great bunch of guys: the conference organisers Alex, Oier and Borja. We started a project called pyjokes (one line programmer jokes; jokes-as-a-service) I gave a 5 minute lightning talk at PyConUK last weekend telling how pyjokes came about: […]
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 International Space Station! Read 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 industrial customers (announced in […]
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 Berlin for a week (which I’d […]
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 […]
Today I saw fixubuntu.com featured on Hacker News. I assumed it was to be yet another rant about why you should use distro X instead of Ubuntu, and how Canonical are ruining it. I was half-right. I clicked the link to see what it was about and found a large box containing a list of […]
Brilliant video of Graham Linehan (writer of Father Ted, Black Books and The IT Crowd) on Robert Llewellen (Kryten in Red Dwarf)’s Carpooling show from 2010. He discusses copyright law, ridiculing its problems and desperately looking for a way to get paid to make material and put it out to users in a fair way.
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 […]
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 schools, so we ran a […]
Last month I attended the Manchester Girl Geeks Barcamp – affectionately known as bracamp. I did a talk on Free Software Culture, covering the varying definitions of “free” (libre/gratis), the principles of free and open source, why people do it, how development is managed and demonstrated use cases, as well as battle some gripes from a misunderstood […]
A skeleton found beneath a Leicester car park has been confirmed as that of English king Richard III. Experts from the University of Leicester said DNA from the bones matched that of descendants of the monarch’s family. Richard was killed in battle in 1485 but his grave was lost when the church around it was […]
Last month I attended Hack Manchester – a 24 coding event as part of the Manchester Science Festival, held at MOSI. Having only arranged to team up with Mike, we ended up joining two guys Shaf introduced us to, his colleagues from the BBC, by the names of Jack and Tom. The four of us formed […]
This weekend I attended the fifth (my third) PHPNW annual conference. As a member of the local PHPNW user group and community, I volunteer as a helper which involves getting delegates registered, getting the speakers to the right place and making sure everything’s running smoothly. Starting on the Friday evening hackathon social, I got chatting […]
Like a lot of other Ubuntu users, when I installed Ubuntu 10.10 I hated the new desktop environment Unity. I wanted to get back to the Gnome desktop with the ‘Applications | Places | System’ menu where I knew where things were, I didn’t feel comfortable with the silly oversized icons on the left, and […]
This scene from Beavis & Butthead Do America makes me laugh every time. Next time you hear a sentence ending in a preposition, try to correct it in your head. Not out loud, you’ll get something thrown at you.
This trick was inspired by Brian Suda who I saw speak at Whisky Web. Take a string, any string. Hash it using MD5. Substring the hash to get a 6-digit hex code. Take a look at what colour that hex code represents. A really simple, really cool way of generating seemingly random colours, that can […]
I just read an article on BBC News. All quotes are taken directly from that article. The link is at the bottom of this post. Norwich City kit published on internet by boy ahead of launch When I read this I imagined the boy in question had illegally obtained pictures of the new kit, and […]
Today I participated in Maths Busking as part of the Science Festival of Leeds. “What is Maths Busking?” I hear you ask. Maths Busking is a street performance of mathematics whereby the buskers demonstrate mathematical ideas and engage the public in thinking like a mathematician in the form of a series of busks. I’m not […]
Here’s an amazing video from Bret Victor about how some software tools he built allow him to see change immediately upon editing or writing code, how he can control the value of variables with sliders where moving them up and down renders the output accordingly, and many other features we’d all love to use. Bret […]
So the other day, Rasmus tweeted that PHP 5.4 was fully released (following several release candidates): PHP 5.4.0 is out – go get it #php — Rasmus Lerdorf (@rasmus) March 1, 2012 There are some great additions, the highlights (other than a huge increase in speed, apparently) being square bracket notation for arrays, array […]
So I’m sitting in my office, bashing away at my keyboard, when a small parcel arrives on my desk. I wasn’t expecting anything, I’m new here so it wouldn’t be work-related, it wasn’t just a letter but a small parcel containing an object quite clearly in the third dimension. Who on Earth would be sending […]
Don’t Copy That Floppy was an anti-copyright infringement campaign run by the Software Publishers Association beginning in 1992. The video for the campaign, starring M. E. Hart as “MC Double Def DP,” was filmed at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C. and produced by cooperation between the SPA, the Educational Section Anti-Piracy Committee, and the […]
Yesterday was XP Manchester‘s XL event – a Saturday coding session of pairing, katas and a team bot tournament hosted at the MadLab. I managed to persuade Kris, a friend I used to work with, to come along – it’s his first experience of this sort of thing, so I’m really glad he got introduced […]
The ternary operator is a shorthand way of writing an if/else statement where a particular action occurs in both cases, but the value associated with that action depends on the condition stated. For example, the traditional if/else construct (C/Java/JavScript syntax): can be rewitten as: This in itself is a huge benefit to clean, concise code. […]
This is a guest post I wrote for the IMA Blog – Dr. Darren Dancey: “Maths – There’s an App For That!” This North West regional talk was delivered by Manchester Metropolitan University’s Computer Science lecturer Darren Dancey, whose teaching specialisms include programming and artificial intelligence. Darren also runs an iPhone development course for industry […]
The X-Factor winner has won the Christmas Number One every year since 2005, and it would have been the same this year if it hadn’t been for one man. A guy called Jon Morter decided he was sick of seeing people being spoon-fed what music they should like by Simon Cowell so he set up […]
A short film produced by Paul Maunder of Northern Parkour, based on the music video for Michael Jackson’s Thriller. We rehearsed the dance routine for a long time and threw together the script and filmed the other bits at some training sessions.
They say that you can learn more from two weeks in the Alps than you can kayaking a whole year in the UK. I can vouch for that after 3,298.7 miles, 8 countries, 13 rivers, 5 mountain bike trails, 2 rafting trips and half a day at Fontainebleau. Miles and I set off from Sheffield […]
I’ve had a hectic week this week trying to get all my assignments in. I had a MATLAB assignment due in on Thursday and a Java one due in today. The MATLAB one involved two questions: the first was a banking system which calculated interest and mortgage payments; the second was an animation of a […]
I did quite a bit of kayaking in January; in Wales, the Lake District and more locally in the North West of England. I think the first one of the new year was the Dee in Llangollen in North Wales, which I did a few years ago while doing my 4-star course. I was incredibly excited when […]
This is the new parkour documentary. It was produced by two good friends of mine; the legendary Paul Maunder and written by the Chairman of the British Parkour Coaching Association, Dave Sedgley. This is truly the greatest parkour documentary we have seen to date, in terms of its content (the words and the movement) and in terms of how […]
Being part of the most active Scout Unit in South Yorkshire, I was strongly encouraged to participate in the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme and given every opportunity to complete each section of it, with a decent amount of effort. I worked through the Bronze in my first year when I was 14, went on to the Silver which […]
I’ll try and be quick because I’m mega busy at the moment – got a massive week ahead of me and time is precious but I’m trying to keep up the whole ‘frequent blog post’ thing I’ve mentioned in the last few posts so here I am writing this from my brand new ASUS laptop […]
I was asked by the chairman of the canoe club if I would like to attend the BCU whitewater student safety seminar with him and the vice chairman, being a fresher who is keen to commit to kayaking and to the club and likely to be seriously involved in the club over the next few years. I […]
I’m now at the end of my third week of university. I’ve moved away from home and now live in halls of residence in Manchester, which is a completely new experience for me. I can cook and generally fend for myself but it’s still very different from being at home. I’m having a wicked time […]
Trace is a Parkour gathering in the peak district organised by Jason Matten and Dave Sedgley. The first proper one was last year (Trace Gathering 2007) and we had a smaller one the year before called the Northern Parkour Gathering 2006. I came back a few days early from my trip to the Spanish Pyrenees for […]
Pi – An irrational constant used to represent the ratio between a circle’s circumference and its diameter, symbolised by the greek letter Pi, approximately 3.14159265358979323846264338327 (not rounded) Pi Day – A geek holiday held to celebrate the mathematical constant Pi, observed on March 14 (3/14 in the American date format) We celebrated Pi Day 2008 in style. My Maths […]
The Winter Runaround is a Scouting competition for 14-25s where teams of 4-7 travel across South Yorkshire by means of public transport with pre-purchased travel passes, with the aim of competing bases at Scout headquarters all over the county in order to earn points. The Bone of Contention is a challenge trophy (a bone on […]
It all started with an email from Jamie Coulson. He asked if I could set something up to film parkour for his programme, Inside Out, for the BBC. I told him about the (then upcoming) Trace Gathering and he was very interested, so I arranged with Jason Matten, the organiser, and arranged for Jamie and a […]
I’m currently sat in a pub called The Eagle, it’s round the corner from King’s College Chapel of the University of Cambridge, I’m waiting for the food we just ordered. I’m writing this blog post on my new mobile phone. Damn right – I’m on Blogger on my phone. I love technology. Anyway, here’s my story […]
For those of you who don’t know, Lisses is a suburb of Paris and it is where Parkour began. David Belle, the founder of the French discipline, lived there and began to develop the art of movement from his background in gymnastics, athletics and martial arts. Me, Danny and Scott met up in Sheffield bus […]
Danny and Paul went on their Lisses (France) trip last week and had promised to leave me a sign of some sort that I would see or find when I go next week. Danny told me that he had left something written on paper in the tunnel part on the Dame Du Lac, and that I would have […]
This week, Fieldhead Campsite in Edale in the Peak District held host to 115 or so traceurs for the Trace (or TRACEur) Gathering 2007. An absolutely brilliant few days of hanging out with over a hundred people who live for parkour – camping together, talking about parkour, and training in the most amazing natural areas […]
On Thursday afternoon I received an email from Luke Markey from TT, who was meant to be standing in for Daniel Ilabaca to present the parkour films and do a talk on parkour at ShAFF – the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival (Daniel couldn’t make it as he’s currently filming in India), anyway, Luke asked if […]
I went to Wales for a weekend in half term with the WVU Network. I summited Snowdon (the highest mountain in Wales) for the first time, which was great, even though it is a bit touristy. Photos: And here’s the video:
This weekend I’ve been on the Apex Challenge, which is a competition for teams of four (this time in Castleton in the Peak District) where the teams involved have to navigate through a large geographical area racking up points from taking part in various activities at bases set up all round the mapped area. My […]
Had an absolutely brilliant time in Manchester this weekend. Will, Dez and I saw Motion City Soundtrack at the Manchester Academy, and they totally rocked, supported by OK Go, who were pretty cool too (they even did a dance while we were waiting for MCS to come on!) After the gig finished, we realized we […]
Well, I’m in New York, New York. I frickin’ love this place! Times Square has to be the coolest place I’ve ever seen in my life. I haven’t got time to write up what I’ve done so far, so I’ll mention a few; today I went to Grand Central Station and the Morgan Museum, I’ve […]
Thursday in Sheffield It’s Thursday night now, I’m about to go to bed ready for tomorrow’s day in the Peak District. Today was a brilliant day of parkour; Will and I met up with Jin, Jason and two other traceurs from Cambridge, we trained from 1:00pm till about 8:00pm, it was fantastic. The four of […]