Manchester Raspberry Jam
Posted: June 13, 2012 Filed under: Uncategorized Leave a comment »The UK’s first Raspberry Pi User Group
Madlab was the venue for the first Raspberry Pi focussed user group meeting.
The venue, kindly provided free of charge, was filled with Raspberry Pi as far as the eye could see, all being used for different reasons.
The event, organised by Ben Nuttall, was developed to promote programming, and the Pi , to a larger audience.
But one common theme, was seeing everyone so excited and interested in the diminutive device, especially the children that attended.
Amy, who is eleven, built games using scratch, and is quite clearly a future game designer, she is also an active Manchester Girl Geek
The event started with Ben hosting a short introduction to the format of the day, and explaining his path into the world of IT.
We then broke up into smaller groups, each working together to get our Pi’s setup and ready to go.
We then had our first talk, which was presented by Olly from Blackpool LUG, he chaired an open discussion on Linux, focussing on Debian based distributions such as Debian, Linux Mint and Ubuntu. Olly explained the history of Linux, and showed off the latest versions of the previously mentioned distributions.
Our next talk, was presented by Martin, he spoke about 3D printing, as the Raspberry Pi currently does not have an official case, lots of people are making their own with 3D printers. He talked about using 3D printers with the Raspberry Pi, surely this would be a fantastic idea, and create quite a polished 3D printer in a few months time.
Next up was the legendary Florentina sandwich from Rustica.
And then I spotted a photo op
After lunch, Jon Chamberlain hosted a Python primer, and used the Raspberry Pi directly on the Project A Sketch. Jon has been hosting a weekly Python meeting at Blackpool LUG and via our Google Hangout. Jon explained Python, and showed of a few procedural programs to simply explain the syntax.
Our last talk was Bob “Paragon” Clough talking about using the Raspberry Pi in place of an Arduino for hardware hacking. Bob is a keen hardware hacker, and has built many devices using an Arduino, and other clone boards.
Ben should be very proud of this event.
The user group has been kickstarted into life. with lots of support from Ben and the Manchester geek groups.
Very special thanks to Madlab, once again they have provided a home to a user group, and asked for no money in return. I really wish that we had more places like Madlab around the UK.
