Raspberry Pi Ideas Repository

It's a very sensible idea, but a bit of a mouthful in that fully-descriptive form, so Pideas has been created with this much shorter monniker. The repository itself is here, as yet with only half a dozen or so Pideas projects – but that's not bad for something just starting.

There are videos associated with some of the projects, which are quite interesting uses for the Pi, including as the heart of a weather station. I might be interested in that one myself, if I can get permission to put up such a station on the roof here...

Get Your Bitcoins Here!

Not here in Britain yet, but an American-currency 'hole in the wall' machine for taking various Dollar notes (a.k.a. bills) and instantly crediting someone's Bitcoins account is coming.

Bitcoins, I explain for those who haven't heard of this concept, are an Internet-only currency that has been gaining popularity since its introduction nearly four years ago.

It was inevitable that an alternative to physical, national currency would develop one day, because of the sheer volume of on-line purchasing and similar transactions and the high proportion of this that crosses national boundaries. The complexities, uncertainties (e.g. varying exchange rates) and delays with conventional currency when applied to the on-line transactional world show how poorly they fit this completely different way of working.

Thus the Bitcoin mini-revolution that will surely become the core of a major part of the world's monetary activity one day.

Politically, it takes control away from national governments (and institutions such as the EU) who are notorious for devaluing the currency they control so as to invisibly steal from their citizens – something we here in Britain really learned about with the large-scale devaluation of Sterling by then Prime Minister Harold Wilson, getting on for half a century ago. More subtly, it is done all the time, via inflation and other devices.

That won't stop it, as Bitcoins cannot suddenly be (internationally, too) outlawed after having been allowed to become so significant that even some major businesses already accept payment this way.

Therefore the idea will expand; and having this reverse-cash-dispenser idea will help the transition from new idea to mainstream in the world, during the next several years. By the end of this decade, I'd expect the more forward-looking big economy countries to have made the cultural and operational shift, and the rest of us/them around the world will end up catching up because they'll have to do so in order to survive and thrive.

There is one British element to the story of the Dollars-to-Bitcoins machines, though: they have a Raspberry-Pi computer at their heart.

Pi on CNN

Here's a short-ish item about the Raspberry Pi computer that recently appeared on CNN.

It's just the right kind of British good news story that gives us a welcome break from the festive season for a few minutes and should leave us feeling positive afterward...

RasPi Talk at Hackerspace Charlotte

This is a really interesting talk by the Raspberry Pi Foundation's Eben Upton. If you're at all interested in this area of technology, do reserve forty minutes or so for the talk and slide show (but not the Q&A session, which has been cut out) in order to go all the way through this. While some of the content is, naturally enough, background material, there is also a lot of quite fascinating stuff in here, if you keep with it...

Pi in the Sky

Well, that's what it looks something like on RyanTeck's world map "tracker" of Raspberry Pi computers. They're almost everywhere in the world now – and they've been going out for only a few weeks.

As I write this, North America has the greatest number of Pis, currently approaching 2,000 registered on the map as being located there – by the looks of it, mostly in California, though the numbers seem to go awry when I zoom in for the more detailed figures, so I can't confirm this.

There are also some 1,400 registered in Europe.

It's all happening out there, and this tracker map will be one to watch in order to gain insight into how this little device is storming around the globe as fast as they can be produced and tested.

I bet even Acorn Computers never anticipated anything quite like this when they firstly invented the ARM processor that in a later incarnation would become the heart of the Pi, and secondly even when they jointly formed a company to take their invention into other markets, which has resulted in billions of the things going into mobile 'phones, set-top boxes, tablets and other items needing a low power consumption state-of-the-art processor chip/chipset.

It's a rare example of a British invention actually making it in the world market; and the Raspberry Pi in turn looks set to follow in its own CPU's 'chipsteps'.

Pi Day

Raspberry Pi computers have been arriving all over the place today.

After a change of designation that then required them to have emissions testing, causing a moderate delay, the first batch of Pi's has now gone out and some customers have reported receiving theirs this morning.

At least one recipient has already tweeted from it, others have simply announced the arrival of theirs, one with a photo, and here's another pic, oh and this one has a video.

In the video, note the mention of Element 14 on the instructions, which is the name for what was, once upon a time, Acorn Computers, inventor of the ARM chip of which breed a recent version is at the heart of the Pi...

The device will be featured on BBC Look East this evening, also viewable nationwide on Sky channel 981 or Freesat channel 953.

What's a GertBoard?

This demonstration should give you an idea...



Yes, it's a hardware interface add-on for the Raspberry Pi. It reminds me so much of the sort of thing my brother and I (mostly him) built ourselves, back in the early 'eighties at the family home in Morden. The row of LEDs and the momentary-contact pushbuttons are so reminiscent of a very basic computer (with 1 kiloByte of memory!) built into a silver-and-green casing that I had, with a Motorola 6800 CPU at its heart.

Ah, those were the days! The memories the GertBoard thus brought back to me were quite powerful, and reminded me of just how much I still had to learn in those times.

Anyway, we are now some thirty years on, and still the spirit of "breadboard innovation" and experimentation lives on. It really is important for the future, to help prevent stagnation in some of the fields in which the technology can continue to flourish and develop.