Manchester Jamboree – Intro to Robotics Session

On the 9th March, the first every Jamboree was held in Manchester and myself Jason Barnett (@boeeerb) http://www.boeeerb.co.uk/ and Ben Smith (@ManchesterBudo) ran a 45 minute session showing people how to easily interface a Raspberry Pi to a £5 breadboard setup with some LEDs and a switch.

CPC Components kindly provided all the hardware for the day and we had 16 RPi setup and managed to cram 32 people into the session.

We showed them (and they all then did) how to make a simple set of Traffic Lights and have them go through the Green-Amber-Red-Red and Amber -Green sequqnce and how the RPi could detect if a switch was open or shut.

All of this was done with a normal RPi running my Scratch GPIO package. http://cymplecy.wordpress.com/2012/08/26/scratch-controlling-the-gpio-on-a-raspberrypi/

We explained how as well as switching things off and on, you can use an RPi to vary the speed of a motor by simply adding in a 37p IC (ULN2003) and Jason showed everyone what you can acheive with a bit more time and effort 🙂
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UWX1BtS7tCA]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S6zKNRW9E5g]

The link to our presentation is here https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1JqwOkrtjOu6y-uS2w3M1IPbosq6vlAEgl_M7CJqMcJ4/

Please tweet any of us of leave comments here
@cycmplecy (me) @boeeerb (Jason-Master Roboteer) @ManchesterBudo (Proper Teacher)

My email is simplecy at googlemail dot com