"raspberry pi" entries

4 ways the Raspberry Pi is being used in education

Get inspired to create, teach, and learn with the Raspberry Pi.

raspberries

The Raspberry Pi is a small computer that can be used for a variety of projects, and has been heralded as a great boon to education due to its flexibility and simplicity. While PcPro magazine noted in January of 2014 that Pi’s were “gathering dust” in classrooms, production has not ceased. The usage map is pretty impressive and the Raspberry Pi 2 was recently released.

In February of this year, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced that they’re starting a mentoring program for people 16-21 years old. Here are four other ways that the Pi is being used in education and growing the tech community.

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Four short links: 8 August 2014

Four short links: 8 August 2014

Synchronization, Security Pi, YouTube Stardom, and Javascript Logging

  1. Everything You Wanted to Know About Synchronization But Were Too Afraid to Ask (PDF) — This paper presents the most exhaustive study of synchronization to date. We span multiple layers, from hardware cache-coherence protocols up to high-level concurrent software. We do so on different types of architectures, from single-socket — uniform and non- uniform — to multi-socket — directory and broadcast-based many-cores. We draw a set of observations that, roughly speaking, imply that scalability of synchronization is mainly a property of the hardware.
  2. Raspberry Pi as Low-Cost Security Camera (Instructables) — $120 HD motion-sensing web-viewable security camera.
  3. Inside YouTube’s Fame Factory (FastCompany) — great article about the tipping point where peer-to-peer fame becomes stage-managed corporate fame, as Vidcon grows. See also Variety: If YouTube stars are swallowed by Hollywood, they are in danger of becoming less authentic versions of themselves, and teenagers will be able to pick up on that,” Sehdev says. “That could take away the one thing that makes YouTube stars so appealing.”
  4. Sherlog.js (Github) — Javascript error and event tracker application. Honestly, I have no idea if this is any good but the name is golden. I’m such a sucker.
Four short links: 10 June 2014

Four short links: 10 June 2014

Trusting Code, Deep Pi, Docker DevOps, and Secure Database

  1. Trusting Browser Code (Tim Bray) — on the fundamental weakness of the ‘net as manifest in the browser.
  2. Deep Learning in the Raspberry Pi (Pete Warden) — $30 now gets you a computer you can run deep learning algorithms on. Awesome.
  3. Announcing Docker Hub and Official Repositories — as Docker went 1.0 and people rave about how they use it, comes this. They’re thinking hard about “integrating into the build ship run loop”, which aligns well with DevOps-enabling tool use.
  4. Apple’s Secure Database for Users (Ian Waring) — excellent breakdown of how Apple have gone out of their way to make their cloud database product safe and robust. They may be slow to “the cloud” but they have decades of experience having users as customers instead of products.
Four short links: 8 April 2014

Four short links: 8 April 2014

Our Robot Future, Embeddable Pi, Behavioural Economics Not Solved Problem, and Imagine Processing Language

  1. Next Five Years for Robots — plausible summary of the near future progression, taken from Helen Greiner’s DEMOlabs talk.
  2. Raspberry Pi Compute Modulea Raspberry Pi shrunk down to fit on a SODIMM with onboard memory, whose connectors you can customise for your own needs. (via Makezine)
  3. Behavioural Economics and Public Policy (Financial Times) — interesting how A/B trials revealed that implementations of Cialdini’s social proof didn’t test as well as non-social-proof persuasive techniques. More useful than something that claims to be the right answer is knowing when you’re closer to the right answer. (via Mind Hacks)
  4. Halide Language — open source programming language designed to make it easier to write high-performance image processing code on modern machines. Its current front end is embedded in C++. Compiler targets include x86/SSE, ARM v7/NEON, CUDA, Native Client, and OpenCL.
Four short links: 4 February 2014

Four short links: 4 February 2014

UX Fundamentals, Mozilla Persona, Pi Tests, and The Holodeck

  1. UX Fundamentals, Crash Course — 31 posts introducing the fundamental practices and mindsets of UX.
  2. Why We Love Persona And You Should Too — Mozilla’s identity system is an interesting offering. Fancy that, you might have single-sign on without Single Pwn-On.
  3. Raspberry Pi As Test Harness — Pi accessory maker uses Pis to automate the testing of his … it’s Pis all the way down.
  4. The Holodeck Begins to Take Shape — displays, computation, and interesting input devices, are coming together in various guises.

Supercomputing on the cheap with Parallella

Blowing open the doors to low-power, on-demand supercomputing

Parallella topview

Packing impressive supercomputing power inside a small credit card-sized board running Ubuntu, Adapteva‘s $99 ARM-based Parallella system includes the unique Ephiphany numerical accelerator that promises to unleash industrial strength parallel processing on the desktop at a rock-bottom price. The Massachusetts-based startup recently ran a successfully funded Kickstarter campaign and gained widespread attention only to run into a few roadblocks along the way. Now, with their setbacks behind them, Adapteva is slated to deliver its first units mid-December 2013, with volume shipping in the following months.

What makes the Parallella board so exciting is that it breaks new ground: imagine an Open Source Hardware board, powered by just a few Watts of juice, delivering 90 GFLOPS of number crunching. Combine this with the possibility of clustering multiple boards, and suddenly the picture of an exceedingly affordable desktop supercomputer emerges.

This review looks in-depth at a pre-release prototype board (so-called Generation Zero, a development run of 50 units), giving you a pretty complete overview of what the finished board will look like.

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Upward Mobility: The Forgotten Mobile Platforms

They may not be as pretty, but low cost embedded computing is a big thing

When thinking about the mobile development space, it’s easy to make the mistake of restricting it to smartphones. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the stragglers dominate the news, and seeing someone typing away at a handset has become ubiquitous. But below the surface, there’s another set of mobile platforms that tend to get ignored, outside the DIY community, but are revolutionizing the world in their own way.

Traditionally, embedded computing was restricted to high-volume commercial applications (e.g., smart refrigerators and automobile control systems.) The intrepid hackers dabbled, but the amount of hardware knowledge required to get a CPU, memory and I/O logic onto a breadboard prevented any but the most experienced from implementing their own low-power embedded creations.

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Four short links: 1 November 2013

Four short links: 1 November 2013

AI Lecture, Programming Provocation, Packet Laws, and Infrared Photography

  1. Analogy as the Core of Cognition (YouTube) — a Douglas Hofstadter lecture at Stanford.
  2. Why Isn’t Programming Futuristic? (Ian Bicking) — delicious provocations for the future of programming languages.
  3. Border Check — visualisation of where your packet go, and the laws they pass through to get there.
  4. Pi Noir — infrared Raspberry Pi camera board. (via DIY Drones)
Four short links: 20 September 2013

Four short links: 20 September 2013

Insecure Hardware, Doc Database, Kids Programming, and Ad-Blocking AP

  1. Researchers Can Slip an Undetectable Trojan into Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs (Ars Technica) — The exploit works by severely reducing the amount of entropy the RNG normally uses, from 128 bits to 32 bits. The hack is similar to stacking a deck of cards during a game of Bridge. Keys generated with an altered chip would be so predictable an adversary could guess them with little time or effort required. The severely weakened RNG isn’t detected by any of the “Built-In Self-Tests” required for the P800-90 and FIPS 140-2 compliance certifications mandated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
  2. rethinkdbopen-source distributed JSON document database with a pleasant and powerful query language.
  3. Teach Kids Programming — a collection of resources. I start on Scratch much sooner, and 12+ definitely need the Arduino, but generally I agree with the things I recognise, and have a few to research …
  4. Raspberry Pi as Ad-Blocking Access Point (AdaFruit) — functionality sadly lacking from my off-the-shelf AP.
Four short links: 13 September 2013

Four short links: 13 September 2013

Remote Work, Raspberry Pi Code Machine, Low-Latency Data Processing, and Probabilistic Table Parsing

  1. Fog Creek’s Remote Work PolicyIn the absence of new information, the assumption is that you’re producing. When you step outside the HQ work environment, you should flip that burden of proof. The burden is on you to show that you’re being productive. Is that because we don’t trust you? No. It’s because a few normal ways of staying involved (face time, informal chats, lunch) have been removed.
  2. Coder (GitHub) — a free, open source project that turns a Raspberry Pi into a simple platform that educators and parents can use to teach the basics of building for the web. New coders can craft small projects in HTML, CSS, and Javascript, right from the web browser.
  3. MillWheel (PDF) — a framework for building low-latency data-processing applications that is widely used at Google. Users specify a directed computation graph and application code for individual nodes, and the system manages persistent state and the continuous flow of records, all within the envelope of the framework’s fault-tolerance guarantees. From Google Research.
  4. Probabilistic Scraping of Plain Text Tablesthe method leverages topological understanding of tables, encodes it declaratively into a mixed integer/linear program, and integrates weak probabilistic signals to classify the whole table in one go (at sub second speeds). This method can be used for any kind of classification where you have strong logical constraints but noisy data.