Last night we went along to the Raspberry Jam session hosted at Mozilla's super offices in Central London to meet, mingle and demonstrate our beta boards.
There were a couple of excellent presentations, one on RiscOS for the PI, one on the awesome #TechnoTunnel. The latter defies description - you had to be there - but I'm hoping someone took a video. When it's published we will share the link.
There was a real buzz throughout the evening, both metaphorically and literally, as our neighbours were demonstrating two lively and noisy Roadsters. They had on-board RasPis controlled over bluetooth. One was almost certainly breaking the speed limit - at least until it crashed!
As we hoped, Sukkin Pang of SK Pang Electronics was there with his custom workbench for our hardware. The version he brought has a mobile battery powering the Pi which runs for hours without a mains supply. Neat and simple to use, like the Pi. Sukkin gave us some great feedback about the beta boards.
We had a steady stream of visitors asking about the interface board, port extender and analogue board. Our demo showed three sets of bar LEDs being controlled by a Python program over the I2C bus. The cool bit is that each is controlled by a separate program running in its own process. The Linux kernel sorts out all the concurrency issues and the simple Python code just works.
We met several people working on fascinating projects, ranging from home control to an allotment management project combining remote greenhouse control with intruder detection. The Pi makes it easy to create projects which would have been impossible a couple of years ago.
The Jams are a great way to stimulate your imagination, find out what others are doing and try out ideas. if you're in the London area and remotely interested in the Raspberry Pi the #raspijam is a must-go event.