Rob brought along a few Raspberry Pi Revision 2 Boards to show off for the event. He also brought along two very exciting products that will hopefully come out in the near future. The first one was the Gertboard, which we are looking forward to immensely. This is the creation of Broadcom employee Gert Van Loo. It enables the Pi to run servos and motors and the sensing of voltages and currents. The Gertboard will be a kit that you have to fully assemble, which includes soldering lots of small components. The Gertboard will open up a wonderful world of robotics projects for the Raspberry Pi. The second product is actually a 5MP Camera that will attach to the Raspberry Pi via a pin connector. This camera is being designed by Raspberry Pi and will be offered at $25 when it is released. Rob mentioned they created it because it would be hard for the general public to obtain a cellphone camera that takes 5MP stills and shoots 1080p video for $25. Rob said that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has buying power when it comes to getting these cameras and after all most of them work for Broadcom, so it’s great they will be able to offer these to us at such a great price. Rob will be developing the drivers to run the camera as soon as he is off the hackspace tour which ends in Austin, TX.
Adafruit has had paid day off for voting for our team for years, if you need help getting that going for your organization, let us know – we can share how and why we did this as well as the good results. Here are some resources for voting by mail, voting in person, and some NY resources for our NY based teams as well. If there are additional resources to add, please let us know – adafruit.com/vote
Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
Each Friday is PiDay here at Adafruit, be sure to check out our posts, tutorials and new Raspberry Pi related products. Have you tried the new “Adafruit Raspberry Pi Educational Linux Distro” ? It’s our tweaked distribution for teaching electronics using the Raspberry Pi. But wait, there’s more! Try our new Raspberry Pi WebIDE! The easiest way to learn programming on a Raspberry Pi.