Here’s some fun photo coverage of a visitor’s experience at Bristol’s first Mini Maker Faire — and we noticed an interesting Raspberry Pi robotics project by Steve Battle (among the other cool projects) to share for #piday:
This is a Theremin being played badly by the little robot arm on the left… (above)
…and this is the Raspberry Pi driving the robot that’s “playing” the theremin! (below)
Here are more details of Gordon’s visit, which I enjoyed reading:
M-Shed is a pretty interesting place in its own right – a nice little museum exploring some of the history of Bristol, and as someone who lived in Bristol for a few years it was nice to have a look at some of the exhibits. It does warrant another trip too, it’s quite a nice little gem of a place. I left Bristol just over 10 years ago and all that area was just in the process of being re-developed at that time and the whole area looks quite good now too. (On both sides of the floating harbour!)
So the Maker Faire is basically just a bunch of folks showing off and hopefully trying to get others enthused into their projects – there are some commercial companies sponsoring the event and it was good to see Pimoroni – makers of the Pibow case for the Raspberry Pi there and chat to the chaps, as well as a few other small companies selling components and embedded processor boards (e.g. Phoenoptix, Soldersplash) as well as Element 14 and many others. (Sponsor list here)
There were also lots of enterprising individuals, and of-course lots of non-computer/electronics makers too! Bronze casting, knitting/weaving, pottery/clay work, soft-drink making – something for absolutely everyone.
The Bristol Hackspace took up a lot of space in the middle and were demonstrating many varied and different projects – from old pen plotters to their BBC Micro connected to a Raspberry Pi sending & receiving tweets!
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.
We now have Raspberry Pi Model B with 512MB RAM in stock and shipping now!