Raspberry Pi-themed Dojo at BAML

Yesterday Bank of America once again hosted the London Python Code Dojo, this time at their St Paul’s offices. I don’t know what the normal use is for the room we were in, but it felt like a cross between a banqueting hall and something from Khazad-dûm. Very grand and with nice AV facilities: one big screen, several smaller screens and microphones. As is customary, the hosts provided beer & pizza, but as usual with BAML, in a somewhat classier mode, with slices and plates and a variety of drinks served by staff. All very much appreciated.

They’d also done all the setup, so we had 8 or 10 Raspberry Pi rigs with screens and enough keyboards and so on to go round. The networking took some doing and ended up being a cat’s cradle of very long ethernet cables all routing — I understand — through one all-the-data-you-can-eat phone connection! Which worked fine.

Al Broomhead and Tina Zhang gave a joint lightning talk on a couple of projects they’d been involved in on a recent Hack Day. Ben Nuttall from the Raspberry Pi Foundation had been good enough to come and join us and gave an overview of some of the resources they already have to help people use the RPi and to encourage any contributions the evening might bring forth.

Slightly differently from our usual approach, we had several different projects going during the evening. The idea was to come up with something which showcased the Raspberry Pi in some way. In the end, we had: a very simple approach to a door-challenge mechanism; a on-screen 7-segment display; an automated light which reacted to the hue of a chosen image; a text-adventure interface to Minecraft (”go forward; dig 5″); a morse-code reader using a Pibrella; and a couple of things which I’ve forgotten (sorry; someone ping me a reminder…).

At the end, of course, we had a name-draw for the book donated as usual by O’Reilly. And thanks go to BAML for their continued sponsorship of the Dojo. And to the BAML guys (and I think it was all guys) in particular for all the prep and tidy-up work to get the kit in place for us.

It was nice to see new people as well as the familiar faces. If anyone who was there wants to contribute their code or ideas to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, get in touch with Ben Nuttall. You can see a few photos via the @ldnpydojo twitter account. If any more show up we’ll try to retweet them.