Southend-on-Sea Raspberry Jam

On Saturday, I attended the Southend Raspberry Jam. It was great fun and it was nice to meet new people as well as bump into some familiar faces. The guys at Southend-on-Sea Linux User Group did a great job of organising all the talks and the central room where there was lots of show-and-tell. Nice to see a good amount of youngsters getting stuck in with Minecraft and especially Sonic Pi v2.

I attended a few of the talks, some of which were Pi-related, some of which were more to do with microcontrollers, and then embarked on some show-and-tell of my own. This was my table:

You can see lots of things here – my Picorder is in the middle (I really ought to do a proper case for it now it’s finished!), Zach Igielman’s PiPiano board (it’s the one with all the red buttons – coming soon to Kickstarter), a few RasPiO boards and, of course, Ryan Walmsley’s TurtlTeck (which is a standalone robotics product currently running on Kickstarter).

I think my Project of the Jam was Peter Onion‘s huge LED matrix display. 4 LED matrices all connected together (and to the Pi) and at one stage running an implementation of Conway’s Game of Life, written in C. (Wish I’d got a video! I couldn’t stop watching it!).

Photo courtesy of The Average Man

For a pictorial guide to the Southend Jam, check out the Average Man’s blog post about the event.

3 comments for “Southend-on-Sea Raspberry Jam

  1. I think you liked it because it was a great Jam that you didn’t have to worry about organising!

    Seriously though, I really enjoyed myself. It was a good opportunity to talk to people in a relaxed environment. There was a range of abilities in lots of different areas and a lot of information sharing. Just how we like it!

    • There was an element of that, yes 😉
      What struck me is that it was definitely worth the 1h30 drive to get there. I think the guys were genuinely surprised at how successful it was – and being in August, they probably ought to have been surprised! I can see a great future for this Jam.
      Really nice day out it was. Wish I’d stayed for chips along the seafront, but family duties called.

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