Carla Washbourne
I left Maker Faire UK with a 20 computer. This was somewhat unprecedented. This tiny gadget, known as the ‘Raspberry Pi’, appeared throughout the Maker Faire exhibits controlling all kinds of crafty projects, from lasers to remote controlled cars. The idea had me hooked. Originally designed and marketed as a low-cost unit to allow kids to learn programming skills in a fun and immediately applicable way, the Pi has permeated the minds of makers across the world. This pocket-sized unit has significantly more processing power than my family’s first PC (and once you pop a 4GB SD card in to the pre-allocated slot, more hard drive storage space too!) and can be used to develop programming-based projects on many scales. It can run a number of different processes at any one time and sports a vast array of features which make it amazingly integrate-able with other pieces of electronic hardware.
I should say at this juncture that I am by no means a seasoned programmer, computer whizz, or electronics genius. I am a field-scientist, geoscientist and writer who occasionally still manages to irrevocably confuse Microsoft Excel. The greatest part of my experience in the field of programming was supplied by a ‘toy’ laptop I owned as a child (like this – although mine wasn’t cool / modern enough to have a mouse), which sported a number of strategically dull educational applications alongside the opportunity to learn to programme in BASIC. BASIC is a long-established programming language which gives you the power to develop your own little programmes and games. Amazingly BASIC won out over the ‘spelling bee’ and ‘word jumble’ applications, leading to the creation of a multitude of ‘quizzes’ which would predict such important events as the amount of time it would take my mum to get ready to leave the house and which boys my friends would marry (always brilliantly skewed to the hilariously screech-inducing – oh the joys of being in control of the results!) It also resulted in a number of massive disappointments, mostly where relatives of advanced years vastly overestimated both the computing power of the mid 1990′s and my skill as a programmer. Generally this resulted in said relative assuming that they could speak directly to the computer, and becoming frustrated when it seemed unwilling to accept their responses. I’d like to think that my Great Uncle Laurie was the real inspiration behind voice recognition software.
Now computers really can do some amazing things, and like many of us I have completely lost touch with much of the ingenuity behind both the hardware and software that make this possible. Through fleeting encounters with HTML and visual basic, I am now here, older, wiser, and holding a piece of simple hardware with so much more potential than I can really comprehend. I guess the point of my writing this article (and there is a point, I assure you!) is to convince both myself and you, dear readers, that a relative novice can pick up something like the Raspberry Pi without being daunted. That we can, in some small way, go back to being makers of technology rather than just users.
Where on Earth am I going to start? Well I realise that before I do anything much with my Pi I will have to learn to programme in Python – essentially tackling a new language – and that’s actually pretty exciting. I am so used to being a consumer of technology, and especially of software, that I’m actually really looking forward to learning a little bit more about what is going on in the background. I will also need to give myself a crash-course in some pretty rudimentary electronics. Soldering has already been ticked off the list, as the lovely people at MadLab (http://www.madlab.org/) agreed to let me loose with a soldering iron at the Maker Faire. Despite being a very hands-on person in my work, combining the phrases ‘electricity’ and ‘hands on’ in the same sentence does still make me wince. Perhaps the Pi will help to alleviate my fear a little, or at least prove too well-designed to allow me to accidentally melt anything particularly expensive.
A few lines of code and a bit of jiggery-pokery and the gang at the Raspberry Pi Foundation (http://www.raspberrypi.org/about) assure me that I can do anything from turning on my coffee-maker via Twitter to booby trapping my house with hidden cameras and light beam based trip-wires (which I am sure my housemates will love). What have I really got to lose?
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