Pumping Station: One

Interested in learning a little about PS:One?

New to PS:One and want to learn how to get along here?

Come join us on the 4th Sunday of every month at 4pm for N00bs’ Paradise: an event specifically for the new and/or curious about PS:One.

You’ll learn:

• how to immediately get started learning and doing awesome things at PS:One
• the one and only rule you need to remember at PS:One
• what mailing lists and IRC channels you should join
• how to get discounts on classes, tee-shirts, stuff around town, and even monthly dues!
• how to get certified on equipment
• how to donate stuff to PS:One
• how to create a new class, event, group, meeting, or what have you
• do-ocracy and how to do-ocratize things

The basics:

• Who: anyone who wants to learn more about PS:One and how it works
• When: Sunday April 28th, 4 pm until about 6pm (and every 4th Sunday thereafter)
• Where: PS:One 1st floor lounge
• Cost: free

Here are the class notes – please feel free to read beforehand (Note: these notes are not a good substitute for class attendance).

NERP is not exclusively raspberry pi, the small computer interest group at
Pumping Station:One in Chicago.

There are a bunch of credit card size and smaller computers out there, but the
one closest to the Raspberry Pi in purpose and features is the Beagle Bone. The
BeagleBone is a credit-card sized Linux computer that connects with the Internet
and runs software such as Android 4.0 and Ubuntu. NERP first saw the Beagle
Board during Drew’s high-level overview in March.

The current Beagle Bone (~$89) costs more than the Raspberry Pi, but the Bone
has better perfomance. Tomorrow, 4/23/13, circutco.com will publicly announce a
new, more powerful, more featureful, and cheaper Beagle Bone. The price for the
new board will put it closer to the Pi. The revolution is over, but the
competiton for the smallest, most powerful, most versatile, and cheapest
embeddable computer has just begun. Adafruit, one of several Beagle Bone
resellers, is getting revved up for the new release.

http://www.adafruit.com/products/1278

Tonight Brian Chamberlain will give an in depth introduction to writing code on
the Beagle Bone. Brian’s talk will  “…cover how to setup and run remote
debugging on a BeagleBone from within the Eclipse IDE. It will include a
walkthrough of the key steps for setting things up. Then a demonstration of how
to step through lines of code, inspect variables, and generally cause havoc on a
simple program running remotely on the BeagleBone. Also, as a segway from our
normal RaspberryPi discussions there will be a brief overview of the BeagleBone,
its features, and how it compares to the RaspberryPi.”

Find NERP and Pumping Station:One
at http://www.meetup.com/NERP-Not-Exclusively-Raspberry-Pi/
and http://pumpingstationone.org

NERP meets at 7pm 4-22-13 at Pumping Station:One, 3519 N. Elston Ave. in
Chicago. NERP is free and open to the public.

Ed Bennett ed @ kinetics and electronics . com

ERP is not exclusively raspberry pi, the small computer and embedded control interest group at Pumping Station:One in Chicago.

Tonight, Eric Stein, who is Chief Cat Herder and president of Pumping Station:One will take time out of his busy schedule to show us a Raspberry Pi and Python based system that sends messages by passing messages.

Eric’s system, which is currently in development, receives input from IRC (internet relay chat) and responds by playing an informational message over one of several louudspeakers located around the PS:1 facility. The Pi does text-to-speech conversion on stored messages and i/o logic and control to select the appropriate audio output channel.

A very interesting aspect of the system is the use of ZeroMQ to pass control messages between the Pi and and a server that does something important that Eric will explain. From wikipedia:

“ØMQ (also spelled ZeroMQ, 0MQ or ZMQ) is a high-performance asynchronous messaging library aimed at use in scalable distributed or concurrent applications. It provides a message queue, but unlike message-oriented middleware, a ØMQ system can run without a dedicated message broker. The library is designed to have a familiar socket-style API.”

Find NERP and Pumping Station:One
at http://www.meetup.com/NERP-Not-Exclusively-Raspberry-Pi/
and http://pumpingstationone.org

NERP meets at 7pm 4-8-13 at Pumping Station:One, 3519 N. Elston Ave. in
Chicago. NERP is free and open to the public.

Ed Bennett ed@kineticsandelectronics.com
Tags: announcement, electronics, embedded, meetup, NERP, Open Source, raspberry pi
–

Happy Happy
-Ed Bennett

NERP is not exclusively raspberry pi, the small computer interest group at Pumping Station:One in Chicago.

Ste Kulov (like “steve” without the “ve”) is the signal processing guru of Pumping Station:One. He’s also a great teacher who’s enthusiastic about sharing his knowledge of the theory and practice of analog and digital circuit design. Tonight Ste will show NERP what FPGA (Field Programmable Gate Array) chips do and how to use the chip manufacturers’ development tools.

Xilinx.com

FPGA’s are very fast logic chips that can perform better than microprocessor CPU’s in a number of high throughput applications. FPGA’s are programmable, but FPGA programs aren’t necessarily seqences of instruction like a C program would be. In fact, on an FPGA you can “write” a CPU. All the cool kids are learning to use FPGA’s, and you should, too!

Tonight’s agenda from Ste:
1.) What are FPGAs & CPLDs and what do they do?
2.) Why would you want to use one?
3.) Explain how you would program one using a hardware description
language such as VHDL or Verilog.
4.) Go over a quick Verilog example & demo of displaying “NERP” on the
4-digit 7-segment display on my dev board.
5.) With the remaining time, demo off my Nintendo DS video output
project to illustrate the neat stuff you can do with these things.

Find NERP and Pumping Station:One
at http://www.meetup.com/NERP-Not-Exclusively-Raspberry-Pi/
and http://pumpingstationone.org

NERP meets at 7pm 3-25-13 at Pumping Station:One, 3519 N. Elston Ave. in
Chicago. NERP is free and open to the public.

Ed Bennett ed@kineticsandelectronics.com
Tags: announcement, electronics, embedded, meetup, NERP, Open Source, raspberry pi–

Happy Happy
-Ed

http://KineticsAndElectronics.com

NERP is not exclusively raspberry pi, the small computer interest group at
Pumping Station:One in Chicago.

Tonight Drew Fustini will demo the Beagle Bone.

BeagleBone (http://beagleboard.org/bone) is an open source, low-cost
credit-card-sized Linux computer that connects with the Internet and runs
software such as Android 4.0 and Ubuntu.

BeagleBone is capable of interfacing to all of your robotics motor
drivers, location or pressure sensors and 2D or 3D cameras. It can also run
OpenCV, OpenNI and other image collection and analysis software.

Through HDMI, VGA or LCD expansion boards, it is capable of decoding and
displaying mutliple video formats utilizing a completely open source software
stack and synchronizing playback over Ethernet or USB with other BeagleBoards.

Drew will also hit the high points of a Raspberry Pi interface board called the
Pi Face (http://pi.cs.man.ac.uk/interface.htm)

Pi-Face Digital is the first of a range of interfaces to allow the Raspberry Pi
to control and manipulate the real world. It allows the Raspberry Pi to read
switches connected to it – a door sensor or pressure pad perhaps, a microswitch
or reed switch, or a hand held button. With appropriate easy to write code, the
Raspberry Pi then drives outputs, powering motors, actuator, LEDs, light bulbs
or anything you can imagine to respond to the inputs.

Find NERP and Pumping Station:One
at http://www.meetup.com/NERP-Not-Exclusively-Raspberry-Pi/
and http://pumpingstationone.org

NERP meets at 7pm 3-11-13 at Pumping Station:One, 3519 N. Elston Ave. in
Chicago. NERP is free and open to the public.

Ed Bennett ed@kineticsandelectronics.com

NERP is Not Exlusivey Raspberry Pi, the small computer interest group at Pumping Station:One in Chicago.

Boardforge gantry Ver 0.3a in development (Ed_B)

Several members of Pumping Station:One are collaborating on a project to produce a pick and place machine. PnP machines are robotic assembly devices that place electronic components on circuit boards as part of the soldering process. The software that will run the machine is made of several distinct subsystems including motion control and computer vision. Jay Hopkins has been doing some experiments to determine whether a Raspberry Pi can serve as the on-board controller for the machine. Tonight he’ll show nerp some of his progress. Teaser: OpenCV _will_ compile on the Raspberry PI!

Find NERP and Pumping Station:One
at http://www.meetup.com/NERP-Not-Exclusively-Raspberry-Pi/
and http://pumpingstationone.org

NERP meets at 7pm 2-25-13 at Pumping Station:One, 3519 N. Elston Ave. in Chicago. NERP is free and open to the public.

This NERP, Drew Fustini will show us how to WebIDE to program the Raspberry Pi. WebIDE is free from Adafruit. Put simply, “The Raspberry Pi WebIDE is by far the easiest way to run code on your Raspberry Pi. Just connect your Pi to your local network, and log on to the WebIDE in your web browser to edit Python, Ruby, JavaScript, or anything and easily send it over to your Pi.” Drew will use a Pi Plate RGB 16×2 character “Pi Plate” as the output device.

At the 1/28 NERP, we announced that the Adafruit Industries community grants people intended to send us a care package with Raspberry Pi goodies. The package arrived last week, and rather than opening it right away I thought it would be nice to share the surprise on Monday. It’ll be fun to see what kinds of ideas come out of the box and what kinds of projects they might inspire.

As always, if you have a NERP related project that you’d like to share, bring
it along!

Find NERP and Pumping Station:One
at http://www.meetup.com/NERP-Not-Exclusively-Raspberry-Pi/
and http://pumpingstationone.org

NERP meets at 7pm 2-11-13 at Pumping Station:One, 3519 N. Elston Ave. in Chicago. NERP is free and open to the public.

Raspberry Pi hands-on workshop

NERP is Not Exclusively Raspberry Pi, but Monday, 1/28, we’ll be all Raspberry.

Pumping Station:One and NERP are excited to be included in Adafruit Industries community grants of cool hardware for the Raspberry Pi.  Adafruit is sending us a care package of Raspberry Pi gear we can use to make projects. The exact contents of the package will be a surprise.

On Monday Jan. 28th at 7pm, we’ll get into the swing of making cool Pi things by doing a hands-on workshop on basic controlling and sensing with the Pi. Bring your Pi, keyboard, monitor, etc, and try out a couple of demo projects from learn.adafruit.com . The parts cost should be about zero since the projects don’t require much external hardware. PS:One′s Electronics area will provide tools and parts to get started.

We’ll learn how to turn on a simple LED (or anything else) using Python. Then we’ll explore two example projects on learn.adafruit.com :

http://learn.adafruit.com/basic-resistor-sensor-reading-on-raspberry-pi/basic-
photocell-reading

http://learn.adafruit.com/playing-sounds-and-using-buttons-with-raspberry-pi

Find NERP and Pumping Station:One
at http://www.meetup.com/NERP-Not-Exclusively-Raspberry-Pi/
and http://pumpingstationone.org

As always, if you have a NERP related project that you’d like to share, bring
it along!

NERP meets at 7pm 1/28/13 at Pumping Station:One, 3519 N. Elston Ave. in Chicago. NERP is free and open to the public.

Monday Dec. 3rd. is back-to-basics night at NERP. In Part 1, Carl
Karsten and Bonnie King will give an introduction to Python programming
for novice programmers. The target will be the Raspberry Pi, and the
focus of their teaching examples will be on input/output to simple
hardware. In Part 2, yours truly will demo control of output devices
including simple circuits for interfacing electronics to
electro-mechanical devices.

Find us here…
http://www.meetup.com/NERP-Not-Exclusively-Raspberry-Pi/

-Ed

Are you new around here?

There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that, and you’re hardly alone. PS:One has seen explosive growth in the past year or so, and it’s becoming increasingly obvious that we need a formal way of teaching new folk how to be a healthy, happy member of PS:One.

Meet with PS:One old-timers (including at least one former president) to learn the many opportunities available to PS:One members, plus hacks for getting around easier.

You’ll learn:

• the one and only rule you need to remember at PS:One!
• what mailing lists and IRC channels you should join
• how to get discounts on classes, tee-shirts, stuff around town, and even monthly dues!
• how to get certified on equipment
• how to bring new equipment into PS:One
• how to create a class, event, group, meeting, or what have you
• how to request a class, event, group, whatever
• how to blog
• the wiki.
• do-ocracy and how to do-ocratize things

The basics:

• Who: anyone who wants to learn how PS:One works
• When: Monday October 22nd, 7 pm
• Where: PS:One 1st floor
• Cost: free

Here are the class notes for folk who can’t attend.