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Raspberry Jam: So good we’re going to *preserve* it in our calendar

Friday night saw the Event Space in Farset Labs packed with eager attendees to Northern Ireland’s first ever Raspberry Jam.

Raspberry Jam is a rapidly growing global network of Raspberry Pi users that regularly meet and, following the success of Friday’s Jam, Farset Labs is pleased to announce that the event will be joining our wide and eclectic event calendar as a monthly fixture.
With the Event Space stuffed with in excess of thirty attendees, with an age-range stretching from six to sixty and abilities ranging from the simply curious to the robot-controlling masterminds of future world-domination. In respect to the latter, one of the most impressive projects on show was the use of a Pi to control an NXT robotics system; this was from a (impressively uniformed, for 7pm) sixth form student from Dalriada School, giving weight to the hopes of the Raspberry Pi Foundation that their innovation will ignite the passion for tinkering and technology in schools. Of course, not only is the Pi a wonderful development system, it can also run a variety of more consumer oriented tasks; if loaded up with RaspBMC software, you now have an immensely capable £25 media centre.

After the scheduled session, the assembled users had the chance to mix, compare experiences and work collaboratively, demoing, among others, Quake 3 running on the Pi and a system for the Pi built entirely from Freecycle, including a hacked screen from an in-car entertainment system and a jury-rigged powered USB hub with connections to a keyboard, mouse and wireless card.

Future sessions intend to cover alternative distributions (operating systems for the Raspberry Pi), strange use cases and hardware interfacing, both via direct link and also the Gertboard. Suffice to say, having seen the users on Friday, the road ahead will be fast, interesting and, above all, full of unexpected turnings.

Check out the obligatory timelapse below, which is slightly cut off due to the fact that the level of activity throughout the day filled the modest card!

(Apologies for the awful, awful pun, but William Cully wasn’t available for consultation at 3am.)

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pzw_BRdqZi0]

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