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You imply a key point, Shane: it would be very frustrating for a
whole class full of kids to share a single computer. My experience
has been with settings where kids are going from place to place such
that only a few are at any one thing at a time. I totally lost sight
of that with my posting to the list. The other significant headache
with the RPI approach is the pile of free little monitors out in the
world do not support HDMI and the pile of free mice and keyboards
are often PS2 vs the necessary USB type. Then there's power
supplies, etc. To make even a small number of these systems would
involve scrounging a lot of stuff.<br>
<br>
I looked at the slides and poked around in the Eagle files for the
project Shane pointed to and have a few comments.<br>
<br>
I agree this project could provide an <b>incredible</b> experience
for 6+ graders. But to emulate the format described in the slides
would require some number of programmers (they used one per pair of
students). Jon Wolfe of Anibit might make a deal on a batch of
Adafruit USBtinyISP programmer kits but they're retail price is
about $22.<br>
<br>
But one additional pain might be that edge connector. I really
expected to see a 2x3 or 2x5 <u>PIN</u> header connector on this
board. But it appears this board would require some kind of edge to
pin header connector (that feels like it could cost a few bucks a
throw) or else an adapter cable (guestimate a buck a piece). The
Adafruit programmer comes with a 2x5 connector/cable (in addition to
2x3). In my opinion step one for pursuing this would be to tweak the
PCB design to use a standard 2x3 male header to eliminate the need
for some weird adapter lashup.<br>
<br>
-Pete<br>
<br>
PS I've come to terms with this Adafruit programmer and don't hate
it any more. I discovered why it wouldn't work some times (and
anybody considering buying one of these should ping me for the
details to avoid some real heartburn). My remaining issues with it
that aren't germane to a student project are that a) it's
unbelievably slow compared to it's somewhat more expensive cousins
and b) it applies over four volts to VCC no matter what the power
jumper setting is. That's highly stressful to discover after the
fact if your circuit board contains devices that forbid voltages
this high.<br>
<br>
<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 01/24/2015 05:00 PM, Shane Trent
wrote:<br>
</div>
<blockquote
cite="mid:CAAFjd3qaFH5Mr8oAdY54413SQELvPmaeFeQB+Wh4hjEmbB_HVA@mail.gmail.com"
type="cite">
<div dir="ltr">Slightly different approach but I was impressed
when I read about this effort (Raleigh guy too, might be on the
list) to show kids how to blink an LED on a tiny cheap board. I
suspect you could raise enough donations to build enough for a
classroom.
<div><br>
</div>
<div><a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://learn.sparkfun.com/blog/1193">https://learn.sparkfun.com/blog/1193</a><br>
</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Shane</div>
</div>
<div class="gmail_extra"><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Jan 24, 2015 at 4:49 PM, Pete
Soper <span dir="ltr"><<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:pete@soper.us" target="_blank">pete@soper.us</a>></span>
wrote:<br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0
.8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
<div bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000"> I've done a few
things in area elementary schools and school carnivals and
a Durham library but mostly helping kids play with "<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/apthomas/SquishyCircuits/"
target="_blank">Squishy Circuits</a>" (and "Banana
Piano", but IMO that's not at all relevant to this topic).
<br>
<br>
But my cohorts showed the kids how to play with <a
moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://scratch.mit.edu/"
target="_blank">Scratch</a> (which comes preinstalled as
part of Raspbian Linux for RPI these days). If I were
going to do something like you're talking about, and could
put a little time into it I'd jumper a Raspberry Pi to a
solderless breadboard with a few LEDs and piezo beeper, et
al on it and use Scratch, show the kids how to use it,
then stand back and watch. If you google "<a
moz-do-not-send="true"
href="https://www.google.com/search?q=raspberry+pi+scratch+gpio+projects&oq=raspberry+pi+scratch+gpio+projects&aqs=chrome..69i57j69i64.13625j0j7&sourceid=chrome&es_sm=93&ie=UTF-8#q=raspberry+pi+scratch+gpio+projects"
target="_blank">raspberry pi scratch gpio projects</a>"
there's a lot of stuff available to help shorten the
learning curve.<br>
<br>
I'm semi-confident somebody on this list would be glad to
loan you an RPI for a reasonably limited time to
facilitate this. I've got extra breadboards, LEDs,
beepers, and six other things that could be used for this
that you're welcome to borrow. (My RPIs are either tied up
or the old, 1/4gb RAM flavor)<span class="HOEnZb"><font
color="#888888"><br>
<br>
-Pete</font></span>
<div>
<div class="h5"><br>
<br>
<div>On 01/24/2015 03:19 PM, jonathan hunsberger
wrote:<br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
<blockquote type="cite">
<div>
<div class="h5">
<div dir="ltr">Hi all,
<div>I'm pretty much an embedded n00b, lurking on
the list to learn some things (pretty successful
in that so far!) I work in IT, doing systems
engineering / infrastructure architecture, but
when my daughter's Computer Skills (mostly
typing, plus a little bit of other stuff,
including "hour of code") teacher found out I
was a "computer person", she wanted me to come
talk to the class about writing code. I am not
a software developer, but like most people I do
write a lot of scripts, etc. to make my job
easier. And at home my latest free time sink
has been playing with microcontrollers, etc.
So.. I had two ideas:</div>
<div>1. Talk about ways that some level of coding
skills can be useful even when you aren't a
software developer for a living. </div>
<div>2. Talk about how you can use code to do
things "in the real world" with all of the
easily-accessible microcontrollers that are on
the market these days.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Kind of leaning toward the second one since
it seems more like playing than working. For
kids who have just come out of "hour of code"
and maybe a few hours of codecademy, I was
thinking it might be cool just to bring in an
Arduino and some common peripherals (sensors,
LEDs, etc.) and show how easy it is to quickly
get something working using SparkFun/AdaFruit
tutorials and running/modifying example sketches
that come with the Arduino IDE. Generally show
them how accessible it can be and give them the
basic info about getting started with it if it
is interesting to them.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Have any of you done anything like that?
Does anyone have advice on specific things to
demonstrate, ways to organize the presentation,
etc.? This would be for middle school students.
6th grade for sure, not sure about 7th and 8th.</div>
<div><br>
</div>
<div>Thanks!</div>
</div>
<br>
<fieldset></fieldset>
<br>
</div>
</div>
<span class="">
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TriEmbed web site: <a moz-do-not-send="true" href="http://TriEmbed.org" target="_blank">http://TriEmbed.org</a>
</pre>
</span></blockquote>
<br>
</div>
<br>
_______________________________________________<br>
Triangle, NC Embedded Computing mailing list<br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="mailto:TriEmbed@triembed.org">TriEmbed@triembed.org</a><br>
<a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://mail.triembed.org/mailman/listinfo/triembed_triembed.org"
target="_blank">http://mail.triembed.org/mailman/listinfo/triembed_triembed.org</a><br>
TriEmbed web site: <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://TriEmbed.org" target="_blank">http://TriEmbed.org</a><br>
<br>
</blockquote>
</div>
<br>
<br clear="all">
<div><br>
</div>
-- <br>
<div class="gmail_signature">
<div dir="ltr"><span
style="color:rgb(0,0,0);font-family:HelveticaNeue-Light,'Helvetica
Neue Light','Helvetica Neue',Helvetica,Arial,'Lucida
Grande',sans-serif;font-size:16px">A blog about some of my
projects. <a moz-do-not-send="true"
href="http://fettricks.blogspot.com/" target="_blank">http://fettricks.blogspot.com/</a></span><br>
</div>
</div>
</div>
</blockquote>
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