Topic: Raspberry Pi
Presenter: Main Speaker Pete Soper coordinating with a group of Splat Space hackers of Durham NC
When: Thursday, January 10, 7pm
Where: Red Hat HQ, NCSU Centennial Campus, 1801 Varsity Dr, Raleigh, NC
Map: Google Maps
Slides: PDF
Video: YouTube

® Raspberry Pi is a trademark of the Raspberry Pi Foundation

Raspberry Pi:

Raspberry Pi is a very inexpensive, richly capable single board computer (SBC) designed for educational settings. It features a modest speed ARM chip, a half gigabyte of RAM, flash SD, USB, ethernet, graphic and direct digital I/O interfaces that work together with a highly capable port of Debian Linux as a general purpose computing system that can as easily host your home web server or LAN engine as it can keep an eye on your thermostat or dispense cat food while you're away.

Synopsis:

In this introduction to Raspberry Pi attendees will get up close and personal with the hardware and software combination that is setting a new high water mark for price, performance, and useability. Multiple RPi demos in the main and conference rooms will be in operation during the meeting to provide the best opportunity for hands on experience. Traditional slide presentations will cover where RPi came from, what its capabilities are, and its charter for driving a wide range of educational opportunities while serving as an "instant platform" for a wide range of applications in hobby and light commercial settings. The bulk of the meeting will offer demos that go from "close to the metal," low level apps encroaching on the traditional domain of the Arduino family of SBCs to high level tools such as Clojure (Lisp implemented with the Java virtual machine). Join a group of Splat Space hackers coordinated by the main speaker as they and other volunteers provide a rich introduction to this remarkable $35 device.

Bio:

Alan Dipert is a Clojure programmer working for LonoCloud, Inc. Clojure is a Lisp for the JVM that runs nicely on the Raspberry Pi, and in his spare time Alan enjoys writing Clojure programs on his Pi to do mostly useless but occasionally entertaining things.

Inspired by electronic music to study Electronics, Physics, and Computer Science in the 1970's. Peter Reintjes currently uses his skills to make interactive music and video projects for SparkCon and to develop and maintain exhibits at the North Carolina Museum of Life and Science. He works with Arduino, PIC, and a few micro-controllers you haven't heard of, but now keeps a Raspberry PI in his toolbag.

Pete Soper is an underemployed software engineer who wrote and worked on system software like OS kernels, virtual machines, data communication protocols, compilers and runtime environments for five OEMs, three of which he helped start from scratch and saw bought by bigger fish. Recently he's looped back to embedded development to make data loggers and other gadgets out of off the shelf boards and custom PCBs.