Tag Archives: community

Meet The Workers Team Over Discord

Post Syndicated from Albert Zhao original https://blog.cloudflare.com/meet-the-workers-team-over-discord/

Meet The Workers Team Over Discord

Meet The Workers Team Over Discord

The Cloudflare Workers team is excited to announce the opening of our Discord channel! You can join right away by going here.

Through our Discord channel, you can now connect with the team to ask questions, show off what you’re building, and discuss the platform with other developers.

Sometimes you just need to talk to another human being. Our developer docs will always be the source of truth on the mechanics of Workers, but we want to provide quicker help if you need it.

Growing The Workers Community

Over the past three years, Cloudflare Workers evolved from an initial sandbox for enterprise customers writing edge code to a developer platform for creating new applications and systems.

“We bet our whole business on Workers and it paid off big time,” said Hamlet Batista, CEO of RankSense, a SEO automation platform. “We’ve been saving a lot of money on infrastructure costs and DevOps resources we no longer need.”

Our team is constantly surprised by the palette of use cases from those developing on Workers. For example, a developer in Belgium created a static Workers site that teaches an online tutorial in three different languages on how to make your own face mask, which earned the approval of the Belgian government.

Why Discord?

Discord provides a medium that allows users to openly share their thoughts while maintaining anonymity. It’s also really fast — partially due to Discord’s use of Workers and Cloudflare’s network.

“Workers are in the path of virtually all Discord requests,” said Mark Smith, Director of Infrastructure at Discord. “We are longtime users of Workers and big fans of the power and flexibility they give us to continue building great things for our users.”

As we continue to build the ecosystem of developer tools, we’d love to hear what you’re building, whether it’s a personal site of your pet or an API gateway. Come say hi today.

Thank you 2020: Results, Achievements, and Plans

Post Syndicated from Jekaterina Petruhina original https://blog.zabbix.com/thank-you-2020-results-achievements-and-plans/13184/

2020 was not an easy year, but it challenged and taught us a lot. Let’s sum up the past year’s results together and make some plans for the next one.

Going online

Despite the worldwide lockdown and the entire team’s inability to work from the office, Zabbix continued to evolve and get better. The Zabbix 5.0 release was the first release to be done remotely – without the usual cake and “family” celebration on release day in our cozy office kitchen. Version 5.2 also followed remotely, with the already familiar online celebration in Zoom.

Unexpectedly we had to change the vector of planned activities. In January 2020, we expected to hold ten conferences in different countries of the world. But in reality, due to the pandemic and the restrictions it caused, we were only able to have a few: Zabbix Conference Benelux 2020, Zabbix Conference China 2020, and Zabbix Conference Japan 2020.

In 2020, we were going to have the biggest Zabbix Summit ever – the 10th-anniversary event. But plans changed, and instead, we held our first online Zabbix Summit. Given the unusual format of a traditional Zabbix Summit – it turned out very successful and proved the online version also could be sustainable.  We are grateful to all the speakers and guests who supported us and joined the event.

We can say that 2020 was all about online events. We start a good tradition to hold Zabbix meetups online and received positive feedback from the community. Thanks to our partners’ support, online meetups have been held not only in English and Russian but also in Czech, Italian, French, Portuguese, Spanish, German, and Polish. We will continue this tradition for sure, providing our users worldwide to learn Zabbix, share their experience, and meet co-thinkers. Remember that we always record the meetups for you to have access to presentations when it is required. Recordings are available on our website’s event section under each event.

Conquering the world

One of the most important events of 2020 for Zabbix was the opening of the office in Brazil. The software and professional services are now even more accessible to Latin American users thanks to language localization and the branch office’s closeness. We are happy to be part of one of Zabbix’s most active communities worldwide and being able to cooperate on a much greater level. We have expanded our Latin American branch with new Zabbix professionals, partners, and initiatives during last year.

We are also proud of making Zabbix more reachable for different language users – with our Latin American office, we opened Zabbix Spanish and Portuguese web page and thanks to our active partners – also German site. Now we are working on more languages to make our open source solution even more open.

As for the overall results, we can share with you some statistics

Our integration team has been very active over the past year and has released many useful templates. In total, their efforts resulted in 42 new templates and 20 new Webhook integrations.

Zabbix partnership network has also grown. Zabbix Partnership program creates a worldwide network of trustful and highly skilled companies ready to provide immediate technical assistance and become an accessible intermediary between you and the Zabbix team. This network has now grown by 40+ partners worldwide, resulting in around 200 partners for now.

In the past year, we rethought the professional training program and expanded it with extra training – one-day courses for in-depth study of one specific topic. These courses differ from the rest of the program by having no requirements. You can get extra knowledge about monitoring with Zabbix without Zabbix certification. Four additional training courses are available now, but we are working on the next topics to provide you.

Note that we have already published many training sessions for this year, so now is an excellent time to choose and book the courses and timing that suit you best. Don’t forget to use the filter – you can quickly sort courses by language, level, and location (online or on-site).

Speaking of statistics for last year, thanks to the Zabbix team and partners’ efforts, there were 203 training sessions in total. Altogether, 1,214 official Zabbix certificates were awarded to the training attendees who successfully mastered the material and passed the exam.

But education doesn’t end with training. Webinars are an excellent opportunity to learn different aspects of Zabbix for free. Note that we have also added the ability to watch recorded sessions at your convenience. And we also want to remind you not to forget to use the filter to navigate between sessions. We cover many topics in many different languages, and we want to make sure you don’t miss out on learning the material. Last year we hosted 245 webinar sessions (including 55 sessions held by Zabbix partners worldwide), and we hope it was beneficial for our community.

A sneak peek to 2021

So what can we expect from Zabbix in the new year of 2021? Lots of things! We are not going to stop and continue to work hard. The Zabbix software development roadmap is available on our website. Feel free to explore the features we are working on right now! We will continue to hold meetups, covering complex technical issues. As for the Zabbix Summit 2021, we are also planning to have it online in October 2021. The first experience was a success, so why not strengthen the achieved result. And as for other news, keep an eye on our updates here on the blog, social media, and newsletter. We have an exciting year ahead of us, so let’s make the most of it!

 

Aranet — a wireless IOT sensor platform

Post Syndicated from Toms Reksna original https://blog.zabbix.com/aranet-a-wireless-iot-sensor-platform/12953/

Aranet — wireless IoT sensor platform. Wherever you need to measure anything – temperature, air quality, light, or any other physical parameter – Aranet’s main mission is to deliver these measurements simply, easily, and above all – wirelessly. Aranet is manufactured by SAF Tehnika — a company with over 20 years of experience in the telecom industry, microwave radio, and test & measurement equipment manufacturing, and a certified partner of Zabbix.

Contents

I. Aranet wireless sensor network (1:41)
II. Aranet in retail (5:53)
III. Indoor air quality and COVID19 (8:20)
IV. Partnership with Aranet (12:11)
V. Questions & Answers (13:52)

Aranet wireless sensor network

Aranet is a wireless sensor network consisting of the Aranet PRO base station and sensors transmitting data to one another over the 868 MHz frequency in Europe and 920 MHz frequency in the United States. This frequency allows us to have a very large line of sight distance between the sensor and the base station — up to 3 kilometers line of sight and a couple of hundred meters indoors.

Sensors are intended to measure different environmental parameters. You can connect up to a hundred sensors per base station. Sensors can be configured to send the data over different intervals — once every minute, two minutes, five, or 10 minutes. Sensors are very power efficient — with a regular AA battery, they will last up to 10 years.

Aranet ecosystem

Aranet technology is based on the LoRa physical layer. We have built our proprietary LPWAN protocol with XXTEA encryption on top of LoRa to make the radio parameters better and to increase the battery life.

Aranet technology

The brain of the system is the Aranet PRO base station – the radio receiver with a built-in web server housing SensorHUB software and internal memory for local data storage. It is made with ease of use in mind – you can connect directly to the base station with your PC, laptop, or phone over Ethernet or Wi-Fi, open up your web browser and access the free SensorHUB software. You don’t even need to install anything.

Aranet PRO base station offers a lot of features such as graphing, exporting data, etc. In addition, its internal memory allows for storing 10 years of readings even if the Internet goes down.

The sensors are sending data to the base station. Several such base stations can be agglomerated into the Aranet Cloud solution collecting data from several base stations and allowing you to access the data from anywhere.

Aranet architecture

With over 20 years of experience in radio manufacturing, we believe that we’ve created one of the best-in-class systems in terms of wireless connectivity with our base stations and in-house cloud. However, we are looking for a strategic partnership where the Aranet system can become a part of a larger system. This brought us to the partnership with Zabbix so that we can integrate our cloud solution with the Zabbix monitoring system.

Aranet philosophy

Aranet Example Use Cases

Aranet for retail

Rimi

Aranet has been actively used in retail, for instance, Rimi — a chain of Latvian supermarkets, where 6,500 sensors have been installed in 125 stores. Aranet is planning to expand to other Baltic states.

Aranet equipment is primarily used for:

  • Monitoring of freezer temperatures. Earlier, they had to check the temperature manually — somebody had to walk around with the legal pad and check the temperature to make sure that freezers are working properly and to report to the relevant government agencies. Aranet allowed for automating this process.
  • Alarms in case of malfunction. In the case of a malfunction, an alarm can be sent to avoid product spoilage.
  • Working on predictive maintenance, including machine learning algorithms for predictive maintenance to locate anomalies in the defrost cycle temperature data helping to prevent breakages.

Aranet in retail

Benefits

  • Even the largest supermarkets (8800 m2/94 000 ft2) can be covered with a single base station.
  • Manual data collection can be avoided
  • Freezer temperature operating costs can be optimized (20% energy costs reduction).
  • Product spoilage can be avoided.
  • Litigation/fines for slip and fall accidents can be avoided.

Aranet for indoor air quality and COVID19 safety

Due to COVID19, many governments and health agencies have changed their guidelines, including the Center for Disease Control in the United States, and they now state that COVID19 can be transmitted through aerosols. Aerosols are small droplets that are released when we cough, sneeze, or talk. As these droplets are small — about five microns, they linger in the air for up to nine or more minutes. So, that means that you don’t even have to be in contact with the infected person to actually catch the disease.

This requires proper ventilation practices, which can decrease x10 the time aerosol particles stay in the air.

Aranet4 PRO – a wireless COVID19 safety network

One way to estimate if ventilation is sufficient is to measure CO2. The amount of CO2 (air exhaled by other people) in a certain room is a measure of the risk of contagion. The recommended air circulation per person is 60m3 /h, which is approximately 800ppm CO2 concentration — almost twice as much as the outside value.

Aranet wireless CO2 sensor

Aranet offers a wireless CO2 sensor that also measures temperature, relative humidity, and air pressure. It comes with a useful Bluetooth application, which allows you to easily get the latest readings. But the most important thing is that this sensor can generate alerts. So, whenever the value exceeds the critical level, you have a visual indication — green, yellow, or red, as well as an audible alert prompting to manually increase the ventilation, for instance, by opening windows.

Lately, these sensors have been gaining popularity, especially in schools, universities, and offices as they offer:

  • Simple plug-and-play setup with the Aranet base station.
  • Updating information available locally on each sensor, as well as centrally on the base station, so that you can see what spaces need additional ventilation.
  • Free software – graphs, reports, centralized alarms.
  • Control of airborne COVID19 spread in schools, offices, and other indoor facilities.

Partnership with Aranet

Aranet wireless network can be implemented in many other industries:

  • Horticulture,
  • Livestock,
  • Building Management,
  • Warehousing,
  • Data Centres,
  • Pharma,
  • Medical,
  • Retail.

So, Aranet is looking for integration and distribution partners, which are interested in wireless monitoring. Details of the partnership are available on aranet.com or can be requested from [email protected].

The Aranet’s core value is the wisdom of Lord Kelvin: “you can only improve what you can measure”. So, we strive for delivering these measurements in the easiest and the most straightforward way possible so that you could improve whatever you wish.

Questions & Answers

Question. Is there some way or some benefit to integrating Aranet with Zabbix?

Answer. Aranet has many and diverse applications, as well as Zabbix. So, adding physical parameters on top of the monitoring solution network parameters would help out. For data centers or retail stores, in addition to alerts of something wrong with the network, alarms of something physical happening would be useful. It might be useful to be alerted, for instance, if it’s too hot.

Question. Is it possible to switch your sensors to LoRaWAN so that we can use existing networks?

Answer. We have decided to have our proprietary network based on the LoRa physical layer with proprietary communication software. This decision was made for several reasons:

  • ease of use— the main thing that our customers actually value. Aranet system can be easily set up in a couple of minutes — you just lay the sensors and they start working. With LoRaWAN you have the base station from one provider, and sensors from the other, so it takes time to make the system work. Aranet works out of the box.
  • improved battery due to our protocol.
  • improved security as with Aranet you control the whole ecosystem from the base station to sensors. In addition, with Aranet you won’t face dependencies, password management, or communication issues.
  • private network. 

Question. Are there any electrical sensors — volts, amps, power, or anything like that?

Answer. We can monitor voltage, but these are mostly for third-party integrations. We have pulse output sensors, which you can connect to these electricity meters, for instance. So, this can be monitored.

 

Raspberry Pi ‘Swear Bear’ keeps your potty mouth in check

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-swear-bear-keeps-your-potty-mouth-in-check/

Why use a regular swear jar to retrain your potty-mouthed brain when you can build a Swear Bear to help you instead?

Swear Bear listens to you. All the time. And Swear Bear can tell when a swear word is used. Swear Bear tells you off and saves all the swear words you said to the cloud to shame you. Swear Bear subscribes to the school of tough love.

Artificial intelligence

The Google AIY kit allows you to build your own natural language recogniser. This page shows you how to assemble the Voice HAT from the kit, and it also includes the code you’ll need to make your project capable of speech-to-text AI.

Black AIY HAT stuck on top of a Raspberry Pi
Image of the Voice HAT mounted onto a Raspberry Pi 3 courtesy of aiyprojects.withgoogle.com

To teach Swear Bear the art of profanity detection, Swear Bear creators 8 Bits and a Byte turned to the profanity check Python library. You can find the info to install and use the library on this page, as well as info on how it works and why it’s so accurate.

You’ll hear at this point in the video that Swear Bear says “Oh dear” when a swear word is used within earshot.

Hardware

Birds eye view of each of the hardware components used in the project on a green table

This project uses the the first version of Google’s AIY Voice Kit, which comes with a larger black AIY Voice HAT and is compatible with Raspberry Pi 3 Model B. The kit also includes a little Voice HAT microphone board.

Version 2 of the kit comprises the smaller Raspberry Pi Zero WH and a slimmer ‘Voice Bonnet’.

The microphone allows Swear Bear to ‘hear’ your speech, and through its speakers it can then tell you off for swearing.

All of hardware is squeezed into the stuffing-free bear once the text-to-speech and profanity detection software is working.

Babbage Bear hack?

Babbage the Bear

8 Bits and a Byte fan Ben Scarboro took to the comments on YouTube to suggest they rework one of our Babbage Bears into a Swear Bear. Babbage is teeny tiny, so maybe you would need to fashion a giant version to accomplish this. Just don’t make us watch while you pull out its stuffing.

The post Raspberry Pi ‘Swear Bear’ keeps your potty mouth in check appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Lift and shift your Zabbix to Oracle Cloud with MySQL database service

Post Syndicated from Vittorio Cioe original https://blog.zabbix.com/lift-and-shift-your-zabbix-to-oracle-cloud-with-mysql-database-service/12792/

 

If you are tired of administering the infrastructure on your own and would prefer to gain time to focus on real monitoring activities rather than costly platform upgrades, you can easily lift and shift your MySQL-based Zabbix installation stack to Oracle Cloud.

Contents

I. Moving to the Cloud (1:46)
II. Moving Zabbix to Oracle Cloud (2:41)

1. Planning migration (3:22)
2. Migrating Zabbix to Oracle Cloud (6:17)
3. Migrating the database to MySQL Database Service (8:47)

III. Questions & Answers (15:12)

Moving to the Cloud

The data is increasingly moving to the cloud — the consumer data followed by the enterprise data, as enterprises are always a bit slower in adopting technologies.

Data moving to the cloud

Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, OCI, is the 4th cloud provider in the Cloud Infrastructure Ranking of the Gartner Magic Quadrant based on ‘Completeness of Vision’ and ‘Ability to Execute’.

OCI is available in 26 regions and has 26 data centers across the world with 12 more planned.

26 Regions Live, 12+ Planned

24+ Industry and Regional Certifications

Moving Zabbix to Oracle Cloud

With Zabbix in the Oracle Cloud you can:

  1. get the latest updates on the technology stack, minimizing downtime and service windows.
  2. convert the time you spend managing your monitoring platform into the time you spend monitoring your platforms.
  3. leverage the most secure and cost-effective cloud platform in the market, including security information and security updates made available by OCI.

Planning migration

To plan effective migration of the on-premise Zabbix instance with clients, proxies, management server, interface, and database, we need to migrate the last three instance components. Basically, we need:

  • the server configuration;
  • on-premise network topology to understand what can communicate with the outside or what would eventually go over VPN, that is, the network topology of client and proxies; and
  • the database.

Migration requirements

We also need to set up the following in the OCI tenancy:

  • MySQL Database System,
  • Compute instance for the Zabbix Server,
  • storage for database and backup,
  • networking/load balancing.

The target architecture involves setting up the VPN from your data center to the Oracle cloud tenancy and deploying the load balancer, the Zabbix server in redundancy over availability domains, and the MySQL database in a separate subnet.

Required Components:
• Cloud Networking,
• Zabbix Cloud Image,
• MySQL Database Service,
• VPN Connection for client/proxies.

Oracle Cloud target architecture for Zabbix

You can also have a lighter setup, for instance, with proxies communicating over TLS connections over the Internet or communicating directly with the Zabbix Server in the Oracle Cloud, and the Zabbix server interfacing with the database. Here, you will need fewer elements: server, database, and VCN.

Oracle Cloud target architecture for Zabbix — a simpler solution

Migrating Zabbix to Oracle Cloud

Zabbix migration to the Oracle Cloud is straightforward.

1. Before you begin:

  • set up tenancy and compartments,
  • set up cloud networking — public and private VCN.

2. Zabbix deployment on the VM:

  • select one-click deployment or DIY — use the official Zabbix OCI Marketplace Image or deploy an OCI Compute Instance and install manually,
  • choose the desired Compute ‘shape’ during deployment.

3. Configuration:

  • start the instance,
  • edit the config file,
  • point to the database with the IP address, username, and password (to do that, you’ll need to open several ports in the cloud network via the GUI).

The OCI infrastructure allows for multiple choices. The Zabbix Server is lightweight software requiring resources. In the majority of cases, a powerful VM will be enough. Otherwise, you’ll have the Oracle Cloud available.

Compute services for any enterprise use case

In the Oracle Cloud you’ll have the bare metal option — the physical machines dedicated to a single customer, Kubernetes container engine, and a lot of fast storage possibilities, which end up being quite cheap.

Migrating the database to MySQL Database Service

MySQL Database Service is the managed offer for MySQL in Oracle Cloud, fully developed, managed, and supported by the MySQL team. It is secure and provides the latest features as it leverages the Oracle Cloud, which has been rated by various sources as one of the most secure cloud platforms.

In addition, the platform is built on the MySQL Enterprise Edition binaries, so it is fully compatible with the platform you might be using. Finally, it costs way less on a yearly basis than a full-blown on-premise MySQL Enterprise subscription.

MySQL Database Service — 100% developed, managed, and supported by the MySQL team

Considerations before migration

Before you begin:

  • check your MySQL 8.0 compatibility,
  • check your database size (to assess the time needed to migrate), and
  • plan a service window.

High-level migration plan

  1. Set up cloud networking.
  2. Set up your (on-premise) networking secure connection (to communicate with the cloud).
  3. Create MySQL Database Service DB System with storage.
  4. Move the data using MySQL Shell Dump & Load utility.

Creating MySQL DB system with just a few clicks

  • Create a customized configuration.
  • Start the wizard to create DB system.
  • Select Virtual Cloud Network (VCN).
  • Select subnet to place your MySQL endpoint.
  • Select MySQL configuration (or create customized instances for your workload).
  • The shape for the DB System (CPU and RAM) will be set automatically.
  • Select the size of the storage for data and backup.
  • Create a backup policy or accept the default.

Creating MySQL instances

You can use MySQL Shell Upgrade Checker Utility to check the compatibility with MySQL8.0.

util.checkForServerUpgrade()

Loading the data

To move the data, you can use the MySQL Shell Dump & Load utility, which is capable of multi-threading and is callable with the JavaScript methods from MySQL Shell.

So, you can dump on what can be a bastion machine, and load your instance to the cloud. It will take several minutes to load the database of several gigabytes, so it is necessary to plan the service maintenance window accordingly.

In addition, the utility is easy to use. You just need to connect to an instance and dump.

MySQL Shell Dump & Load

The operation is pretty straightforward and the migration time will depend on the size of the database.

Free trial

You can have a test drive of the MySQL Database Service with $300 in cloud credits, which you can spend in the Oracle Cloud on MySQL Database Service or other cloud services.

 

Questions & Answers

Question. Do you help with migrating the databases from older versions to MySQL 8.0?

Answer. Yes, this is the thing we normally do for our customers — providing guidance, though data migration is normally straightforward.

Question. Does the database size matter? How efficient MySQL Shell Dump is? What if my database is terabytes in size?

Answer. MySQL Shell Dump & Load utility is much more efficient than what MySQL Dump used to be. The database size still matters. In that case, it will require more time, still way less than it used to take

 

 

 

 

100 Raspberry Pi moments

Post Syndicated from Ashley Whittaker original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/100-raspberry-pi-moments/

The official Raspberry Pi magazine turned 100 this month! To celebrate, the greatest Raspberry Pi moments, achievements, and events that The MagPi magazine has ever featured came back for a special 100th issue.

100 Raspberry Pi Moments is a cracking bumper feature (starting on page 32 of issue 100, if you’d like to read the whole thing) highlighting some influential projects and educational achievements, as well as how our tiny computers have influenced pop culture. And since ’tis the season, we thought we’d share the How Raspberry Pi made a difference section to bring some extra cheer to your festive season.

Projects for good

The Raspberry Pi Foundation was originally launched to get more UK students into computing. Not only did it succeed at that, but the hardware and the Foundation have also managed to help people in other ways and all over the world. Here are just a few examples!

Computers for good

The Raspberry Pi Foundation provides free learning resources for everyone; however, not everyone has access to a computer to learn at home. Thanks to funding from the Bloomfield Trust and in collaboration with UK Youth and local charities, the Foundation has been able to supply hundreds of Raspberry Pi Desktop Kits to young people most in need. The computers have allowed these children, who wouldn’t have been able to otherwise, to learn from home and stay connected to their schools during lockdown. The Foundation’s work to distribute Raspberry Pi computers to young people in need is ongoing.

Elsewhere, a need for more medical equipment around the world resulted in many proposals and projects being considered for cheap, easy-to produce machines. Some included Raspberry Pi Zero, with 40,000 of these sold for ventilator designs.

The Foundation’s Digital Making at Home live streams bring coding fun to young people at home every week

Offline learning

While there’s no global project or standard to say what an offline internet should contain, some educational projects have tried to condense down enough online content for specific people and load it all onto a Raspberry Pi. RACHEL-Pi is one such solution. The RACHEL-PI kit acts as a server, hosting a variety of different educational materials for all kinds of subjects, as well as an offline version of Wikipedia with 6000 articles. There’s even medical info for helping others, math lessons from Khan Acadamy, and much more.

The RACHEL sites are available in English, French, and Spanish

17,000 ft is another great project, which brings computing to schools high up in the Himalayas through a similar method in an attempt to help children stay in their local communities.

Young learners in red jackets and baseball caps using tablets to learn in a Himalayan school
Ladakh is a desert-like region up a mountain that can easily shut down during the winter

Education in other countries

The free coding resources available on our projects site are great, and the Raspberry Pi Foundation works to make them accessible to people whose first language isn’t English: we have a dedicated translation team and, thanks to volunteers around the world, provide our free resources translated into up to 32 other languages. From French and Welsh to Korean and Arabic, there’s a ton of projects that learners from all over the world can access in their first language.

And through the Code Club and CoderDojo programmes, the Foundation supports volunteers around the world to run free coding clubs for young people.

A Raspberry Pi lab in Kuma Adamé, Togo that Dominique Laloux helped create and update
A Raspberry Pi lab in Kuma Adamé, Togo, that Dominique Laloux helped create and update

That’s not all: several charitable groups have set up Raspberry Pi classrooms to bring computing education to poorer parts of the world. People in African countries and parts of rural India have benefited from these programmes, and work is being done to widen access to ever more people and places.

Pocket FM

The Pocket FM is far smaller than traditional transmitters, and therefore easy to move into the country and set up

The HAM radio community loves Raspberry Pi for amateur radio projects; however, sometimes people need radio for more urgent purposes. In 2016, German group Media in Cooperation and Transition created the Pocket FM 96 , micro radio transmitters with 4–6km range. These radios allowed Syrians in the middle of a civil war to connect to free media on Syrnet for more reliable news.

There are a number of independent radio stations that transmit through Pocket FM
There are a number of independent radio stations that transmit through Pocket FM

Raspberry Pi powered these transmitters, chosen because of how easy it is to upgrade and add components to. Each transmitter is powered by solar power, and Syrnet is still transmitting through them as the war continues into its tenth year.

The post 100 Raspberry Pi moments appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Spread the joy of learning through making

Post Syndicated from original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/spread-the-joy-of-learning-through-making/

From our first prototype way back in 2006, to the very latest Raspberry Pi 400, everything we have built here at Raspberry Pi has been driven by a desire to inspire learning. I hope that each of you who uses our products discovers — or rediscovers — the joy of learning through making. The journey from technology consumer to technology creator can be a transformational one; today, on Giving Tuesday, I’m asking you to help even more young people make that journey.

Donate to the Raspberry Pi Foundation on Giving Tuesday

Too few young people have the chance to learn how technology works and how to harness its power. Pre-existing disparities in access to computing education have been exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic. At the Raspberry Pi Foundation, we’re on a mission to change this, and we’re working harder than ever to support young people and educators with free learning opportunities. Our partner CanaKit supports the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s mission, and they’ve extended the generous offer to match your donations up to a total of $5,000.

Double the impact of your donation today!

Alongside our low-cost, high-performance computers and free software, you may know that the Raspberry Pi Foundation provides free educational programmes including coding clubs and educator training for millions of people each year in dozens of countries. You might not know that the Raspberry Pi Foundation was founded as, and still remains, a nonprofit organisation. Our education mission is powered by dedicated volunteers, and our programmes are funded in part thanks to our customers who buy Raspberry Pi products, and in part by charitable donations from people like you.

A smiling girl holding a robot buggy in her lap

Every donation we receive makes an impact on the young people and educators who rely on the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Ryka, for example, is a 10-year-old who attends one of our CoderDojo clubs. Since March she’s been using our project guides and following our Digital Making at Home code-along live streams. Her parents tell us: 

“We were looking at ways to keep Ryka engaged during this lockdown period and came across Digital Making at Home. As a parent I can see that there has been discernible improvement in her abilities. We’ve noticed that she is engaged and takes interest in showing us what she was able to build. It has been a great use of her time.” 

– Parent of a young person who learns through our programmes

Ryka joins millions of learners in our community around the world, many of whom now rely on us more than ever with schools and extracurricular activities disrupted. Through the ongoing support of our donors and volunteers, we’ve been able to rise to the challenge of the pandemic:

Young coders and digital makers need our help in the year ahead as they take control of their computing education under challenging and uncertain circumstances. As a donor to the Raspberry Pi Foundation, you will be investing in our youngest generation of innovators and helping to create a spark in a young person’s life. On Giving Tuesday, I am grateful to each of you for the role you play in creating a world where everyone can learn, solve problems, and shape their future through the power of technology. 

Thank you for supporting Raspberry Pi on Giving Tuesday

PS Thank you again to our friends at CanaKit for doubling the impact of every donation, up to $5000! 

The post Spread the joy of learning through making appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Zabbix Summit Online 2020: Remote Experience of Sharing Knowledge and Being Together

Post Syndicated from Jekaterina Petruhina original https://blog.zabbix.com/zabbix-summit-online-2020-remote-experience-of-sharing-knowledge-and-being-together/12526/

Zabbix Summit 2020 was supposed to be the greatest Zabbix event of the decade – we planned to celebrate the 10th anniversary Zabbix Summit. But the very different 2020 circumstances intervened, and we had to adjust to the new reality and shift our focus. It so happened that in 2020 we held not the tenth anniversary but the first online Zabbix summit.


Available for everyone

When it was evident that the on-site event is not an option, we made a decision – the event should be available for everyone, and we made it free of charge. The other task was to manage the timing so that Summit would be available for attendees from all over the globe. We managed it efficiently by making the event as long as it was necessary to be convenient for users from Japan and China, Europe, and the USA and Latin American Region. Yes, it was quite a long day for Zabbix Team. However, we achieved what we were aiming for – about 8000 Zabbix enthusiasts from worldwide joined the Zabbix Summit live stream. This year, it became available to have extensive speeches from all regions, because the traveling issue was solved.

We made the most of the focus on the recently released Zabbix 5.2. And of course, we left enough place for use cases and professional tips as well. If, for some reason, you couldn’t join us on October 30, you are always welcome to watch the speeches in the record.

 

Traditionally every Zabbix Summit delivers an option to attend hands-on workshops. Due to the online format, it was possible to run more workshop sessions than in previous years, and attendees could join as many sessions as they wanted. Moreover, the workshops have been recorded and now are available on the Zabbix website.

Summit fun

Every Zabbix Summit is all about networking and fun. Let’s be honest, this unofficial part means a lot for the community along with the agenda. Unfortunately, we couldn’t meet in person this time and have fun all together at parties. Still, the community chat in Telegram made it clear – there are no boundaries for you guys to keep in touch, discuss ideas, and communicate. You made the networking part exist this year, and we are delighted and grateful for seeing such enthusiasm, activity, and interest in Zabbix. We provided the Summit attendees opportunity to communicate with the Zabbix Sales and Technical team, get acquainted with the event’s sponsors, and ask the questions via special Zoom rooms, and it worked well. Even though there were hundreds and hundreds of thousands of kilometers between the visitors of the event, there was a feeling that it happens here and now – with an audience full of interested people looking for opportunities to learn new things and help others.

What about next year?

Well, we think positive, however, stay realistic. Thus Zabbix Summit 2021 will also be held online.

If you care for better further events organized by Zabbix, we encourage you to fill out this post-Summit survey. It will help us understand what we have to improve to make Zabbix Summit Online 2021 even more generous. 

PS: Take a break and look at some behind the scenes photos – how the Zabbix Summit 2020 looked from the inside.

Take part in the PA Raspberry Pi Competition for UK schools

Post Syndicated from Janina Ander original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pa-raspberry-pi-competition-uk-2021/

Every year, we support the PA Raspberry Pi Competition for UK schools, run by PA Consulting. In this free competition, teams of students from schools all over the UK imagine, design, and create Raspberry Pi–powered inventions.

Female engineer with Raspberry Pi device. Copyright © University of Southampton
Let’s inspire young people to take up a career in STEM!
© University of Southampton

The PA Raspberry Pi Competition aims to inspire young people aged 8 to 18 to learn STEM skills, teamwork, and creativity, and to move toward a career in STEM.

We invite all UK teachers to register if you have students at your school who would love to take part!

For the first 100 teams to complete registration and submit their entry form, PA Consulting provides a free Raspberry Pi Starter Kit to create their invention.

This year’s competition theme: Innovating for a better world

The theme is deliberately broad so that teams can show off their creativity and ingenuity.

  • All learners aged 8 to 18 can take part, and projects are judged in four age groups
  • The judging categories include team passion; simplicity and clarity of build instructions; world benefit; and commercial potential
  • The proposed budget for a team’s invention is around £100
  • The projects can be part of your students’ coursework
  • Entries must be submitted by Monday 22 March 2021
  • You’ll find more details and inspiration on the PA Raspberry Pi Competition webpage

Among all the entries, judges from the tech sector and the Raspberry Pi Foundation choose the finalists with the most outstanding inventions in their age group.

The Dynamix team, finalists in last round’s Y4–6 group, built a project called SmartRoad+

The final teams get to take part in an exciting awards event to present their creations so that the final winners can be selected. This round’s PA Raspberry Pi Awards Ceremony takes place on Wednesday 28 April 2021, and PA Consulting are currently considering whether this will be a physical or virtual event.

All teams that participate in the competition will be rewarded with certificates, and there’s of course the chance to win trophies and prizes too!

You can prepare with our free online courses

If you would like to boost your skills so you can better support your team, then sign up to one of our free online courses designed for educators:

Take inspiration from the winners of the previous round

All entries are welcome, no matter what your students’ experience is! Here are the outstanding projects from last year’s competition:

A look inside the air quality-monitoring project by Team Tempest, last round’s winners in the Y7–9 group

Find out more at the PA Raspberry Pi Competition webinar!

To support teachers in guiding their teams through the competition, PA Consulting will hold a webinar on 12 November 2020 at 4.30–5.30pm. Sign up to hear first-hand what’s involved in taking part in the PA Raspberry Pi Competition, and use the opportunity to ask questions!

I want to sign up to the webinar

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