Tag Archives: education

Hello World Issue 6: Ethical Computing

Post Syndicated from Dan Fisher original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/hello-world-issue-6/

Join us for an in-depth exploration of ethical computing in the newest issue of Hello World, our magazine for computing and digital making educators. It’s out today!

 

We need to talk about ethics

Whatever area of computing you hail from, how to take an ethical approach to the projects we build with code is an important question. As educators, we also need to think about the attitudes we are passing on to our students as we guide them along their computing journey.

Ensuring that future generations use technology for good and consider the ethical implications of their creations is vital, particularly as self-learning AI systems are becoming prevalent. Let’s be honest: none of us want to live in a future resembling The Terminator’s nightmarish vision, however unlikely that is to come true.

With that in mind, we’ve brought together a wide range of experts to share their ideas on the moral questions that teaching computing raises, and on the social implications of computing in the wider context of society.



More in this issue

We’ve also got the latest news about exciting online courses from Raspberry Pi and articles on Minecraft, Scratch, and the micro:bit. As usual, we also answer your latest questions and bring you an excellent collection of helpful features, guides, and lesson plans!

Highlights of issue 6 include:

  • Doing the right thing: can computing help create ‘good citizens’?
  • Ethics in the curriculum: how to introduce them to students
  • Microblocks: live programming for microcontrollers
  • The 100-word challenge: a free resource to unlock creative writing

You can download your PDF of Hello World #6 from our website right now! It’s freely available under a Creative Commons licence.

Subscribe to Hello World

We offer free print copies of the magazine to all computing educators in the UK. This includes teachers, Code Club and CoderDojo volunteers, teaching assistants, teacher trainers, and others who help children and young people learn about computing and digital making.

Subscribe to have your free print magazine posted directly to your home, or subscribe digitally — 24000 educators have already signed up to receive theirs!

If you live outside the UK and are interested in computer science and digital making education (and since you’ve read this far, I think you are!), subscribe to always get the latest issue as a PDF file straight to your inbox.

Get in touch!

You could write for us about your experiences as an educator to share your advice with the community. Wherever you are in the world, get in touch by emailing our editorial team about your article idea — we would love to hear from you!

Hello World magazine is a collaboration between the Raspberry Pi Foundation and Computing At School, which is part of the British Computing Society.

The post Hello World Issue 6: Ethical Computing appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

The European Astro Pi Challenge is back for 2018/2019

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/european-astro-pi-challenge-launch-2018-2019/

Ever wanted to run your own experiment in space? Then you’re in luck! ESA Education, in collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is pleased to announce the launch of the 2018/2019 European Astro Pi Challenge!

Astro Pi returns for a new 2018/19 challenge!

Ever wanted to run your own experiment in space? Then you’re in luck! ESA Education, in collaboration with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is pleased to announce the launch of the 2018/2019 European Astro Pi Challenge!

In this challenge, we offer students and young people the amazing opportunity to conduct scientific investigations in space by writing computer programs that run on Astro Pis — special Raspberry Pi computers aboard the International Space Station (ISS).

ESA astronaut Alexander Gerst and CSA astronaut David Saint-Jacques are the Challenge’s ambassadors. They will accompany our Astro Pi’s on the ISS and oversee your programs while these run and collect scientific data.

Two missions are part of the Astro Pi Challenge: Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab.

Mission Space Lab opens today!

If you are 19 or younger and live in an ESA Member or Associate Member State*, we invite you to form a team with at least one friend of yours and apply to the Astro Pi Challenge’s Mission Space Lab by sending us your experiment idea by the end of October. We can’t wait to see your ideas!

Astro Pi Mission Space Lab logo

Mission Space Lab gives you the chance to have your scientific experiment run on the ISS. Your challenge is to design and code an experiment using the environmental sensors and cameras of the Astro Pi computers, called Ed and Izzy, aboard the ISS.

You can choose between two themes for your experiment: Life in space and Life on Earth. If you pick the ‘Life on Earth’ theme, you’ll use the Astro Pi computer Izzy, fitted with a near-infrared camera facing out of an ISS window, to study the Earth. For ‘Life in space’, you’ll use the Astro Pi computer Ed, which is equipped with a camera for light sensing, and investigate life inside the Columbus module of the ISS. The best experiments will be deployed on the ISS, and you’ll have the opportunity to analyse your experimental data to write a report with your results. The ten teams who send us the best reports will become the Astro Pi Mission Space Lab 2018/2019 winners!

There are four phases to Mission Space Lab:

  • Phase 1 – Design (until end of October 2018)
    • Come up with an idea for your experiment
  • Phase 2 – Create (November 2018 to March 2019)
    • Code your program and test your experiment on Earth
  • Phase 3 – Deploy (April 2019)
    • Your program is deployed on the ISS
  • Phase 4 – Analyse (May 2019)
    • Use the data from your experiment to write your report

In the first phase, Design, you just need an idea for an experiment. You won’t need to do any coding yet, but you should think about how you might write the program for your experiment to make sure your goal is achievable. Have a look at our Astro Pi Mission Space Lab guidelines for everything you need to know to take part the challenge. Your deadline to register and submit your idea via the Astro Pi website is 29 October 2018.

We will select teams and notify them of their acceptance to Phase 2 of Mission Space Lab by mid-November 2018.

Mission Zero — open soon

Mission Zero, the simpler level of the Astro Pi Challenge, also offers you the chance to have something you’ve coded run on the ISS, in the form of a simple program that displays a message to the astronauts on-board. For this mission, you don’t need special equipment and you can be a complete beginner at coding; if your entry follows a few simple rules, it’s guaranteed to run in space!

Astro Pi Mission Zero logo

If you are 14 or younger and live in an ESA Member or Associate Member State*, we would like you to take part in Mission Zero. You can submit your program from 29 October 2018 onward. For more details, head to the Mission Zero page.

Find out more about the Astro Pi Challenge

What is Astro Pi?!

Announcing the 2018-19 European Astro Pi challenge in partnership with the European Space Agency (ESA). It’s open to students from all 22 ESA member countries, including associate members Canada and Slovenia. In Mission Zero, students aged up to 14 write a simple Python program that will display a message on the International Space Station for 30 seconds.

*ESA Member States in 2018:

Austria, Belgium, Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Ireland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom.

ESA Associate States in 2018: Canada, Slovenia

In the framework of the current collaboration agreement between ESA and the Republic of Malta, teams from Malta can also participate in the European Astro Pi Challenge. ESA will also accept entries from primary or secondary schools located outside an ESA Member or Associate State only if such schools are officially authorised and/or certified by the official Education authorities of an ESA Member or Associate State (for instance, French school outside Europe officially recognised by the French Ministry of Education or delegated authority).

The post The European Astro Pi Challenge is back for 2018/2019 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Getting started with your Raspberry Pi

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/getting-started-raspberry-pi/

Here on the Raspberry Pi blog, we often share impressive builds made by community members who have advanced making and coding skills. But what about those of you who are just getting started?

Getting started with Raspberry Pi

For you, we’ve been working hard to update and polish our Getting started resources, including a brand-new video to help you get to grips with your new Pi.

Getting started with Raspberry Pi

Whether you’re new to electronics and the Raspberry Pi, or a seasoned pro looking to share your knowledge and skills with others, sit back and watch us walk you through the basics of setting up our powerful little computer.

How to set up your Raspberry Pi || Getting started with #RaspberryPi

Learn how to set up your Raspberry Pi for the first time, from plugging in peripherals to loading Raspbian.

We’ve tried to make this video as easy to follow as possible, with only the essential explanations and steps.

getting started with raspberry pi

As with everything we produce, we want this video to be accessible to the entire world, so if you can translate its text into another language, please follow this link to submit your translation directly through YouTube. You can also add translations to our other YouTube videos here! As a thank you, we’ll display your username in the video descriptions to acknowledge your contributions.

New setup guides and resources

Alongside our shiny new homepage, we’ve also updated our Help section to reflect our newest tech and demonstrate the easiest way for beginners to start their Raspberry Pi journey. We’re now providing a first-time setup guide, and also a walk-through for using your Raspberry Pi that shows you all sort of things you can do with it. And with guides to our official add-on devices and a troubleshooting section, our updated Help page is your one-stop shop for getting the most out of your Pi.

getting started with raspberry pi

For parents and teachers, we offer guides on introducing Raspberry Pi and digital making to your children and students. And for those of you who are visual learners, we’ve curated a collection of our videos to help you get making.

As with our videos, we’re looking for people whose first language isn’t English to help us translate our resources. If you’re able to donate some of your time to support this cause, please sign up here.

The forums

We’re very proud of our forum community. Since the birth of the Raspberry Pi, our forums have been the place to go for additional support, conversation, and project bragging.

Raspberry Pi forums

If your question isn’t answered on our Help page, there’s no better place to go than the forums. Nine times out of ten, your question will already have been asked and answered there! And if not, then our friendly forum community will be happy to share their wealth of knowledge and help you out.

Events and clubs

Raspberry Pi and digital making enthusiasts come together across the world at various events and clubs, including Raspberry Jams, Code Club and CoderDojo, and Coolest Projects. These events are perfect for learning more about how people use Raspberry Pi and other technologies for digital making — as a hobby and as a tool for education.

getting started with raspberry pi

Keep up to date

To keep track of all the goings-on of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, be sure to follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, and sign up to our Raspberry Pi Weekly newsletter and the monthly Raspberry Pi LEARN education newsletter.

The post Getting started with your Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Mu, a new Python IDE for beginners

Post Syndicated from Martin O'Hanlon original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/mu-python-ide/

Mu is a very simple-to-use Python editor and IDE (integrated development environment) and this week, version 1.0 was released!

Mu Python IDE for beginners Raspberry Pi

New Mu

Mu is designed to be as user-friendly and as helpful as possible for new Python programmers, presenting just the tools that are useful, such as:

  • Syntax highlighting
  • Automatic indentation
  • In-built help
  • Code checking
  • Debugging

Great for new programmers

Mu is intended to be not the only Python IDE you’ll ever need, but the first one — the editor that helps you start your coding journey, but not necessarily the one you finish it with. So when you’re ready, you will have the skills and confidence to move on to using a more advanced Python IDE.

You can use Mu in a number of modes; modes make working with Mu easier by only presenting the options most relevant to what you’re using Mu for:

Mu Python IDE for beginners Raspberry Pi

Available now

Mu version 1.0 is available now for Windows, macOS, Linux, and the Raspberry Pi’s official operating system Raspbian! And to help new Python programmers get started, we have created a guide to Getting Started with Mu for all these operating systems.

Mu Python IDE for beginners Raspberry Pi

Mu is the brainchild of Nicholas Tollervey, who has worked tirelessly to create Mu. I recently met up with him and some of the Mu team at the world’s first Mu-“moot” to celebrate this release:

Nicholas Tollervey on Twitter

World’s first Mu-moot. 🙁

One of the inspirations for Mu was the keynote presentation at EuroPython 2015 given by Raspberry Pi’s Carrie Anne Philbin. She talked about the barriers to children getting started with Python, including the lack of an suitably easy-to-use IDE:

Carrie Anne Philbin – Keynote: Designed for Education: A Python Solution

Carrie Anne Philbin – Keynote: Designed for Education: A Python Solution [EuroPython 2015] [23 July 2015] [Bilbao, Euskadi, Spain] The problem of introducing children to programming and computer science has seen growing attention in the past few years. Initiatives like Raspberry Pi, Code Club, code.org, (and many more) have been created to help solve this problem.

Raspberry Pi has provided support for the project, helping to take Mu from its first implementation as a micro:bit programming tool to a general-purpose and simple-to-use Python editor and IDE!

You can find installation instructions as well as tutorials on Mu’s website.

The post Mu, a new Python IDE for beginners appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Learn how to document your code

Post Syndicated from Alex Bate original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/learn-document-code/

In our latest resource, we show you how to create a website and use it to document your coding projects.

documenting your code Raspberry Pi resources

Why document your code?

Search the web with the right key words for your programming conundrum, and you’re bound to find someone who has written software to address a question that’s at least similar to yours. And not only that, they’re also making their software freely available under an open source license, and writing documentation to help you use their code. How awesome it that?!

Many people who write code are eager to share their programs and allow others to use and remix them according to their own needs. This is why the open source community is so inviting for makers, especially those who want to make projects that are yet beyond their ability to build from scratch.

So unless you plan on turning your code into a money-making commodity, you’re writing scripts that you can share with others. By adding clear, supporting online documentation to your code, you’ll help people all over the world to not only use your software but to also understand what everything does and become better programmers themselves.

Our resource

In our latest resource, we show you how to use docstrings to automatically create documentation for your Python code. Then, we walk you through using Sphinx to build a website showcasing this documentation and any example scripts you want to share with the world.

You’ll learn how to create supporting documentation to guide users through elements of your code, add multiple pages to your website, and use themes to costumise the site’s layout and make it stand out.

You can find the resource here, and our full list of free resources here on our projects site.

More free resources


We’ve also recently released a new Sense HAT music player project, along with a resource teaching basic Raspberry Pi terminal navigation skills with a fun game to find all the Pac-Man ghosts.

The post Learn how to document your code appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Celebrating our teachers

Post Syndicated from Dan Fisher original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/celebrating-teachers/

The end of the academic year is here, and we are marking the occasion by celebrating teachers from all over the world.

Raspberry Pi Teachers Computing highlight 2018

For those about to teach, we salute you.

Since last September, we’ve run a whole host of programmes that teachers have been involved in. From training with us at Picademy to building apocalyptic projects for Pioneers, from running Code Clubs, Dojos, and Raspberry Jams to learning tea-making algorithms on our free online training courses, these brilliant people do amazing things on a daily basis. And even more amazingly, they somehow also have the energy to take their knowledge into schools and share it with their learners to get them excited about computing too.

Dr Sue Sentance, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s new Chief Learning Officer, has trained teachers for many years and understands better than most the impact a good teacher can have:

“When thinking about teaching Computing, we often get so caught up in the technology — what software, what kit, what environment, etc. — that we forget that it’s the teachers who actually facilitate students’ learning and inspire and motivate the students. A passionate and enthusiastic teacher is more important than which device or tool the students are using, because they understand what will help their students. “

In celebration of our education community, we asked teachers around the world to answer one big question:

“What has been your computing highlight of the year?”

Caroline Keep

Raspberry Pi Teachers Computing highlight 2018

Caroline (top right) and her group of students at Spark Penketh

Caroline Keep won the TES New Teacher of the Year award and runs Spark Penketh, a school makerspace in Warrington. She will also be training with us in August to become a Raspberry Pi Certified Educator. Her highlight of the year was achieving success at the forefront of the UK’s makerspace movement:

“All the physical computing projects we’ve done since February when Raspberry Pi co-founder Pete Lomas opened our school makerspace (the first one in a UK state school) have been amazing! We’ve built and coded talking robots, and gesture-controlled ones on micro:bits with primary schools. We’ve built drones, coded Arduinos for European Maker Week, opened a RoboDojo, used Python and Node-RED on Raspberry Pi to control weather stations, Pi Camera Modules, and robots, and we’ve designed a Digital Creative pathway for Industry 4.0 skills for September. Next up are Google AIY Projects kits, Redfern Electronic’s Crumble, and Bare Conductive’s Touch Board. We can’t wait!”

Heidi Baynes

Raspberry Pi Teachers Computing highlight 2018

Heidi (left) and two other amazing US-based educators pose under a very apt sign. It’s like they planned it.

Heidi Baynes is an Education Coordinator for the County Office of Education in Riverside, California. Her highlight is a birthday party with a difference:

“The Riverside Raspberry Jam was held on 3 March 2018 as part of Raspberry Pi’s Big Birthday celebration. Fellow Picademy graduate Ari Flewelling and I planned the event in conjunction with Vocademy, and we were thrilled by the overwhelming support from the local community. The event featured a project showcase, workshops, and an introduction to all things Raspberry Pi. We can’t wait to start planning the 2019 Riverside Raspberry Jam! I was also particularly proud of the students from Mountain Heights Academy who shared their Raspberry Pi and micro:bit projects at the Consortium’s #CSforAll event in Riverside. Our student Hailey was able to share her experiences as part of a student panel and even had the opportunity to meet the CEO of code.org, Hadi Partovi!”

Amy Bloodworth

Raspberry Pi Teachers Computing highlight 2018

Amy Bloodworth and her Astro Pi–winning students

Amy Bloodworth is a teacher at The American School In Switzerland (TASIS) in Lugano, Switzerland. Her highlight is literally out of this world:

“It has been a busy year for us here in Switzerland. Highlights for me and my students include meeting a computer game designer, competing in the World Robot Olympiad, and participating in the Astro Pi Challenge. With Astro Pi, my students loved that they could send their coded message to the ISS astronauts in any of the languages of ESA. As we are an international school, so this helped the students feel more connected to the task. The Astro Pi Challenge hooked the students in and acted as a springboard for other activities, such as coding an ISS tracker that alerted them when the ISS was overhead, and other science experiments using the Sense HAT. Next year, I plan to start a new after-school club dedicated to competitive robotics.”

Janice Paterson

Raspberry Pi Teacher Computing highlight 2018

Janice Paterson’s lovely class of brain-eating zombies

Janice Paterson is the Principal Teacher at Wormit Primary in Fife, Scotland. Her highlight wouldn’t seem out of place in The Walking Dead:

“We loved the amazing open-ended challenge of a zombie apocalypse, courtesy of Raspberry Pi’s Pioneers programme. It was truly cross-curricular and completely immersive for all the young learners. The books were devoured for information/ideas, and the makeup kits inspired our imaginations and creative side. We had Pi-powered, zombie-detecting robots coded to offer assorted challenges, and micro:bits set up as zombie teacher detectors (their thermometers were used because, of course, teachers have hot bodies!). We all learned loads! The best bit was sharing it all with the rest of our Code Club and the whole school.”

Wojtek Zielinski

Wojtek Zielinski works in Poland as a teacher. His highlight was a breakthrough he had when working with the translated versions of our resources with his students:

“When children work with resources in English, they often end up following what’s in the pictures. They don’t understand why the game or the program they created works. Translated materials enable them to truly learn and understand programming concepts, and that empowers them to experiment and create more. Translations are therefore essential for learning.”

Our thanks

We are so grateful for everything our teachers do to help us make our programmes a success. Together we’ll be able to achieve our goal of making high-quality computing resources that are accessible to everyone!

As a quick aside, you might also be interested to read a recent article written by Raspberry Pi creator and co-founder Eben Upton about the positive impact his teachers had on him.

Whether you’re a teacher wanting to share your success, or you simply want to share your appreciation for the teachers who inspired you, tell us about it in the comments below.

And from everyone at the Raspberry Pi Foundation, there’s only one thing left to say…

Teachers, we salute you!

The post Celebrating our teachers appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Raspberry Fields 2018: ice cream, robots, and coding

Post Syndicated from Tom Evans original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/relive-raspberry-fields-2018/

Umbrella trees, giant mushrooms, and tiny museums. A light-up Lovelace, LED cubes, LED eyelashes, and LED coding (we have a bit of a thing for LEDs). Magic cocktails, melted ice creams, and the coolest hot dog around. Face paint masterpieces, swag bags, and bingo. More stickers than a laptop can cope with, a flock of amazing volunteers, and it all ending with an exploding microwave! This can only mean one thing: Raspberry Fields 2018.

The #RaspberryFields digital making festival 2018

Subscribe to our YouTube channel: http://rpf.io/ytsub Help us reach a wider audience by translating our video content: http://rpf.io/yttranslate Buy a Raspberry Pi from one of our Approved Resellers: http://rpf.io/ytproducts Find out more about the Raspberry Pi Foundation: Raspberry Pi http://rpf.io/ytrpi Code Club UK http://rpf.io/ytccuk Code Club International http://rpf.io/ytcci CoderDojo http://rpf.io/ytcd Check out our free online training courses: http://rpf.io/ytfl Find your local Raspberry Jam event: http://rpf.io/ytjam Work through our free online projects: http://rpf.io/ytprojects Do you have a question about your Raspberry Pi?

Raspberry Fields forever

On 30 June and 1 July, our community of makers, vendors, speakers, volunteers, and drop-in activity leaders impressed over 1300 visitors who braved the heat to visit our festival of digital making at Cambridge Junction.

Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018
Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018
Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018

Our mini festival was both a thank you to our wonderful community and a demonstration of the sheer scale of support and ideas we offer to people looking to get involved in digital making for the first time.

Projects and talks galore

Our community of makers came out in force at Raspberry Fields, with shops, hands-on activities, installations, and show-and-tells demonstrating some of the coolest stuff you can do with a Raspberry Pi and with digital making in general.

Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018
Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018
Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018

Many visitors we spoke to couldn’t believe some of the incredible creations and projects our community members had brought along for them to learn about and play with.

Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018
Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018
Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018

Over the weekend, e had 29 talks on two stages, with our community speakers coming from all over the UK, as well as France, Germany, Korea, Japan, and Australia! Their talks covered a fascinating range of topics such as volunteering with our coding clubs, digital inclusion, drones, wildlife conservation, and so much more! If you missed any of the speakers, don’t worry: we will be uploading talks to our Youtube channel for everyone to see.

Spectacular live shows

We rounded off the two days with three smashing performances: on Saturday, the fantastic Neil Monteiro showed off some of the awesome things you can do with an Astro Pi at home. He was followed by the outstanding Ada.Ada.Ada., in which Ada Lovelace, kitted out in an epic tech-covered dress, taught people all about her programming legacy.

Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018
Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018

Sunday’s finale brought the mischief of Brainiac Live! to Raspberry Fields: the Brainiacs showed us just how much they laugh in the face of science, before providing us with the explosive finish every good festival needs!

Outstanding volunteers

A whopping 60 community members came and helped us out, many of whom had never volunteered at a Raspberry Pi event before! Our festival of digital making would not have happened without these lovely people willing to give up some of their precious weekend to ensure that everything went off without a hitch.

Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018
Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018
Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018

The volunteers were doing everything from greeting and registering guests as they arrived, handing out swag bags, and stamping bingo cards, to giving directions, helping out with activities, and managing our two stages. They were absolutely fantastic, and we hope to see them all again at future events!

Join our community today

Raspberry Fields was just a taster of what is going on around the world every day within the marvellous Raspberry Pi community at Raspberry Jams, Code Clubs, CoderDojos, Coolest Projects events, or at home, where people use our products and free resources to create their own projects. If our festival has made you curious, then dive in and join the amazing people that have made it possible!

Till next time!

The whole Raspberry Pi team is hugely grateful to all our community members who helped out in some way with Raspberry Fields, as well as to all the staff at Cambridge Junction, who were so open and friendly, and happy to let us taking over the whole venue for a weekend. We would like to say a massive thank you for making the event so much fun for everyone involved, and for being so welcoming to everyone who took part!

Raspberry Pi event Raspberry Fields 2018

We look forward to seeing all of you at upcoming events!

The post Raspberry Fields 2018: ice cream, robots, and coding appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

New software to get you started with high-altitude ballooning

Post Syndicated from James Robinson original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pytrack-skygate-hab-software/

Right now, we’re working on an online project pathway to support you with all your high-altitude balloon (HAB) flight activities, whether you run them with students or as a hobby. We’ll release the resources later in the year, but in the meantime we have some exciting new HAB software to share with you!

High altitude ballooning with Pi Zero

Skycademy and early HAB software

Over the past few years, I’ve been lucky enough to conduct several high-altitude balloon (HAB) flights and to help educators who wanted to do HAB projects with learners. In the Foundation’s Skycademy programme, supported by UKHAS members, in particular Dave Akerman, we’ve trained more than 50 teachers to successfully launch near-space missions with their students.

high-altitude balloning Raspberry Pi
high-altitude balloning Raspberry Pi
Dave Akerman high-altitude balloning Raspberry Pi

Whenever I advise people who are planning a HAB mission, I tell them that the separate elements actually aren’t that complicated. The difficulty lies in juggling them all at the same time to successfully launch, track, and recover your balloon.

Over the years, some excellent tools and software packages have been developed to help with HAB launches. Dave Akerman’s Pi In The Sky (PITS) software gave beginners the chance to control their first payloads: you enter your own specs into a configuration file, and the software, written in C, handles the rest. Dave’s Long Range (LoRa) gateway software then tracks the payload, receiving balloon data and plotting the flight’s trajectory on a real-time map.

Dave Akerman high-altitude balloning Raspberry Pi

Dave at a Skycademy event

These tools, while useful, present two challenges to the novice HAB enthusiast:

  • Exposing and adapting the workings of the software is challenging for novice learners, given that it is written in C
  • The existing tracking software and tools are fragmented: one application received LoRa signals; another received radioteletype (RTTY) data; photos were received and had to be manually opened elsewhere; and so on

Introducing Pytrack and SkyGate

Making ballooning as accessible as possible is something we’ve been keen to do since we first got involved in 2015. So I’m delighted to reveal that over the past year, we’ve worked with Dave to produce two new applications to support HAB activities!

Pytrack

Pytrack is a Python implementation of Dave’s original PITS software, and it offers several advantages:

  • Learners can create their own tracker in a simpler programming language, rather than simply configuring the existing software
  • The core mechanics of the tracker are exposed for the learner to understand, but complex details are abstracted away
  • Learners can integrate the technology with standard Python libraries and existing projects
  • Pytrack is modular, allowing learners to experiment with underlying radio components

SkyGate

After our last Skycademy event, I started to look for a way to make tracking a payload in flight easier. For Skycademy, we made a hacky tracking box using a Pi, a 7” screen, and a very rough GUI app that I wrote in a hurry lovingly toiled over.

Skygate high-altitude balloning Raspberry Pi
Skygate high-altitude balloning Raspberry Pi

 

Since then, we have gone on to develop SkyGate, a complete tracking application which runs on a Pi and fits nicely on a 7” screen. It brings together all the tracking functionalities into one intuitive application:

  • Live tunable LoRa reception and decoding
  • Live tunable RTTY reception and decoding (with compatible USB SDR)
  • Image reception and previewing
  • GPS tracking to report your location (when using compatible GPS USB dongle)
  • Data, images, and GPS upload functionality to HabHub tracking site
  • An Overview tab presenting a high-level summary and bearing to payload
  • Full customisation via the Settings tab

You can get involved!

We would love HAB enthusiasts to test and experiment with both Pytrack and SkyGate, and to give us feedback. Your input will really help us to write the full guide that we’ll release later this year.

To get started, install both programmes using your command prompt/terminal.

For your payload, run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install python3-pytrack

And your receiver, run:

sudo apt update
sudo apt install skygate

Follow this guide to start using Pytrack, and read this overview on SkyGate and what you’ll need for a tracking box. To give us your feedback, please raise issues on the respective GitHub repos: for Pytrack here, and for SkyGate here.

We’ve developed these software packages to make launching and tracking a HAB payload easier and more flexible, and we hope you’ll think we’ve succeeded.

Happy ballooning!

Disclaimer: each country has its own laws regarding HAB launches and radio transmissions in their airspace. Before you attempt to carry out your own HAB flight, you need to ensure you have permission and are complying with all local laws.

The post New software to get you started with high-altitude ballooning appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Tim Peake congratulates winning Mission Space Lab teams!

Post Syndicated from Erin Brindley original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/mission-space-lab-winners-2018/

This week, the ten winning Astro Pi Mission Space Lab teams got to take part in a video conference with ESA Astronaut Tim Peake!

ESA Astro Pi students meet Tim Peake

Uploaded by Raspberry Pi on 2018-06-26.

A brief history of Astro Pi

In 2014, Raspberry Pi Foundation partnered with the UK Space Agency and the European Space Agency to fly two Raspberry Pi computers to the International Space Station. These Pis, known as Astro Pis Ed and Izzy, are each equipped with a Sense HAT and Camera Module (IR or Vis) and housed within special space-hardened cases.

In our annual Astro Pi Challenge, young people from all 22 ESA member states have the opportunity to design and code experiments for the Astro Pis to become the next generation of space scientists.

Mission Zero vs Mission Space Lab

Back in September, we announced the 2017/2018 European Astro Pi Challenge, in partnership with the European Space Agency. This year, for the first time, the Astro Pi Challenge comprised two missions: Mission Zero and Mission Space Lab.

Mission Zero is a new entry-level challenge that allows young coders to have their message displayed to the astronauts on-board the ISS. It finished up in February, with more than 5400 young people in over 2500 teams taking part!

Astro Pi Mission Space Lab logo

For Mission Space Lab, young people work like real scientists by designing their own experiment to investigate one of two topics:

Life in space

For this topic, young coders write code to run on Astro Pi Vis (Ed) in the Columbus module to investigate life aboard the ISS.

Life on Earth

For this topic, young people design a code experiment to run on Astro Pi IR (Izzy), aimed towards the Earth through a window, to investigate life down on our planet.

Our participants

We had more than 1400 students across 330 teams take part in this year’s Mission Space Lab. Teams who submitted an eligible idea for an experiment received an Astro Pi kit from ESA to develop their Python code. These kits contain the same hardware that’s aboard the ISS, enabling students to test their experiments in conditions similar to those on the space station. The best experiments were granted flight status earlier this year, and the code of these teams ran on the ISS in April.

And the winners are…

The teams received the results of their experiments and were asked to submit scientific reports based on their findings. Just a few weeks ago, 98 teams sent us brilliant reports, and we had the difficult task of whittling the pool of teams down to find the final ten winners!

As you can see in the video above, the winning teams were lucky enough to take part in a very special video conference with ESA Astronaut Tim Peake.


2017/18 Mission Space Lab winning teams

The Dark Side of Light from Branksome Hall, Canada, investigated whether the light pollution in an area could be used to determine the source of energy for the electricity consumption.

Spaceballs from Attert Lycée Redange, Luxembourg, successfully calculated the speed of the ISS by analysing ground photographs.

Enrico Fermi from Liceo XXV Aprile, Italy, investigated the link between the Astro Pi’s magnetometer and X-ray measurements from the GOES-15 satellite.

Team Aurora from Hyvinkään yhteiskoulun lukio, Finland, showed how the Astro Pi’s magnetometer could be used to map the Earth’s magnetic field and determine the latitude of the ISS.

@stroMega from Institut de Genech, France, used Astro Pi Izzy’s near-infrared Camera Module to measure the health and density of vegetation on Earth.

Ursa Major from a CoderDojo in Belgium created a program to autonomously measure the percentage of vegetation, water, and clouds in photographs from Astro Pi Izzy.

Canarias 1 from IES El Calero, Spain, built on existing data and successfully determined whether the ISS was eclipsed from on-board sensor data.

The Earth Watchers from S.T.E.M Robotics Academy, Greece, used Astro Pi Izzy to compare the health of vegetation in Quebec, Canada, and Guam.

Trentini DOP from CoderDojo Trento, Italy, investigated the stability of the on-board conditions of the ISS and whether or not they were effected by eclipsing.

Team Lampone from CoderDojo Trento, Italy, accurately measured the speed of the ISS by analysing ground photographs taken by Astro Pi Izzy.

Well done to everyone who took part, and massive congratulations to all the winners!

The post Tim Peake congratulates winning Mission Space Lab teams! appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Bell Gardens’ Code Club is headed to Coolest Projects North America

Post Syndicated from Christina Foust original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/bell-gardens-code-club-coolest-projects/

Located outside Los Angeles, the Boys & Girls Club of Bell Gardens run after-school and summer programming for youth in the community. The club at Bell Gardens is part of the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, a national organization of local chapters that offer after-school programs for young people. In September, their Code Club members will be heading to Coolest Projects North America to share their coding projects and connect with other young coders.

Two girls with backpacks reading about a Raspberry Pi project — Boys & Girls Club

Boys & Girls Club of Bell Gardens

At Bell Gardens’ Boys & Girls Club, activities center around healthy living and homework support, in addition to opportunities for kids to practice good character and citizenship, and to explore the arts and technology. But, as we know, rapid changes in technology mean needing to always be on the lookout for updated and kid-friendly materials. Therefore, Loren and her Boys & Girls Club team wanted to find resources that expose their kids to technology and empower them to contribute to society, to solve problems, or to simply get creative.

Code Club Bell Gardens

Loren found that Code Club, the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s longest-running outreach program, has just the resources and online project platform they needed to really level up their digital tech program. Code Club resources, like all resources provided Raspberry Pi, are user-friendly, accessible, and always free.

A boy at a laptop coding in Scratch — Boys & Girls Club

Now, just two short months since their first session, the on-site Code Club at Bell Gardens has grown exponentially and become a favourite of the community. At 20 members and growing, their Code Club is composed entirely of members from the Bell Gardens community, serving kids from 6 to 15. The club runs at least once a week, and Loren hopes to run it more often due to its positive effects. She says:

I’ve seen a lot of internal and external growth in each member. I can honestly say that all the members have been impacted by the exposure to new resources and opportunities. Not only has their self-confidence improved, so have their skills in critical thinking, coding, and math.

Loren admits that the first day of Code Club started off as challenging. “Many of the youngest members faced significant learning difficulties pertaining to literacy and math. However, many of them happily surprised our staff with their ability to memorize the projects steps along with the symbols on the screen. After a two-hour session, most members were able to complete their projects without any assistance!”

Two children holding up Code Club stickers — Boys & Girls Club

The club members come from diverse backgrounds, so Loren is thoughtful about creating a team culture while supporting individual development. As a team, they focus on two objectives: passion and innovation. “Members are constantly seeking solutions to their own questions and challenges. They thrive on inspiration and motivation, which in my opinion is the finest way to be a catalyst in the technological age.”

Bell Gardens heads to Coolest Projects

With Coolest Projects North America coming in September, Bell Gardens’ Code Club members are working on projects over the summer to prepare for the big event. Loren is already looking forward to the showcase: “I am thrilled to bring our club to Coolest Projects because it’s a unique opportunity for the community! Our community has an overwhelming lack of resources, especially concerning education, so I am looking forward to introducing our members to an innovative, competitive environment, but most of all to inspire them to select a project they can feel passionate about.”

Coolest Projects North America

Coolest Projects North America will take place at the Discovery Cube, Orange County, on September 23, 2018.

Coolest Projects UK 2018 Raspberry Pi Foundation CoderDojo
Coolest Projects UK 2018 Raspberry Pi Foundation CoderDojo
Coolest Projects UK 2018 Raspberry Pi Foundation CoderDojo
Coolest Projects UK 2018 Raspberry Pi Foundation CoderDojo

All levels of coders are welcome, and all types of projects are encouraged! Find tickets to the the event, register your project, and learn about travel stipends on the Coolest Projects North America website.

The post Bell Gardens’ Code Club is headed to Coolest Projects North America appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Coolest Projects International 2018

Post Syndicated from Eben Upton original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/coolest-projects-international-2018/

Like many engineers, I have folder upon folder of half-completed projects on my computer. But the funny thing is that this wasn’t a problem for me as a child. Every other Friday evening, I’d spend two hours at Ilkley Computer Club, where I could show off whatever I’d been working on: nothing motivates you to actually finish a project like the opportunity to share it with an audience.




Raspberry Jams, Code Clubs, and CoderDojos all provide children (of all ages: we’re looking at you, Peter Onion) with a place where they can learn, share ideas, and make cool stuff with code and computers. But you can get so involved with the things you’re working on that you forget to take a step back every once in a while to look at what you’ve accomplished. And what do you do when you’ve shown your project to everyone you know, and you fancy a shot at a slightly larger audience?

Enter Coolest Projects International, now in its seventh year. Here’s a video that captures about 1% of the awesomeness of being there in person.

Celebrating Coolest Projects International 2018

Coolest Projects is a world-leading showcase that empowers and inspires the next generation of digital creators, innovators, changemakers, and entrepreneurs. This year, for the first time, we brought Coolest Projects to the UK for a spectacular regional event in London!

Coolest Projects brings Ninjas from CoderDojos across the globe together in Dublin for a chance to share their work with the world, and to compete to be coolest in one of several categories:

  • Scratch projects
  • Websites
  • Games
  • Mobile apps
  • Hardware
  • Evolution (basically, next-level stuff)

At this year’s event, more than 1000 children presented projects, from 15 countries including Argentina, Bulgaria, Italy, Japan, Romania, and Spain.

Raspberry Pi on Twitter

This is it! #CoolestProjects https://t.co/eoepjNWLsC

And for the first time, Coolest Projects was open to Raspberry Jam and Code Club members, and to the broader Raspberry Pi community.

Liz, our daughter Aphra, and I spent the day at the event, along with the CoderDojo team, what felt like half the Raspberry Pi Foundation, keynote speaker Pete Lomas, and the most amazing army of volunteers. Between chugging slushies, I had the opportunity to judge hardware projects with Noel King, CoderDojo volunteer and co-founder of Coolest Projects. Noel provided the judges with a pep talk at the start of the day. He reminded us that the aim wasn’t necessarily to find the most complete, or polished, or technically audacious project, but to seek out creativity: the project that does something unique, or does something you’ve seen before but in a unique way.




To my mind, the focus on creativity is what sets Coolest Projects apart. This is, after all, a contest that aims to “empower and inspire the next generation of digital creators, innovators, changemakers, and entrepreneurs”, and that recognises that each of those activities is, at heart, a creative pursuit.

Unsurprisingly, given the strength of the field, judging went on for some time. Each category’s winner and runner-up were exceptional, and there were countless other projects that didn’t quite make the cut but that I’d be proud to have made myself. Where were these folks when I was a teenager?

You can see the winners and runners up in each category on the Coolest Projects Twitter feed, and you should also check out the winners of the six special prizes. One that especially struck me was Selin Alara Ornek’s project, iC4U, a robot guide dog that she developed at her local CoderDojo in Turkey.

While Coolest Projects started in Dublin, it’s now an international phenomenon. In the last couple of months we’ve seen Coolest Projects regional events in Belgium, Romania, and the UK.

Showcasing your projects at Coolest Projects UK 2018

Coolest Projects is a world-leading showcase that empowers and inspires the next generation of digital creators, innovators, changemakers, and entrepreneurs. This year, for the first time, we brought Coolest Projects to the UK for a spectacular regional event in London!

In September we’ll be holding the inaugural Coolest Projects North America at the Discovery Cube in Orange County.

Coolest Projects began as a volunteer-run event, and we’re immensely privileged to have this wonderful showcase for our community. We are enormously grateful to all the staff and volunteers who continue to give huge amounts of their time, effort, and talent every year to make it the wonderful event that it is. Thank you, all of you.

Events like these give me hope that the future of our industry will be every bit as exciting, and vastly more diverse, than our past and present. If you have a chance to participate in one of them, I think you’ll come away feeling the same.

The post Coolest Projects International 2018 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Build your own weather station with our new guide!

Post Syndicated from Richard Hayler original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/build-your-own-weather-station/

One of the most common enquiries I receive at Pi Towers is “How can I get my hands on a Raspberry Pi Oracle Weather Station?” Now the answer is: “Why not build your own version using our guide?”

Build Your Own weather station kit assembled

Tadaaaa! The BYO weather station fully assembled.

Our Oracle Weather Station

In 2016 we sent out nearly 1000 Raspberry Pi Oracle Weather Station kits to schools from around the world who had applied to be part of our weather station programme. In the original kit was a special HAT that allows the Pi to collect weather data with a set of sensors.

The original Raspberry Pi Oracle Weather Station HAT – Build Your Own Raspberry Pi weather station

The original Raspberry Pi Oracle Weather Station HAT

We designed the HAT to enable students to create their own weather stations and mount them at their schools. As part of the programme, we also provide an ever-growing range of supporting resources. We’ve seen Oracle Weather Stations in great locations with a huge differences in climate, and they’ve even recorded the effects of a solar eclipse.

Our new BYO weather station guide

We only had a single batch of HATs made, and unfortunately we’ve given nearly* all the Weather Station kits away. Not only are the kits really popular, we also receive lots of questions about how to add extra sensors or how to take more precise measurements of a particular weather phenomenon. So today, to satisfy your demand for a hackable weather station, we’re launching our Build your own weather station guide!

Build Your Own Raspberry Pi weather station

Fun with meteorological experiments!

Our guide suggests the use of many of the sensors from the Oracle Weather Station kit, so can build a station that’s as close as possible to the original. As you know, the Raspberry Pi is incredibly versatile, and we’ve made it easy to hack the design in case you want to use different sensors.

Many other tutorials for Pi-powered weather stations don’t explain how the various sensors work or how to store your data. Ours goes into more detail. It shows you how to put together a breadboard prototype, it describes how to write Python code to take readings in different ways, and it guides you through recording these readings in a database.

Build Your Own Raspberry Pi weather station on a breadboard

There’s also a section on how to make your station weatherproof. And in case you want to move past the breadboard stage, we also help you with that. The guide shows you how to solder together all the components, similar to the original Oracle Weather Station HAT.

Who should try this build

We think this is a great project to tackle at home, at a STEM club, Scout group, or CoderDojo, and we’re sure that many of you will be chomping at the bit to get started. Before you do, please note that we’ve designed the build to be as straight-forward as possible, but it’s still fairly advanced both in terms of electronics and programming. You should read through the whole guide before purchasing any components.

Build Your Own Raspberry Pi weather station – components

The sensors and components we’re suggesting balance cost, accuracy, and easy of use. Depending on what you want to use your station for, you may wish to use different components. Similarly, the final soldered design in the guide may not be the most elegant, but we think it is achievable for someone with modest soldering experience and basic equipment.

You can build a functioning weather station without soldering with our guide, but the build will be more durable if you do solder it. If you’ve never tried soldering before, that’s OK: we have a Getting started with soldering resource plus video tutorial that will walk you through how it works step by step.

Prototyping HAT for Raspberry Pi weather station sensors

For those of you who are more experienced makers, there are plenty of different ways to put the final build together. We always like to hear about alternative builds, so please post your designs in the Weather Station forum.

Our plans for the guide

Our next step is publishing supplementary guides for adding extra functionality to your weather station. We’d love to hear which enhancements you would most like to see! Our current ideas under development include adding a webcam, making a tweeting weather station, adding a light/UV meter, and incorporating a lightning sensor. Let us know which of these is your favourite, or suggest your own amazing ideas in the comments!

*We do have a very small number of kits reserved for interesting projects or locations: a particularly cool experiment, a novel idea for how the Oracle Weather Station could be used, or places with specific weather phenomena. If have such a project in mind, please send a brief outline to [email protected], and we’ll consider how we might be able to help you.

The post Build your own weather station with our new guide! appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Some quick thoughts on the public discussion regarding facial recognition and Amazon Rekognition this past week

Post Syndicated from Dr. Matt Wood original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/some-quick-thoughts-on-the-public-discussion-regarding-facial-recognition-and-amazon-rekognition-this-past-week/

We have seen a lot of discussion this past week about the role of Amazon Rekognition in facial recognition, surveillance, and civil liberties, and we wanted to share some thoughts.

Amazon Rekognition is a service we announced in 2016. It makes use of new technologies – such as deep learning – and puts them in the hands of developers in an easy-to-use, low-cost way. Since then, we have seen customers use the image and video analysis capabilities of Amazon Rekognition in ways that materially benefit both society (e.g. preventing human trafficking, inhibiting child exploitation, reuniting missing children with their families, and building educational apps for children), and organizations (enhancing security through multi-factor authentication, finding images more easily, or preventing package theft). Amazon Web Services (AWS) is not the only provider of services like these, and we remain excited about how image and video analysis can be a driver for good in the world, including in the public sector and law enforcement.

There have always been and will always be risks with new technology capabilities. Each organization choosing to employ technology must act responsibly or risk legal penalties and public condemnation. AWS takes its responsibilities seriously. But we believe it is the wrong approach to impose a ban on promising new technologies because they might be used by bad actors for nefarious purposes in the future. The world would be a very different place if we had restricted people from buying computers because it was possible to use that computer to do harm. The same can be said of thousands of technologies upon which we all rely each day. Through responsible use, the benefits have far outweighed the risks.

Customers are off to a great start with Amazon Rekognition; the evidence of the positive impact this new technology can provide is strong (and growing by the week), and we’re excited to continue to support our customers in its responsible use.

-Dr. Matt Wood, general manager of artificial intelligence at AWS

Legal Blackmail: Zero Cases Brought Against Alleged Pirates in Sweden

Post Syndicated from Andy original https://torrentfreak.com/legal-blackmail-zero-cases-brought-against-alleged-pirates-in-sweden-180525/

While several countries in Europe have wilted under sustained pressure from copyright trolls for more than ten years, Sweden managed to avoid their controversial attacks until fairly recently.

With Germany a decade-old pit of misery, with many hundreds of thousands of letters – by now probably millions – sent out to Internet users demanding cash, Sweden avoided the ranks of its European partners until two years ago

In September 2016 it was revealed that an organization calling itself Spridningskollen (Distribution Check) headed up by law firm Gothia Law, would begin targeting the public.

Its spokesperson described its letters as “speeding tickets” for pirates, in that they would only target the guilty. But there was a huge backlash and just a couple of months later Spridningskollen headed for the hills, without a single collection letter being sent out.

That was the calm before the storm.

In February 2017, Danish law firm Njord Law was found to be at the center of a new troll operation targeting the subscribers of several ISPs, including Telia, Tele2 and Bredbandsbolaget. Court documents revealed that thousands of IP addresses had been harvested by the law firm’s partners who were determined to link them with real-life people.

Indeed, in a single batch, Njord Law was granted permission from the court to obtain the identities of citizens behind 25,000 IP addresses, from whom it hoped to obtain cash settlements of around US$550. But it didn’t stop there.

Time and again the trolls headed back to court in an effort to reach more people although until now the true scale of their operations has been open to question. However, a new investigation carried out by SVT has revealed that the promised copyright troll invasion of Sweden is well underway with a huge level of momentum.

Data collated by the publication reveals that since 2017, the personal details behind more than 50,000 IP addresses have been handed over by Swedish Internet service providers to law firms representing copyright trolls and their partners. By the end of this year, Njord Law alone will have sent out 35,000 letters to Swede’s whose IP addresses have been flagged as allegedly infringing copyright.

Even if one is extremely conservative with the figures, the levels of cash involved are significant. Taking a settlement amount of just $300 per letter, very quickly the copyright trolls are looking at $15,000,000 in revenues. On the perimeter, assuming $550 will make a supposed lawsuit go away, we’re looking at a potential $27,500,000 in takings.

But of course, this dragnet approach doesn’t have the desired effect on all recipients.

In 2017, Njord Law said that only 60% of its letters received any kind of response, meaning that even fewer would be settling with the company. So what happens when the public ignores the threatening letters?

“Yes, we will [go to court],” said lawyer Jeppe Brogaard Clausen last year.

“We wish to resolve matters as much as possible through education and dialogue without the assistance of the court though. It is very expensive both for the rights holders and for plaintiffs if we go to court.”

But despite the tough-talking, SVT’s investigation has turned up an interesting fact. The nuclear option, of taking people to court and winning a case when they refuse to pay, has never happened.

After trawling records held by the Patent and Market Court and all those held by the District Courts dating back five years, SVT did not find a single case of a troll taking a citizen to court and winning a case. Furthermore, no law firm contacted by the publication could show that such a thing had happened.

“In Sweden, we have not yet taken someone to court, but we are planning to file for the right in 2018,” Emelie Svensson, lawyer at Njord Law, told SVT.

While a case may yet reach the courts, when it does it is guaranteed to be a cut-and-dried one. Letter recipients can often say things to damage their case, even when they’re only getting a letter due to their name being on the Internet bill. These are the people who find themselves under the most pressure to pay, whether they’re guilty or not.

“There is a risk of what is known in English as ‘legal blackmailing’,” says Mårten Schultz, professor of civil law at Stockholm University.

“With [the copyright holders’] legal and economic muscles, small citizens are scared into paying claims that they do not legally have to pay.”

It’s a position shared by Marianne Levine, Professor of Intellectual Property Law at Stockholm University.

“One can only show that an IP address appears in some context, but there is no point in the evidence. Namely, that it is the subscriber who also downloaded illegitimate material,” she told SVT.

Njord Law, on the other hand, sees things differently.

“In Sweden, we have no legal case saying that you are not responsible for your IP address,” Emelie Svensson says.

Whether Njord Law will carry through with its threats will remain to be seen but there can be little doubt that while significant numbers of people keep paying up, this practice will continue and escalate. The trolls have come too far to give up now.

Source: TF, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing, torrent sites and more. We also have VPN reviews, discounts, offers and coupons.

Replacing macOS Server with Synology NAS

Post Syndicated from Roderick Bauer original https://www.backblaze.com/blog/replacing-macos-server-with-synology-nas/

Synology NAS boxes backed up to the cloud

Businesses and organizations that rely on macOS server for essential office and data services are facing some decisions about the future of their IT services.

Apple recently announced that it is deprecating a significant portion of essential network services in macOS Server, as they described in a support statement posted on April 24, 2018, “Prepare for changes to macOS Server.” Apple’s note includes:

macOS Server is changing to focus more on management of computers, devices, and storage on your network. As a result, some changes are coming in how Server works. A number of services will be deprecated, and will be hidden on new installations of an update to macOS Server coming in spring 2018.

The note lists the services that will be removed in a future release of macOS Server, including calendar and contact support, Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP), Domain Name Services (DNS), mail, instant messages, virtual private networking (VPN), NetInstall, Web server, and the Wiki.

Apple assures users who have already configured any of the listed services that they will be able to use them in the spring 2018 macOS Server update, but the statement ends with links to a number of alternative services, including hosted services, that macOS Server users should consider as viable replacements to the features it is removing. These alternative services are all FOSS (Free and Open-Source Software).

As difficult as this could be for organizations that use macOS server, this is not unexpected. Apple left the server hardware space back in 2010, when Steve Jobs announced the company was ending its line of Xserve rackmount servers, which were introduced in May, 2002. Since then, macOS Server has hardly been a prominent part of Apple’s product lineup. It’s not just the product itself that has lost some luster, but the entire category of SMB office and business servers, which has been undergoing a gradual change in recent years.

Some might wonder how important the news about macOS Server is, given that macOS Server represents a pretty small share of the server market. macOS Server has been important to design shops, agencies, education users, and small businesses that likely have been on Macs for ages, but it’s not a significant part of the IT infrastructure of larger organizations and businesses.

What Comes After macOS Server?

Lovers of macOS Server don’t have to fear having their Mac minis pried from their cold, dead hands quite yet. Installed services will continue to be available. In the fall of 2018, new installations and upgrades of macOS Server will require users to migrate most services to other software. Since many of the services of macOS Server were already open-source, this means that a change in software might not be required. It does mean more configuration and management required from those who continue with macOS Server, however.

Users can continue with macOS Server if they wish, but many will see the writing on the wall and look for a suitable substitute.

The Times They Are A-Changin’

For many people working in organizations, what is significant about this announcement is how it reflects the move away from the once ubiquitous server-based IT infrastructure. Services that used to be centrally managed and office-based, such as storage, file sharing, communications, and computing, have moved to the cloud.

In selecting the next office IT platforms, there’s an opportunity to move to solutions that reflect and support how people are working and the applications they are using both in the office and remotely. For many, this means including cloud-based services in office automation, backup, and business continuity/disaster recovery planning. This includes Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service (Saas, PaaS, IaaS) options.

IT solutions that integrate well with the cloud are worth strong consideration for what comes after a macOS Server-based environment.

Synology NAS as a macOS Server Alternative

One solution that is becoming popular is to replace macOS Server with a device that has the ability to provide important office services, but also bridges the office and cloud environments. Using Network-Attached Storage (NAS) to take up the server slack makes a lot of sense. Many customers are already using NAS for file sharing, local data backup, automatic cloud backup, and other uses. In the case of Synology, their operating system, Synology DiskStation Manager (DSM), is Linux based, and integrates the basic functions of file sharing, centralized backup, RAID storage, multimedia streaming, virtual storage, and other common functions.

Synology NAS box

Synology NAS

Since DSM is based on Linux, there are numerous server applications available, including many of the same ones that are available for macOS Server, which shares conceptual roots with Linux as it comes from BSD Unix.

Synology DiskStation Manager Package Center screenshot

Synology DiskStation Manager Package Center

According to Ed Lukacs, COO at 2FIFTEEN Systems Management in Salt Lake City, their customers have found the move from macOS Server to Synology NAS not only painless, but positive. DSM works seamlessly with macOS and has been faster for their customers, as well. Many of their customers are running Adobe Creative Suite and Google G Suite applications, so a workflow that combines local storage, remote access, and the cloud, is already well known to them. Remote users are supported by Synology’s QuickConnect or VPN.

Business continuity and backup are simplified by the flexible storage capacity of the NAS. Synology has built-in backup to Backblaze B2 Cloud Storage with Synology’s Cloud Sync, as well as a choice of a number of other B2-compatible applications, such as Cloudberry, Comet, and Arq.

Customers have been able to get up and running quickly, with only initial data transfers requiring some time to complete. After that, management of the NAS can be handled in-house or with the support of a Managed Service Provider (MSP).

Are You Sticking with macOS Server or Moving to Another Platform?

If you’re affected by this change in macOS Server, please let us know in the comments how you’re planning to cope. Are you using Synology NAS for server services? Please tell us how that’s working for you.

The post Replacing macOS Server with Synology NAS appeared first on Backblaze Blog | Cloud Storage & Cloud Backup.

Join us at the Education Summit at PyCon UK 2018

Post Syndicated from Ben Nuttall original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pycon-uk-2018/

PyCon UK 2018 will take place on Saturday 15 September to Wednesday 19 September in the splendid Cardiff City Hall, just a few miles from the Sony Technology Centre where the vast majority of Raspberry Pis is made. We’re pleased to announce that we’re curating this year’s Education Summit at the conference, where we’ll offer opportunities for young people to learn programming skills, and for educators to undertake professional development!

PyCon UK Education Summit logo

PyCon UK 2018 is your chance to be welcomed into the wonderful Python community. At the Education Summit, we’ll put on a young coders’ day on the Saturday, and an educators’ day on the Sunday.

Saturday — young coders’ day

On Saturday we’ll be running a CoderDojo full of workshops on Raspberry Pi and micro:bits for young people aged 7 to 17. If they wish, participants will get to make a project and present it to the conference on the main stage, and everyone will be given a free micro:bit to take home!

Kids’ tickets at just £6 will be available here soon.

Kids on a stage at PyCon UK

Kids presenting their projects to the conference

Sunday — educators’ day

PyCon UK has been bringing developers and educators together ever since it first started its education track in 2011. This year’s Sunday will be a day of professional development: we’ll give teachers, educators, parents, and coding club leaders the chance to learn from us and from each other to build their programming, computing, and digital making skills.

Educator workshop at PyCon UK

Professional development for educators

Educators get a special entrance rate for the conference, starting at £48 — get your tickets now. Financial assistance is also available.

Call for proposals

We invite you to send in your proposal for a talk and workshop at the Education Summit! We’re looking for:

  • 25-minute talks for the educators’ day
  • 50-minute workshops for either the young coders’ or the educators’ day

If you have something you’d like to share, such as a professional development session for educators, advice on best practice for teaching programming, a workshop for up-skilling in Python, or a fun physical computing activity for the CoderDojo, then we’d love to hear about it! Please submit your proposal by 15 June.




After the Education Summit, the conference will continue for two days of talks and a final day of development sprints. Feel free to submit your education-related talk to the main conference too if you want to share it with a wider audience! Check out the PyCon UK 2018 website for more information.

We’re looking forward to seeing you in September!

The post Join us at the Education Summit at PyCon UK 2018 appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Working with the Scout Association on digital skills for life

Post Syndicated from Philip Colligan original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/working-with-scout-association-digital-skills-for-life/

Today we’re launching a new partnership between the Scouts and the Raspberry Pi Foundation that will help tens of thousands of young people learn crucial digital skills for life. In this blog post, I want to explain what we’ve got planned, why it matters, and how you can get involved.

This is personal

First, let me tell you why this partnership matters to me. As a child growing up in North Wales in the 1980s, Scouting changed my life. My time with 2nd Rhyl provided me with countless opportunities to grow and develop new skills. It taught me about teamwork and community in ways that continue to shape my decisions today.

As my own kids (now seven and ten) have joined Scouting, I’ve seen the same opportunities opening up for them, and like so many parents, I’ve come back to the movement as a volunteer to support their local section. So this is deeply personal for me, and the same is true for many of my colleagues at the Raspberry Pi Foundation who in different ways have been part of the Scouting movement.

That shouldn’t come as a surprise. Scouting and Raspberry Pi share many of the same values. We are both community-led movements that aim to help young people develop the skills they need for life. We are both powered by an amazing army of volunteers who give their time to support that mission. We both care about inclusiveness, and pride ourselves on combining fun with learning by doing.

Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi started life in 2008 as a response to the problem that too many young people were growing up without the skills to create with technology. Our goal is that everyone should be able to harness the power of computing and digital technologies, for work, to solve problems that matter to them, and to express themselves creatively.

In 2012 we launched our first product, the world’s first $35 computer. Just six years on, we have sold over 20 million Raspberry Pi computers and helped kickstart a global movement for digital skills.

The Raspberry Pi Foundation now runs the world’s largest network of volunteer-led computing clubs (Code Clubs and CoderDojos), and creates free educational resources that are used by millions of young people all over the world to learn how to create with digital technologies. And lots of what we are able to achieve is because of partnerships with fantastic organisations that share our goals. For example, through our partnership with the European Space Agency, thousands of young people have written code that has run on two Raspberry Pi computers that Tim Peake took to the International Space Station as part of his Mission Principia.

Digital makers

Today we’re launching the new Digital Maker Staged Activity Badge to help tens of thousands of young people learn how to create with technology through Scouting. Over the past few months, we’ve been working with the Scouts all over the UK to develop and test the new badge requirements, along with guidance, project ideas, and resources that really make them work for Scouting. We know that we need to get two things right: relevance and accessibility.

Relevance is all about making sure that the activities and resources we provide are a really good fit for Scouting and Scouting’s mission to equip young people with skills for life. From the digital compass to nature cameras and the reinvented wide game, we’ve had a lot of fun thinking about ways we can bring to life the crucial role that digital technologies can play in the outdoors and adventure.

Compass Coding with Raspberry Pi

We are beyond excited to be launching a new partnership with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, which will help tens of thousands of young people learn digital skills for life.

We also know that there are great opportunities for Scouts to use digital technologies to solve social problems in their communities, reflecting the movement’s commitment to social action. Today we’re launching the first set of project ideas and resources, with many more to follow over the coming weeks and months.

Accessibility is about providing every Scout leader with the confidence, support, and kit to enable them to offer the Digital Maker Staged Activity Badge to their young people. A lot of work and care has gone into designing activities that require very little equipment: for example, activities at Stages 1 and 2 can be completed with a laptop without access to the internet. For the activities that do require kit, we will be working with Scout Stores and districts to make low-cost kit available to buy or loan.

We’re producing accessible instructions, worksheets, and videos to help leaders run sessions with confidence, and we’ll also be planning training for leaders. We will work with our network of Code Clubs and CoderDojos to connect them with local sections to organise joint activities, bringing both kit and expertise along with them.




Get involved

Today’s launch is just the start. We’ll be developing our partnership over the next few years, and we can’t wait for you to join us in getting more young people making things with technology.

Take a look at the brand-new Raspberry Pi resources designed especially for Scouts, to get young people making and creating right away.

The post Working with the Scout Association on digital skills for life appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Connect, collaborate, and learn at AWS Global Summits in 2018

Post Syndicated from Tina Kelleher original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/big-data/connect-collaborate-and-learn-at-aws-global-summits-in-2018/

Regardless of your career path, there’s no denying that attending industry events can provide helpful career development opportunities — not only for improving and expanding your skill sets, but for networking as well. According to this article from PayScale.com, experts estimate that somewhere between 70-85% of new positions are landed through networking.

Narrowing our focus to networking opportunities with cloud computing professionals who’re working on tackling some of today’s most innovative and exciting big data solutions, attending big data-focused sessions at an AWS Global Summit is a great place to start.

AWS Global Summits are free events that bring the cloud computing community together to connect, collaborate, and learn about AWS. As the name suggests, these summits are held in major cities around the world, and attract technologists from all industries and skill levels who’re interested in hearing from AWS leaders, experts, partners, and customers.

In addition to networking opportunities with top cloud technology providers, consultants and your peers in our Partner and Solutions Expo, you’ll also hone your AWS skills by attending and participating in a multitude of education and training opportunities.

Here’s a brief sampling of some of the upcoming sessions relevant to big data professionals:

May 31st : Big Data Architectural Patterns and Best Practices on AWS | AWS Summit – Mexico City

June 6th-7th: Various (click on the “Big Data & Analytics” header) | AWS Summit – Berlin

June 20-21st : [email protected] | Public Sector Summit – Washington DC

June 21st: Enabling Self Service for Data Scientists with AWS Service Catalog | AWS Summit – Sao Paulo

Be sure to check out the main page for AWS Global Summits, where you can see which cities have AWS Summits planned for 2018, register to attend an upcoming event, or provide your information to be notified when registration opens for a future event.

Amazon Sumerian – Now Generally Available

Post Syndicated from Jeff Barr original https://aws.amazon.com/blogs/aws/amazon-sumerian-now-generally-available/

We announced Amazon Sumerian at AWS re:Invent 2017. As you can see from Tara‘s blog post (Presenting Amazon Sumerian: An Easy Way to Create VR, AR, and 3D Experiences), Sumerian does not require any specialized programming or 3D graphics expertise. You can build VR, AR, and 3D experiences for a wide variety of popular hardware platforms including mobile devices, head-mounted displays, digital signs, and web browsers.

I’m happy to announce that Sumerian is now generally available. You can create realistic virtual environments and scenes without having to acquire or master specialized tools for 3D modeling, animation, lighting, audio editing, or programming. Once built, you can deploy your finished creation across multiple platforms without having to write custom code or deal with specialized deployment systems and processes.

Sumerian gives you a web-based editor that you can use to quickly and easily create realistic, professional-quality scenes. There’s a visual scripting tool that lets you build logic to control how objects and characters (Sumerian Hosts) respond to user actions. Sumerian also lets you create rich, natural interactions powered by AWS services such as Amazon Lex, Polly, AWS Lambda, AWS IoT, and Amazon DynamoDB.

Sumerian was designed to work on multiple platforms. The VR and AR apps that you create in Sumerian will run in browsers that supports WebGL or WebVR and on popular devices such as the Oculus Rift, HTC Vive, and those powered by iOS or Android.

During the preview period, we have been working with a broad spectrum of customers to put Sumerian to the test and to create proof of concept (PoC) projects designed to highlight an equally broad spectrum of use cases, including employee education, training simulations, field service productivity, virtual concierge, design and creative, and brand engagement. Fidelity Labs (the internal R&D unit of Fidelity Investments), was the first to use a Sumerian host to create an engaging VR experience. Cora (the host) lives within a virtual chart room. She can display stock quotes, pull up company charts, and answer questions about a company’s performance. This PoC uses Amazon Polly to implement text to speech and Amazon Lex for conversational chatbot functionality. Read their blog post and watch the video inside to see Cora in action:

Now that Sumerian is generally available, you have the power to create engaging AR, VR, and 3D experiences of your own. To learn more, visit the Amazon Sumerian home page and then spend some quality time with our extensive collection of Sumerian Tutorials.

— Jeff;

 

Puerto Rico’s First Raspberry Pi Educator Workshop

Post Syndicated from Dana Augustin original https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/puerto-rico-raspberry-pi-workshop/

Earlier this spring, an excited group of STEM educators came together to participate in the first ever Raspberry Pi and Arduino workshop in Puerto Rico.

Their three-day digital making adventure was led by MakerTechPR’s José Rullán and Raspberry Pi Certified Educator Alex Martínez. They ran the event as part of the Robot Makers challenge organized by Yees! and sponsored by Puerto Rico’s Department of Economic Development and Trade to promote entrepreneurial skills within Puerto Rico’s education system.

Over 30 educators attended the workshop, which covered the use of the Raspberry Pi 3 as a computer and digital making resource. The educators received a kit consisting of a Raspberry Pi 3 with an Explorer HAT Pro and an Arduino Uno. At the end of the workshop, the educators were able to keep the kit as a demonstration unit for their classrooms. They were enthusiastic to learn new concepts and immerse themselves in the world of physical computing.

In their first session, the educators were introduced to the Raspberry Pi as an affordable technology for robotic clubs. In their second session, they explored physical computing and the coding languages needed to control the Explorer HAT Pro. They started off coding with Scratch, with which some educators had experience, and ended with controlling the GPIO pins with Python. In the final session, they learned how to develop applications using the powerful combination of Arduino and Raspberry Pi for robotics projects. This gave them a better understanding of how they could engage their students in physical computing.

“The Raspberry Pi ecosystem is the perfect solution in the classroom because to us it is very resourceful and accessible.” – Alex Martínez

Computer science and robotics courses are important for many schools and teachers in Puerto Rico. The simple idea of programming a microcontroller from a $35 computer increases the chances of more students having access to more technology to create things.

Puerto Rico’s education system has faced enormous challenges after Hurricane Maria, including economic collapse and the government’s closure of many schools due to the exodus of families from the island. By attending training like this workshop, educators in Puerto Rico are becoming more experienced in fields like robotics in particular, which are key for 21st-century skills and learning. This, in turn, can lead to more educational opportunities, and hopefully the reopening of more schools on the island.

“We find it imperative that our children be taught STEM disciplines and skills. Our goal is to continue this work of spreading digital making and computer science using the Raspberry Pi around Puerto Rico. We want our children to have the best education possible.” – Alex Martínez

After attending Picademy in 2016, Alex has integrated the Raspberry Pi Foundation’s online resources into his classroom. He has also taught small workshops around the island and in the local Puerto Rican makerspace community. José is an electrical engineer, entrepreneur, educator and hobbyist who enjoys learning to use technology and sharing his knowledge through projects and challenges.

The post Puerto Rico’s First Raspberry Pi Educator Workshop appeared first on Raspberry Pi.