[Coco] Raspberry Jam Report

[Melanie and John Mark Mobley]

A Raspberry Jam is a Raspberry Pi computer festival. 

A Raspberry Pi computer is much like a classic computer.  The parents will
let the kids play with it and wire things to it with no worry of losing data
off the main computer where email and financial data are stored.  And if the
kids burn it up, then that is only $35.00 down the drain. 

I went to a Raspberry Jam on Wednesday May 13th at Marquette University in
Milwaukee, Wisconsin.  It ran from 6:00 PM to 7:30 PM 

We went to a conference room that was designed to hold 8 people.  4 people
were present.  This included the organizer (Sam), Glenn Holmer, myself and
my wife.  Glenn Holmer and I are both into vintage computing.

There was a large screen and we took turns connecting to it and presenting
what our Raspberry Pis could do.

Glen presented a number of operating systems for the Raspberry Pi.  He had a
number of Secure Digital (SD) cards, and was able to quickly change out the
operating system.  One system he presented was the Plan 9 operating system
from Bell Labs.

I presented 5 CPU-intensive tasks running on a 4-core Raspberry Pi 2.  It
was the same program running in 5 BASH terminal windows.  The program took
about 2 minutes to compute pi to 5000 places.  Each task got the same
percent CPU.  Then I changed the priority of one of the tasks but it did not
appear to make a difference.

I mentioned my interest in learning more about Linux clusters, which led to
a discussion on the Raspberry Pi and the new $9.00 C.H.I.P. single-board
computer.  The C.H.I.P. single-board computer is still in development, being
funded through Kickstarter.

I mentioned my experience with using X10 home automation with the Raspberry
Pi.  The X10 system needs to send audio frequency signals to the modules to
turn on and off devices such as lamps.  The lamp modules were designed for
incandescent lamps; however, I am using compact fluorescent and LED lamps,
so I used appliance modules.  I could turn the module on but not off.  Once
the compact fluorescent lamp was turned on, it made so much electrical noise
that the module could not hear the signal to turn off.  I could buy a new
system to replace the X10 system.  A new system would have feedback that
would allow the signal to be retransmitted in case of a communication
failure.  But then I mentioned that the Raspberry Pi is so cheap that I can
just install one where I need it, rather than depend on an automation
control system like X10.

I may have mentioned that the Raspberry Pi can act as a peripheral to a
vintage computer.  I have tried to get DriveWire to run on the Raspberry Pi
so that I can use it as a file server, Real Time Clock (RTC), print server,
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) and telnet server with the Tandy
Color Computer.

I hope to see interest in the Raspberry Jam grow.  However, it will be
interesting to see how the C.H.I.P. computer compares to the Raspberry Pi.


-John Mark Mobley