First Dublin Raspberry Pi Jam

At the end of PiCademy course, I offered a goal of running the 1st Pi Jam in Dublin back in April this year. I do recommend applying to attend PiCademy course if there's one in your area, you can find out via https://www.raspberrypi.org/training/picademy/, it's totally worth it and you get to meet some awesome Raspberry Pi folks and community.

Come Sat August 11th, we had our first Dublin Raspberry Pi Jam kindly hosted by Science Gallery. It was a great continuation to have them host our jam as they hosted the PiCademy course. In the end 19 showed up plus 5 volunteer mentors.

Besides having a venue and volunteers, we have a Code of Conduct.

Since mentioning volunteers, I want this opportunity to thank the following:

Volunteers (besides myself, it would be odd to thank myself 😜)

Partners

Congrats to the winners of the raffle

We had a raffle in the afternoon for prizes thanks to RS Ireland and here's the following winners (I didn't pics sorry, but there's a couple of tweets from winners):

Lessons learnt

I encouraged that it's ok to FAIL, I wasn't thinking that the beginners on getting folks to learn about command would be our first stumbling block. My plan was to introduce what a Pi is, then learn about command lines, then show folks who want to connect their Pis to their own laptops (as we didn't have enough Pi-Tops and Pi-Ceeds) and they can start working on the many tutorials that I printed out from Raspberry Pi and Pimoroni. Plus we brought a selection of MagPi magazines! 🙌

We had a lot of bumps along the way in the beginners side of the room, especially around figuring out why their laptops are not communicating with the Raspberry Pis. For those who had problems, and were stepping through with Mick and Will, do let me know what you learnt from trying to get it working.

Some problems were because of the following:

Again a big thank you for being so patient in the early part of the event. I've slides if folks need to reference things from the jam, the only part that is not quite working is "Installing Bonjour" on Windows part, may need to find an alternative and test on someone's Windows machines if people want SSH access to the Raspberry Pi.

By the way, we ended up just connecting directly to IP assigned to the laptop instead of connecting to "raspberrypi.local". Or workaround, just connect to tv/moniter and keyboard to Pi, it was much easier. I'm sure families/friends don't mind their TV being hijacked to do some cool Pi projects. 😉

We did lose a few people early on ☹️, possibly due to us trying to help folks connecting Pis to their laptops leading to a big delay in continuing the howto section of the jam for beginners, including a two people who realised it just wasn't for them. I went around encouraging folks to play with the tutorials with the Pi-Tops and Pi-Ceeds that are already set up. That actually worked quite well. The Pi-Top inventors kit (contains leds, resistors, buttons, buzzers) were a huge success also working in tandem with tutorials via Pi-Top's dashboard.

I'm sure there are more things that went wrong, but that's ok, as overall, we all learnt (or at least tried) to solve the problems together and have a good laugh.

For the next Jam, we would make it really clear that it's bring your own equipment. We'll still provide at least 3 of our Pi-Tops and printed tutorials as well as Mick's MagPi magazines. The volunteers will still be available if people need advice and help, but there won't be any how-to session as it's not a workshop.

Resources

Slides

Here's some useful resources, if you find any, please share with us:-

Post-workshop

For anyone who wants to keep in touch, find out when the next jam is, share ideas, resources, etc., we have a mailing list. You can sign up via https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/dublin-raspberry-pi-jam

You can find updates via Twitter also via @DublinRaspJam.

Other Pi-related events

If you want to do more Pi stuff and can't wait till our next one, check the following:

Where to buy Pi stuff

Our next 🥧 Jam?

I'm working on getting a venue at the moment. Currently it will be a Saturday in November (quite possibly the 3rd).

I'll be updating our official page: https://dublin-pi-jam.github.io/, announce on our mailing list and tweet about it.

Enquiries

If you have any questions, you can email us via pijam@eventgeek.ie.

About Author

Vicky Twomey-Lee

Pythonista, but normally found organising various tech events, and now heavily involved in diversity initiatives like Coding Grace, PyLadies Dublin, and Women in Technology and Science (WITS Ireland).
👉 http://about.me/whykay

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