Pi and pizza with GDG Dublin at Google

👉 Related to event: GDG & Coding Grace Beginners Raspberry Pi Workshop

After a crazy evening of rushing to Power City to buy HDMI to DVI adaptors for the monitors followed by a rush of getting SD Cards flashed and OS installed on the Pis, I, Vicky, kicked off the workshop with an intro on what Coding Grace is about, apologies as I'm not a morning person. Afterwards, we shuffled people around into 2 broad groups, beginners with me and other mentors and those interested in hardware with Mick.

While almost all the Raspberry Pis are installed with Rasbian OS, there was one that was just started off, and served as a step through for people who never installed a Raspberry Pi before.

NOTE: Recommended 8GB SD Card, if you want to install on 4GB SD Card, here are some instructions from Raspberry Pi. It is also recommended to download their New Out of Box Software called NOOBS, unzip it and copy the contents to the SD Card. Slot the SD Card into your Raspberry Pi and power it on and it will load up with options to pick a number of OSes. Or you can just order it from their store for 4 quid. :-)

Command line is something that is necessary to know when using the Raspberry Pi, and to get people into as quick as we can, I ran through a few basic command lines on LXTerminal on the Raspberry Pi.

Some essentials (open up a file manager so you can compare with what it's going on in the terminal)

References:

Then we opened the rest of the day to folks to go through the workshop projects (you can find them here).

To break up the day, GDG Dublin and Googlers have provided some shiney stuff for people to play with...

... and FREE SWAG! Everyone loves free swag.

Even though the day was on till 5PM, folks were getting a bit weary from one of our longest sessions to date, and there has been quite a few enquiries if we are to run another workshop. I will aim to run a Raspberry Pi Jam instead due to minimalising setup as much as possible. Google has been awesome providing all the hardware (and Raphael for bringing along a switch and getting everyone's Pi set up and connected to the interwebs). The Jam will mean people will bring all their own equipment, all levels are welcome where we can still run beginners sessions and folks who have ongoing projects can share and network their ideas.

On a final note, I would like to thank everyone who came along, the mentors (Andrei, Shane, Mick), GDG Dublin (Raphael, Peter, Rory) and Googlers (Vincent and Ant), and Google for hosting (swag and pizzas for lunch).

Following are upcoming events and workshops, if you want us to run a workshop, do let me know by emailing contact@codinggrace.com.

If you have any questions about coding, the Pi, etc, we have a forum you can join, so don't be shy.

Upcoming events

[Coding Grace] Introduction to Ruby on Rails @ Zendesk, One Grand Parade, Ranelagh.

Google Cloud and MongoDB Evening - GDG Dublin @ Google, Grand Mill Quay Barrow St.

[Ruby Ireland] Ruby & Go: Rebuilding Zendesk Voice @ Engine Yard, Barrow Street, D4

Coder Night @ TOG

[Coding Grace] Data Analysis with Python @ Jury's Inn Custom House, IFSC, D1

Strange Weather Hackathon @ Science Gallery

NoSQL matters Dublin

Hack4Good

Hardware Hackathon @ DCU

PyCon Ireland 2014 @ BallsBridge

And finally...

... here's the day storified from all the kind tweets.

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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