ROUGOL news

Announcement from ROUGOL, 8th July, 2014.

A few misc bits of ROUGOL news, starting with this month’s meeting:

Beginners Guide to Riscy Robots
Presented by Neil Fazakerley

Monday 21st July, 2014, 7:45pm

Anyone who has attended the London Show will be familiar with the sight of Neil Fazakerley’s robots, controlled by the BBC Micro, RiscPC and, more recently, Raspberry Pi.

At this month’s meeting Neil is aiming to persuade more people to have a go at connecting with real-world objects – ‘physical computing’. This is as opposed to the usual virtual world that most code inhabits, in which its output never really leaves the system. To that end, he will be bringing along some examples to demonstrate simple, baby steps that can be taken for those who would like to get started with their existing hardware.

This will start with a quick explanation of GPIO access and a simple demo of how to activate LEDs. Then Neil will introduce a very early version of his current project – a model railway DCC command control system written in BBC BASIC – to show how controlling just a single GPIO line can have very powerful external results.

Finally, he’ll cover the much under-used USB port, to show how it too can control external hardware – using the ubiquitous yellow Maplin robot arm as an example – and how you can write a powerful USB control program with just twenty-five lines of BASIC (yes, really, just half a screenful) – and no extra drivers, modules or libraries to load (unlike Linux).

There may even be a small goody bag for Raspberry Pi and Beagleboard-xM owners to take away to help them try their hand at GPIO programming in BBC BASIC 🙂

Andrew Hutchings – FedNet

At our meeting on 15th September the speaker will be Andrew Hutchings, author of Chocks Away, Stunt Racer, and StarFighter 3000. He will be talking about how he got into programming and the stories behind the development of these classic RISC OS games.

Steve Furber transcript

Way back in November 2009 we had the pleasure of Prof Steve Furber visiting to talk about his time at Acorn. Although we did not get a recording of that meeting, Steve gave a very similar talk at the Vintage Computer Festival last year and a transcript of that is now available on the 4corn website. here:

Enjoy!

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