Question: Where can you find a Raspberry Pi 2, a new Style Guide, and a robot arm, all together? (Um. Have I got the question and answer the wrong way around?)
RISC OS Open Ltd have confirmed that they will be appearing at the RISC OS Southwest Show on Saturday, 21st February, at the Webbington Hotel, Loxton – and that they’ll have some interesting goodies to entertain and/or sell to visitors.
For the purposes of entertaining you, ROOL will be bringing along a USB robot arm which can be controlled by the software on their RISC OS Pico SD Card. Brought out during 2014 as part of the celebration of BASIC’s fiftieth birthday, the card is targetted at the Raspberry Pi and contains a simplified version of RISC OS that boots straight into BBC Basic, rather than the usual RISC OS desktop. Its use with the robot arm is a great demonstration of what can be done with the Pico distribution – which in turn demonstrates that while RISC OS might not be as feature-rich as some operating systems, the lack of features doesn’t mean a lack of capability.
The robot arm is supplied in kit form, and RISC OS Open will be giving away goodies to anyone who helps assemble it on the day! (I won’t bring a screwdriver with me – I’ll just get one from the bar. *hic*)
For the purposes of tempting you into parting with some cash, there will be an updated version of the RISC OS Style Guide available from the ROOL stand, which has been months in the making – a full announcement of the new Guide is promised shortly. Along with the new Guide, of course, there will also be the usual gamut of gadgets and goodies, from the latest versions of the C Tools, to the latest versions of the RISC OS Open mugs (er, of the drinking variety, not the guys themselves!) and so on.
The real showpiece, though, will be that the RISC OS Open stand will be the place to be to see the new Raspberry Pi 2 running RISC OS, which was already a work-in-progress behind closed doors during the new board’s secret development. The Raspberry Pi 2 was announced on Monday, 2nd February, and features an upgraded processor from the 700MHz ARM11 in the previous versions to a 900MHz ARM Cortex-A7, and an increase in the amount of RAM from 256 or 512MB (depending which of the old models you have) to 1GB.
