Encouraging people to be as flashy as he is when his boss isn’t around!
Observant readers and show visitors will have noticed that Andrew Conroy has started occasionally having his own presence at RISC OS computer shows – when CJE Micro’s, the company for which he works, isn’t present. What he exhibits is a range of personal projects interfacing with the Raspberry Pi.
A person visiting Andrew’s stand can be forgiven if they get confused about the time of year, and think it might Christmas, because the most eye catching of his interfacing projects seem to involve flashing lights of various types.
One device that can be interfaced with the Pi is the JAM HAT, which has been designed to be easy to use for those starting out with interfacing, and programming electronic hardware – and it’s very cheap to buy. I don’t think I’ve seen one on Andrew’s stands, but he has developed a BBC BASIC library to support it, which can be downloaded either from his website, or via !Store.
The board is an ideal choice for beginners, schools, and coding clubs, with its clearly laid out format – and while sitting atop a Raspberry Pi, it still fully exposes the GPIO pins, allowing people to progress further by connecting additional hardware as necessary.
It includes six “traffic light” LEDS (two each of red, yellow, and green), two tactile “push to make” buttons, and a buzzer – and Andrew’s library allows control of all these; you can light up the LEDs, play a tune on the buzzer, and detect which button has been pressed.
There is also a pair of very similar boards from RaspberryPi Spy called BerryClip and BerryClip Plus, and Andrew says his library also supports those.
The library makes use of David Ruck’s TimerMOD, and with his permission is included with the download.
