What’s a Raspberry Jam?

A Raspberry Jam is a meetup of like-minded people with a passion for open source technology! You don’t need a Raspberry Pi to come along to a Raspberry Jam, just bring yourself and your thirst for knowledge. The Southend Raspberry Jam welcomes all people of all ages, with workshops aimed at children as well as adults. But the best way to find out what Raspberry Jams are all about is to come along to one!

With talks, show and tells, workshops, videos, flashing LEDs and robots - you can’t get bored! You can come and go as you please, with no obligation to stay for the whole event. So if there’s something that you’re particularly interested in, why not just come along for that event? Who knows, you might end up staying a little longer than you thought.

Bring along your laptop, tablet, Raspberry Pi or smartphone if you want to get involved!

There will be a number of different talks and workshops aimed at different interests, including:

• A talk and demonstration about building a 250 class racing quadcopter drone, like Dave Black‘s.
• A workshop on how to build your own Arduino clone, using your own laptop (must have spare USB port and Arduino IDE version 1.5 pre-installed). £10 for “Shrimping” hardware.
• Goldsmiths University of London MA interactive students will be holding a workshop/discussion on their current research: “My Head Is My Sensor”, a how-to on being an idiot in smart cities.
• A talk on how search engines like Google and Bing work.
• International Space Station Experiments Competition with British ESA Astronaut, Tim Peake, will run your experiments on the International Space Station for the International Space Station Experiments Competition, with hints and tips on how to win.

Other Show and Tells include:

• AverageMan vs Raspberry Pi will be showing off his successful Kickstarter ProtoCam, 14 year old Zachary Igelman’s PiPiano and a host of Raspberry Pi addon boards and projects
• Emsity’s Robot Arm with a 3D printed gear to Maplin robot arm, connected to a 10 turn pot in order to determine base location through electrical feedback
• Learn to solder and program your own add on boards with MyPiFi
• SK Pang will be displaying his electronics, flashing LEDs and books - also available to buy at the Jam.
• The wonderfully clever Artificial Intelligence art installation, Pinnochion, exploring how people think computing works
• Controlling and programming your Raspberry Pi from a web browser with Wyliodrin

Southend Raspberry Jam Schedule:

• 10.45 - 13.00 : Talk & Demonstration - Tech, Rules & Videos & How To Build Your Own Quadcopter
• 10.45 - 13.00 : Workshop - Shrimping IT
• 11.00 - 11.50 : Workshop - “My Head Is My Sensor” with Goldsmiths University of London
• 12.00 - 12.50 : Talk - Want To Be The Next Google?
• 13.00 - 14.00 : Talk - Space Station Experiments
• 14.30 - 15.30 : Talk - History of Analogue Computers
• 14.45 - 15.30 : Talk - Environmental Sensor Networks
• 14.45 - 16.45 : Workshop - Electronic Fashion (You will need the Gemma Starter Kit to participate)
• All Day : Programming Clinic with professional programmer, David Whale. Get 1-to-1 help debugging your code!
• All Day : Workshop where you can build an alarm system, and learn how to control and monitor electronics with a Raspberry Pi.
• All Day : Scratch & Scratch GPIO workshop, where children can learn the basics of programming
• All Day : Soldering workshop where you can learn to solder with Ray.
• All Day: Learning Python programming using the game Minecraft - run on a Raspberry Pi.
• All Day: Learn web basics for beginners - the mark-up code used to create web pages. For complete beginners and children aged 8+.

Not sure if a Raspberry Jam is for you?

Love Southend firmly believe that Raspberry Jams are suitable for anyone and everyone. If you’re not sure, you can check out our photos in write-ups of the previous Southend Raspberry Jams!

• Southend Raspberry Jam #1 (March 2014)
• Southend Raspberry Jam #2 (June 2014)
• Southend Raspberry Jam #3 (August 2014)
• Southend Raspberry Jam #4 (November 2014)