SimpleSi

Just letting you know how this lovely little board is developing 1. 4Tronix (Crumble) are making lots of easy to use add on "Crumbs". Several of us have been trying them out and providing feedback and they should be on general sale in about 2 weeks 2. Phil Bagge (A Master Primary Computing Teacher and world famous for his Sandwich Making video ) loves the Crumble and is developing help cards and lesson plans to use it. The only slightly disappointing news is that I still haven't got an API to interface it fully to Scratch but Redfern Electronics (the manufacturer) is very busy re-writing the Crumble firmware and hoping to get something to me in the next week BUT even if we never get Scratch interface - IMO - the Crumble is the number 1 KS2 primary computing interface and the exisiting GUI is sufficiently Scratch like not to cause too many cognitive issues for primary teachers (the pupils will be fine!) The software comes as an MSI and I've installed it myself and asked for it to be installed at schools where I'm not the NM and no other NM has come back and reported a problem. I strongly encourage everyone to bring this device to attention of primary computing teachers and get one yourself if you've got kids ! Simon

I'm off to the homeland for the weekend - anyone else going along? Simon

Its more the interference to school WiFi that was my issue although I can see the security issues in high schools

just had my first incident of someone running a WiFi hotspot in a school I noticed an SSID on Ch11 called WiFi54 and thought - how come a house WiFi is producing a strong signal in school? It kept on varying and I couldn't track where it was coming from At break time it disappeared completely but then re-appeared at start of lessons. I tracked it down to a TA carrying it around in their handbag. Have you had to explicity ban these in your schools or is not a real problem? Simon

What OS would people recommend for this? Simon

gav from DPD has saved the day - replacement insurances phone as arrived 1:15 mins before daughter sets off for China for a year !!!!

is anyone thinking of selling their old iphone 5S 64GB to mazuma etc - I'm in urgent need of one to replace daughters which got acteone split on it and she is off to China for a year on Wed lunchtime so looking for a quick solution! Simon

Just started down the route of a sort of cross-translator and managed to get it to convert a Scratch 2 .sb2 file into a Crumble .crm file (an .sb2 file is a zip file containg a project.json file and a .crm is just an xml file) Need to work on it being a bit more automagical but I think the same principle can be used for #Arduinos as well Simon

I've firgooton it

The manufacturers are pretty confident that it'll survive - when I get a 2nd one - I'll try and blow the 1st one up Simon

The language is like that But several advantages over Arduino for primaries 1. You can connect to it using croc clips - much more child friendly than breadboards and schools usually have them already 2. You can connect legacy DataHarvest Flo-Go hardware shuch as switches/LEDS/LDRs - a lot of schools have boxes full of them 3. "Driverless install" It seems to think its some sort of keyboard/mouse and every computer I've tried it on just installs it without fuss or bother - Massive plus over Arduino Simon

Then the Dogs of War will be unleashed!!!! However, not likely to happen as, unlike another small board manufacturer, Mr Crumble is keeping me in the loop From email yesterday "Also, I needs to get Crumbs finished - these are i2c expansion boards that connect to A and B (and + and -)." And I already want a MegaCrumble with more I/O ports Simon I just don't know where I get this bad reputation from?

Help! I've managed to avoid office 365 (ostrich method) but its time to dig in and find out about it One head would like the old concept of a bunch on contacts in a group so they can email them all at once. How to do this is eluding me Tried the add a group but that seems to be confined to other Office 365 users in the school. Clueless of Euxton HELP!

If you follow me on twitter you'll know I'm very excited over a new device from Redfern Electronics called the Crumble Crumble Controller | Redfern Electronics Its a VERY cheap (£10) board that has simply 4 digiatal/analogue I/Os and 2 bi-directional motor outputs. It is like a cut-down £99 flo-go box (Don't get me wrong - the flo-go is brilliant but is software is outdated) You can connect to it using croc clips or 4mm bananna plugs (which most primaries have loads of stuff from the old days) Even better - it comes with a Scratch type block programming interface so its super easy to program Betterer still - it remembers the program so you can make standalone devices Did I mention its only £10? And the best news is that Redfern are going to make it so that someone can write a Scratch interface for it. Guess who???? Video here from Mr Sandwich Maker himself Sorry - this is Crumble video Junior Computer Science from Phil Bagge

I've tried 2 sets - 1st one didn't work at the school I wanted it to - teacher used it at home- physically failed after a few months (belkin) Just before xmas I tried one in my house (TP-link) - got very slow connection unless in same room (which defeated the purpose of replacing a WiFi bridiging link) so gave up and ran CAT5 around outside of house Simon PS OCR and Voice recognition doesn't work for me either every time I've tried them

This is a case of not asking the question in the first place because legally the answer is no. OFSTED aren't going to take action against a school using their logo in a non-defamatory manner Sometimes you need to ignore the rules Simon

I'm just very passionate about primary computing and the lack of support from a charitable organisation to get their own device into schools to assist with the introduction of computing. I have a loud mouth and I'm sorry its annoyed you. Simon

[old post] I've decided that the issues introduced by the sudden and unexpected introduction of the Model 2B are detracting from my efforts to get physical computing into primary schools. Therefore, I am not going to support ScratchGPIO running on it and concentrate on the millions of earlier models already in schools and using the Arduino as a much lower cost I/O device Obviously my disrespect for the way the Foundation treats 3rd party developers like myself, teachers and small businesses has a large part to play in this decision /[old post] Following my decision to not support the 2B model as a result of the way the Foundation treats 3rd party developers like myself, teachers and small businesses, I received quite a lot of messages on the topic. Since my aim is to help make computing (and particularly physical computing) easier to learn and do, as a result of all the requests for me not to give up on this aim, both from educators/parents and businesses - I've reversed my decision and will support the 2B model. And you never know, maybe some sort of recognition of this might be made by the Foundation. Thanks Simon

The underlying GPIO library that my ScratchGPIO depends upon has made it into main pi OS so I'm back in business Pi2 Issues - Cymplecy (Simplesi) Simon

I've started playing with getting Scratch 2 talking to a Pi https://github.com/cymplecy/Scratch2GPIO if your a PiPerson/Scratcher - please test and see if it work for you Simon

You had to be lucky on old model to have reliable overclocking. It's alright for geeks but NBG for a teacher to have to deal with SD card corruption. Some people got their old B to run at 1200MHz - I found 800Mhz was the only speed to work across all 6 of my Pi. It'll be interesting to see what the LCM it's with the 2B

BYOB is a development of Scratch and lets you do much more advanced programming but still using blocks instead of text. (It itself has been superceded by Snap! which is a completly rewritten Javascript version intended to 1st year CD undergraduates but that's for another day It precedes Scratch 2.0 and wasn't written by a Scratch team member and is actually much more advanced than Scratch 2 and still runs across many platforms including the Pi There was a little bug in the Pi version but now its been fixed by Tim Rowledge, the squeak guru who is developing Scratch on the Pi As BYOB is a bigger program than Scratch - the Pi used to run it, but a bit slow and you had to be keen as it used up the CPU/memory But on the new 2B, it works quite well and brings Scratch 2 (define your own blocks etc) features to Pi users. I am particularly thinking that I can use it to simplify the syntax of my ScratchGPIO project for primary pupils (and their teachers of course) So to try it, launch an LX Terminal window and type wget https://www.dropbox.com/s/zgkq2jw9o9wbava/installBYOB.sh -O installBYOB.sh then sudo bash installBYOB.sh to run the installer It takes 3 mins to do its work and then you should have a desktop BYOB icon. regards Simon

Just tried on my 2B and it seems much quicker to load and run Scratch and I think it will have the oompf to run BYOB and even Snap! need to do some proper comparitve tests/benchmarks but those extra cores seem to be coming in very useful (or maybe its the RAM) Simon

I think a great thin client is an old refurbished laptop myself -saves a lot of faffing

I may need to update my avatar to show my battle scars