Covent Garden Raspberry Jam

Covent Garden Raspberry Jam

Covent Garden Raspberry Jam – Nov17!

On Saturday the 18th November 2017, I attended Covent Garden Raspberry Jam for girls and boys.

There were many activities to get involved with such as:

• A Retro Pi area – the Raspberry Pi as a retro-gaming machine to play funky old games
• A Micro:bit workshop
• Minecraft – coding in Python
• Scratch
• Sonic Pi – coding with sounds!
• A soldering workshop
• Wearables

At the Jam, I spent time on two workshop activities. I wish I could have done more but there wasn’t enough time! The two  activities I had a go at were the “Wearables” and the “Soldering”.

I started off with the Wearables workshop run by Rachel (@konichiwakitty) who creates wearable fashion items using wearable technology. She was assisted by another mentor. Her workshop involved hacking craft items and turning them into wearables! The theme was very Christmassy! I was quite lucky to get a place on this workshop. It was fully booked but someone had canceled at the last minute, this meant I could join in!  We were given lots of crafting materials to work with such as felt, needles, conductive thread (which allows electronics to be used with textile stuff), LEDs, button batteries and battery holders, etc. The challenge was to design & make a wearable electronic badge.

To begin with, I cut out two pieces of felt in the same shape. I decorated one the way I wanted, with a selection of little craft objects. The second piece of felt was for the back of the badge – to attach a battery holder to. Once I had completed the decorative bit, I moved on to attaching a LED light to the front piece of felt. Rachel taught us how to recognise the positive and negative poles of the LED. It was an important bit of information because the positive side of the LED had to be connected to the positive side of the battery.  Once I had sewn the LED properly to front, and the battery holder to the back, of the felt pieces, I moved on to the fun bit.   This involved sewing the electric thread through both pieces of felt to create a circuit. It was then time for me to put my battery in and to see if all my hard work had paid off – and it did! The LED produced a blue light, which I liked, since blue is my favourite colour!

While I had a bit of time left, I did some soldering. As we are approaching Christmas, I decided to assemble a Christmas tree shaped circuit board with colour changing LED lights. I have done some soldering before so I was quite comfortable with it. Looking back, the trickiest part was making sure that LEDs were inserted the correct way.  At the end of my soldering experience I was really happy…….. my colour changing Christmas tree worked!

Another cool thing about the jam – If you had just bought a Pi and needed some help to set it up, a team was there to help you. A man who didn’t have much soldering experience, came to the Jam especially to get some help. He went home very happy because of the help he received from the soldering team Ben and Andrew (from pocketmoneytronics).

I enjoyed making and being able to take my projects home with me! At the end, there was a free raffle organised by Pi Supply, where you could win a Raspberry pi. I did not win unfortunately!

Overall I really enjoyed my time at the Covent Garden Raspberry Jam and I can’t wait until next time!

It you want to see more of my experiences with coding & tech, feel free to have a look at my other blogs!

You can see more pictures of the Jam on my portfolio page here