Thursday 23 May 2013


Enterprise Week at Henley College Coventry Playing with the Raspberry Pi and Asterisk


Just want to say a massive thank you to Henley College Coventry for inviting me to their Enterprise Week. It gave me an opportunity to demonstrate the single SSR switching circuitry along with the ability for Asterisk to control lighting remotely using an iPad.




The students were great, asked lots of questions. These inquisitive minds is what makes the UK so great at bringing innovation to the masses. I turned a new leaf yesterday. Standing in front of students, helping young minds develop and understand the world of computing, I realised a sense of job satisfaction teachers must get every day. 




TO THE STUDENTS

The rest of this post is dedicated to these students who attended the class and those who missed out but really wanted to be there.....


Guys and Gals, The star of the show is YOU because YOU are the Future of UK TECH.
I have two messages for you, the first is, as Gary says:

THERE IS NO DOUBT IN MY MINE, 

YOU ARE GOING TO KILL IT!!!


I don't want to dwell on there being only one girl in the room so... I wont...But I will say this...Girls, YOU NEED TO get involved, the UK silicon Valley needs ya, end of! 

Gary Vaynerchuk is a massive inspiration to me and many many hackers, entrepreneurs, inventors and visionaries, so if you do nothing today, please please check him out on YouTube, my favorite vid here:




My second message to you is plane and simple, Get out there and hack, there are million, and I mean millions of problems to solve. Start with solving the simple ones you see and hear around you. A lot of people will say I don't know where to start so from here on, am going to dedicate this blog to helping you all get started. Ask me anything, you will get a reply. Email me directly at mohammed at coventryprinting dot com. You have my address now so you have no excuse.

To get you started, I suggested Python as a great language to learn however, if you have a Raspberry PI and just want to kick off with basic programming skills I would start playing with Scratch. Here is a cool set of Labs to get you going...






If you want to get in to the kind of stuff we looked at in the presentation yesterday, have a look at the links in the following text:

The place to get the latest news in hacking, it's the only place to be every day:



The Open Source Telephony system created by Mark Spencer at Digium called Asterisk:



Turning the Raspberry Pi Into an FM Transmitter:



One of the students asked me to explain how to connect LED's. She planned to use this for mood lighting, I would love to see this project develop, blog it out, the world can't wait to see what YOU can do with a PI.

All work and no play is not fun so here are the labs above, ready to play.....Games

Hope you enjoyed the post, leave me your comments...have fun and happy hacking!

Mohammed



Other cool links:
One of my Top Inspirations, Soichiro Honda, who's that you ask? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soichiro_Honda