A few months back, I designed and presented a raspberry pi workshop for Pi Day, covering the following:
- Installing an image onto an SD card
- Basic system info & specs
- Using GPIO
- Using SPI
- Programming an Arduino from the Raspberry Pi
In the spirit of the Open-Source community, here’s the presentation I created. I have chosen to release this material under a CC BY-NC license. Some slides might seem a little bare, as I flushed them out vocally during the presentation, so you may need to use your imagination…
Things that went well:
- Attendees got pretty excited for blinking lights. This never fails!
- We placed a group order and had the attendees purchase the components they required from us (Raspberry Pi, SD card, USB hub, HDMI cable, arduino)
- We hosted the event in a university computer lab, which had HDMI monitors, and keyboards/mice for the attendees to use
- We hosted the event on Pi Day, and brought in some pies for the attendees. Some attendees even brought pie to share!
- We had some friends present a raspberry-pi based UAV project they were working on, while the attendees ate pie.
Things that could be improved:
- We had the attendees flash the SD cards themselves – this takes ~ 1/2 hour. Would be better off having pre-flashed SD cards available.
- Also, some attendees SD cards “went bad” – somehow the image would get corrupted, and the raspberry pi would boot up and experience kernel panic / errors. To avoid having them re-flash the card, it would be best to have extra pre-flashed cards available.
- I interleaved “lecture” style material with “workshop” style material – this led to us waiting for people to catch up before moving to more material, which left some attendees waiting/bored. A better approach would be to do all the lecture-style material first, and then follow it with a lab-style section where attendees can work at their own pace.
If anybody uses this presentation, please let me know how it went and if you improved it in any way! I will likely be throwing this workshop again – the more feedback I can get, the better.