Raspberry Pi Workshop

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
A Pi and a Pie for Pi day
A Pi and a Pie for Pi day

Attendees at the workshop
Attendees at the workshop

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.