Raspberry Pi Construction (part 2)

Last time we showed you how we set up our Raspberry Pi and managed to print something on our thermal printer! This post will show you the rest of the process for building our Readers’ Advisory machine.

Here we are watching the Eurovision semifinals on the projection screen.

Here are all the snacks we had (this is important).

Here are our wires! And the button we had (that didn’t work, more on this later).

Monica working on the code.

Wires plugged into our breadboard. The red button was missing a key component so we couldn’t actually wire it in. Oops.

Wires and cables everywhere!

Monica and Stephanie finishing off the code for the printer.

And it works!

Here’s a video if it in action.

We wrote up a bunch of reviews which are randomly pulled from a CSV file.

If you look carefully you’ll see the spacing and other issues we dealt with for the printer.

And that was all we could accomplish on that day! We’d have to come back on Saturday to finish everything off.

Saturday

Thankfully the Eurovision finals were on, so we could still watch those.

Whoops. Turns out we also bought the wrong resistor thing, but thanks to our extra long bread board we were able to wire stuff together.

All the wires in action.

Our shiny new button!

Hooking everything together.

It’s alive, alive!

Just a few hours later was the Maker Faire social. So we hauled our gear downtown to the Mozilla office and set everything up for people to see what we’d been doing.

Of course (of course!) it didn’t work. Why didn’t it work? We don’t know.

We double checked how all the cables were hooked up.

And it worked! Right now we still need to hook it up to a monitor to get everything running, but we’ll soon have that fixed.

Here’s the sign we made to explain what the machine was.

Krista, Monica, and Stephanie Basking in the delight of having a working machine.


Some of the other people at the social. We met a person from UBC Rapid who will hopefully be making a case for us!

Next up is the show and tell in the SLAIS lounge at 5pm on Wednesday the 21st, and then the Maker Faire on June 7th and 8th! (And if you can’t make either of those, the machine will be around at other events too.)

Don’t forget to write us some reviews for the machine!