On Thursday the 11th of December, we held the first Lagos Raspberry Jam. Raspberry Jams are global events which are held in different places around the world. The focus of the Lagos Jam was on promoting the maker culture by showcasing Raspberry Pi projects built within and around Lagos. With about 8 project demonstrations and over a hundred people in attendance, we were certainly set to have a great time.

Here’s a recap of the event and the project demos.

Who Attended:
True to Jam-style, we had a diverse range of Jam-attendees; from secondary school students, to university undergraduates, parents, professionals and members from our own community. They all turned up to see the projects on display.

The Demos:
All the project demos were powered in one way or the other by the Raspberry Pi, truly proving the versatility of the mini-computer. The demos cut across a variety of sectors including power, education, security and entertainment projects. A brief overview of the projects include:

#1: Energy/Power Monitor: a device that helps keep track of power consumption regardless of whether one is connected to the grid, inverter or generator. This device stores the energy usage data in a database and generates energy consumption reports. This can then be used to verify your electricity bills and provide useful information to help better maintain your equipment. For example, improving the battery lifetime of your inverter by measuring and helping to moderate your power consumption.

#2: Otomatik Server: The Otomatik Server is a portable, mobile educational server which provides students with access to educational resources without having to connect to the internet. The server contains an eLearning portal stocked with a rich variety of resources (video, audio, text) powered by an eLibrary (Rachel) as well as an examination practice portal (Examina) which prepares students for exams. By connecting to the Otomatik wireless network students have full access to the resources without bearing the costs associated with getting data to access the internet.

#3: Remote Surveillance System: using a simple external webcam and a Raspberry Pi, this project makes it possible to easily keep track and monitor your environment from the comfort of your laptop. This is achieved by accessing the webcam feed over a private network. Think of it as an an easy-to-setup and affordable CCTV system to enable you to keep an eye on what’s going on in a given location. A project quite a number of parents seemed interested in.

#4: Pi-Powered Bot: for Robotics lovers this project combines the power of a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and the LEGO NXT Mindstorms kit to create a multi-functional robot. The robot demoed was programmed with python and users were able to control the movement of the robot by the simple press of a button; Touch sensors were used which enabled the buttons react to touch.

#5: Computer Games & Animations: Kids were not left out either; as a number of kids from our Summer of Code programme demoed some of the games and animations that they had built using Scratch. These included an interactive quiz-game, an underwater adventure game as well as a number of animations.

#6: Minecraft: The Jam wasn’t just about viewing demos, but everyone who attended also got the chance to ‘get their hands dirty’ by writing some lines of Python code. The aim was to ‘hack’ Minecraft by printing messages on the screen, or by adding or removing their own objects to Minecraft. The result – a group of super excited first time coders.

Jam Highlights:
There were also a number of prizes up for grabs. Attendees got the opportunity to vote for their top projects in the ‘Most Innovative’ and ‘Most Likely to Use’ category. Dawn Fuel’s Energy/Power Monitor took first place for both awards, with Otomatik Server coming a close second, also in both categories. The prize for each category was a $50 voucher to be spent on purchasing additional project resources.

Three free Raspberry Pi starter kits were also won, by attendees who had the most compelling pitch as to why they deserved to win a free Pi.  The winners were Eyo and Eyitemi (both engineering students from FUTA who intend to build their final year projects around the Raspberry Pi) as well as Gbolahan, a recent graduate of UI, who is interested in building upon the Remote Surveillance System. We are excited to see what they come up with in the ensuing weeks.

The event ran from 12noon to 6pm; with quite a good number of people spending between two-four hours. It was an exciting time for us and we are already looking forward to the next edition of the Jam. Who knows, maybe we would have been able to turn some of these suggestions into working projects.

If you are interested in the Raspberry Pi, have any ideas or projects to share, reach out to us at mxlab[at]cchubnigeria.com.

P.S There’s only so much we can describe, for more exciting pictures from the Jam have a look at the Facebook album.