Saturday 12th May

Another busy morning at the BLUG including 11 physical attenders and several who joined the hangout. As usual several threads going on, John continued his Python tutorial and Les after several false starts managed to demo his Raspberry Pi sort of going on a very old B&W 14" TV Mike had lying around.


He's bringing it again next week as this was not a huge success so he'll have another go with a PC or TV monitor we can hook up to the HDMI port on the Pi. There were also several geeky and not so geeky conversations going on around the room.

As usual I'm lousy with names but welcome to those attending the meeting for the first time, we hope to see you again now you know were not too cracked to spend a couple of hours with on a Saturday Morning. Although the same cannot be said for one gentleman who joined the hang out seemingly a little worse for the strong stuff, and seemed to think it was another type of meeting ;-) nuff said.

At some stage Les has promised to put some links to a few pictures he took of the mornings happenings.

- Les, and here they are...

Blackpool LUG Meetings 31/03/2012 to 21/04/2012

It's been a while, lets catch up.

Join continued his 3rd part of his fantastic Python tutorials.

You can see pictures from that meeting here.

We also met for two meetings at a local coffee shop called Toast in Blackpool town centre.
Conversations ranged from the upcoming release of Ubuntu 12.04 on April 26th, to children learning to program.

April 21st.

The group met at the LUGs home on Ripon Rd, and it was a laid back meeting today.

Tony tinkered with his netbook.




And the group circled like vultures when they saw some new kit that Mike had aquired.






The LED wall sign project nears completion.

From meetings

All in all, a typical LUG ;)

There will be no LUG now until May 12th, but in the meantime you could go to UCubed

All the pictures from the LUG can be found here

Blackpool LUG Meeting 31/03/2012
Blackpool LUG Meeting 21/04/2012

Blackpool LUG Python Workshop Part 2

This week Jon led another Python workshop, and Mike, James and Les were there to learn more.

We created a loop that allowed players to have multiple chances at guessing the correct number.

If you're guess was too high it said

If your guess is too low

And if you got it right

Jon's workshop was a great introduction to programming, and you can clearly see how easy it was for us to make our little game by looking at our code below.



# Generate a random number

import random
import easygui as eg

secret = random.randint(1, 50)
guess = 0
tries = 1
eg.msgbox (secret)

# Ask for your guess
while guess != secret and tries < 4: guess = eg.enterbox("What is your guess? ") guess = int(guess) # Compare your guess against the number if guess < secret: eg.msgbox ("You're guess is too low") elif guess > secret:
eg.msgbox ("You're guess is too high")
elif guess == secret:
eg.msgbox ("You're answer is correct, well done!")

tries += 1
print tries

# Tell you if your guess was correct

print "The answer was : ", secret
eg.msgbox ( "The answer was: " + str(secret))

# Loop if less than six guesses

Massive thanks to Jon for leading these sessions, it has been a great experience.

Also, thanks to Mike for his sterling work on the donated LED wallboards

ToweLUG Meeting 17/3/12

So this week we had two activities ongoing at the same time (one hardware and one software), whilst people popped in and out of the Google Hangout.

The hardware one was the continued efforts by various members to reverse-engineer the LED display boards donated by Les. This week, Mike was soldering (!) on single-handedly, analysing the circuit design of each of the display modules, and confirming how to light each LED and I think had some discoveries around how to drive the display using some form of multiplexing and the on-board shift registers, and also how to produce different colours the display is capable of.



Once this is done, the plan is to use an Arduino to drive the boards. Not sure what the next step is :-)

The other main activity was a programming bootcamp using Python, which was led by Jon. There were two students in the room Les and James, plus Tony part-time on the Google Hangout. During the session, we covered basics such as syntax, commands, the importance of indenting, variables, if blocks, input from the keyboard, data types and type conversion and Python's little gotcha with using integers in calculations. We put this into practice, by writing a number guessing game, which we will build on next time. (Most of the examples were taken from a very good book called 'Hello World' by Carter and Warren Sande).



As a side note, James has been on the mailing list for several years(Welcome James), but this was his first time to attend an actual meeting. Anybody else who has so far only been involved through the mailing list is always very welcome to come along to the meetings! :-)

Photos for the meeting were as usual kindly taken by Les and can be found here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/45703688@N07/sets/72157629604005235/

See you at the next meeting!

This week, everyone is a GIT

Blackpool LUG met once again, and this time we learnt GIT, the version control system.

Git is a powerful version control framework, that allows users to branch off from the main trunk of code, write their own changes, then request to merge them with the original trunk.

Today we setup our GitHub accounts and used the easy to follow Linux instructions (mainly for Ubuntu/Debian) to setup a test repository.

Following this we tried out the command line tools

• We created an empty folder to contain our Git work.
• We created a test file using "touch myfile.py"
• We used "git commit" to commit our changes, this then opened nano so that we could add comments to the code.
• We then used "git status" to check the status of our folder and it's contents.
• Then we looked at the log using "git log" to see what we had done.
• Les then cloned a repo from GitHub, using "git clone git://url_of_git_repo"

Donald and Mike carried on with their sterling work hacking the LED wallboards that Les brought in last week.

Today was a busy day, lots of chatting and learning, the LUG still ran their Google Hangout, we had Mike "Heed" Rimmicans and Pete "Dick Turpin" Cannon.

Thanks to everyone for coming and see you all next time!