RPi use cases explained

Surely John learning to program is actually a practical implementation of Logic and problem solving.

Maybe learning to program's most important gift is learning how to problem solve.

 

This answers the Professor's question.  As long as people who benefit from bamboozling decide what's taught in school, Logic won't be part of it.

selsinork wrote:

 

Morgaine Dinova wrote:

Hopefully it was just an uncommon blip.

I suggest you don't read the rest of the comments coder27 has been quoting from then. I gave up quite quickly.

No danger of that, I gave up following that site and related links many months ago, and now let coder27 preprocess the whole Pi saga for me.  How he has the stamina and nerves of steel to put up with it I don't know, but rather him than me.

Cheers, coder27.

John Alexander wrote:

 

Sorry when you said standard lenses I was expecting C mount lenses like those on a propper security camera.

It would be interesting to see how the Pi Cam operates in low light !?!?!

I'm not sure it was C-Mount lenses, but as it's basically some sort of machined aluminium block made to align with the screw holes in the board, I don't see why someone couldn't come up with a C-Mount version of it.

This is one of the ones I saw http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=45887

As for low light, there are people prying apart the camera so that they can remove the IR filter...  I'm sure I've said it before, but these are cheap enough that everything is going to be tried..

I gave up following that site and related links many months ago, and now let coder27 preprocess the whole Pi saga for me.

Just so I can't be accused of letting you down by neglecting to report significant RPi news,

or in case anyone's writing a book on the history of RPi, here are some perhaps underreported tidbits.

1)  Eben, who had been described as the Executive Director of the RPF as recently as 23 Jan 2013,

http://lifehacker.com/5978324/im-eben-upton-executive-director-of-the-raspberry-pi-foundation-and-this-is-how-i-work

apparently had his position as Director terminated as of 07 Jan 2013:

     http://opencorporates.com/filings/181509848

or maybe as early as 18 December 2012:

      http://opencorporates.com/companies/gb/06758215

He is now described variously as

   "Eben Upton, Co-Founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation"

http://www.element14.com/community/docs/DOC-51657/l/element14-agrees-new-global-distribution-deal-for-raspberry-pi

or "Upton, Technical Director of Broadcom" and RPF founder

https://www.element14.com/community/community/news/blog/2013/06/26/ebon-upton-receives-the-silver-medal-for-bringing-raspberry-pi-to-the-masses

or "creator of the Raspberry Pi"

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/yourbusiness/10139778/Raspberry-Pi-inventor-joins-silver-medal-table.html

or "chip architect at Broadcom", and RPF founder

http://www.raspberrypi.org/about

It isn't known to me who is currently the Executive Director of the RPF, or what if any official

roles Eben or Liz currently have at RPF.

2)  It was widely reported that 10 beta boards were auctioned on eBay in Jan 2012, with serial number No. 01, raising £3,500,

for a total of over £16,000.  For example, Wikipedia currently says:

The ten boards (with a total retail price of £220) together raised over £16,000,^[42] with the last to be auctioned, serial number No. 01, raising £3,500.^[43

But board #01 can be seen in pictures of Eben's desk.  The buyer apparently turned out to be a fraud.

3)  regarding NPOV wikipedia edits:

by liz » Sun Aug 28, 2011 3:03 pm

I'm not able to edit the Raspberry Pi Wikipedia page for NPV reasons, but I've noticed that the name of the processor is wrong, and that the overview section's a bit out of date. If any of you is an editor and fancies having a swing at it, we'd be very grateful!

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=517

and

by liz » Mon Dec 17, 2012 10:45 pm

We never, ever edit the Raspberry Pi stuff on Wikipedia, because we take NPOV very seriously. But that doesn't mean that we don't check it assiduously.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=25995&p=236920

and

by liz » Wed Jun 26, 2013 5:12 pm

This thread remains locked, but zerxy also appears to be the person who's been busily trying to vandalise the Wikipedia page on Raspberry Pi, which resulted in it being put under protection (which we don't contribute to because of NPOV - doesn't stop us reading the history page, though,

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=45512&start=36

and

by liz » Tue Dec 18, 2012 12:13 am

Hearty agree: I wish someone would give the Raspberry Pi article a good old shake-down. I used to be a very enthusiastic Wikipedia editor, but stopped when I started working on Pi (largely because now all I do is Pi and sleeping, with occasional breaks for washing and eating). The current article pains me, but because of NPOV there is bugger all I can do to correct the problem.

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?t=25798&p=236309

followed by:

by mahjongg » Tue Dec 18, 2012 12:18 am                                   

Moderator

Posts: 3351

 

well i have more than 10.000 edits to my name on en.wikipedia.org, and have been editing the Raspeberry PI article quite heavily, so im not quite neutral on the subject (LOL), but If there is anything specific in the article that bothers you, maybe I can help.

John Alexander wrote:

 

Surely John learning to program is actually a practical implementation of Logic and problem solving.

Maybe learning to program's most important gift is learning how to problem solve.

Here's another data point regarding learning to program.

My mother forced music lessons on me at an early age, and I selected the clarinet because of the wonderful levers all over the place.  Clarinet fingering is not trivial, because those various levers give you alternate ways to play the same notes and which you use depends on the notes that come before and the ones that come after.  So you have to plan the fingering strategy ahead and document it with arcane symbols on the music sheet.  Any fingered instrument is going to have similar problems to solve.

Well, it turns out that you need exactly the same skills for programming microcode.  So that came naturally.

I've read that the best way to improve math scores is to teach music.  It seems that music -- especially classical music like Mozart and Bach -- develops the same part of the brain that's needed for math.  In the USA, very few schools have music programs left (especially at the elementary level) and people wonder why STEM is having problems?

In fact, I believe music and software have a great deal in common.  In both cases, you have a static representation -- a source code.  The source code is mostly linear, but does include looping and conditional constructs.  In both cases you need an instrument to interpret the static representation.  In both cases, the dynamic interpretation is transitory and once played is gone.  You can replay it any number of times, but each step in the program or music only exists for a moment.

You see lots of examples of computer scientists who are also musicians.  My favorite example is Donald Knuth, who has his own pipe organ.

So maybe the correct answer to STEM is to throw away the CDs and MP3 players and have children make their own music like they used to.

Clarinet fingering is not trivial, because those various levers give you alternate ways to play the same notes and which you use depends on the notes that come before and the ones that come after.

I don't know anything about clarinet fingering, but trumpet fingering is confusingly similar

to binary representation.  The middle valve adds a short amount to the total length of the

tubing; the first valve adds twice as much, and the 3rd valve adds 3 times as much. 

So pressing the 2nd valve will lower the tone by one note (half-step), and

pressing the 3rd valve is roughly equivalent to pressing the first two valves,

so there are only 7 rather than 2^3=8 distinct notes that can be played before

starting over at a higher harmonic with more air pressure.  At higher harmonics

you get more fingering equivalences, because the harmonics come closer and closer together.

Both the first and third valves have "slides", like a trombone slide, so they can

be extended as needed to make a particular note in tune, in addition to a main

tuning slide that stays fixed while playing.  This is because the math based on

tubing length doesn't work out exactly for the musical scale.

My favorite example is Donald Knuth, who has his own pipe organ.

There is a nice photo of it at:

http://alumni.stanford.edu/get/page/magazine/article/?article_id=33888  (6 of 6 in the album)

note:  photo #1 is not Dr. Knuth pondering my bug reports.

To John and coder27:  If clarinet and trumpet have something in common with programming and binary, then I'll volunteer two related data points:

• Guitars have such a complex relationship between action and sound that if a correspondance with computing is being sought, it can only be with analogue computers.  Which string you activate and which fret you hold down convey barely a hint of the sound that will emerge. It depends on how you activate it, from a light tickle to a medium pluck or a hard twang, but that itself depends on whether you use a plectrum or your bare fingers, and it depends on where on the string you activate it (anywhere from near the bridge up to near the nut at the other end), and on the angle of attack which is a continuum, and you can also slap it against the body for a different effect.  On the fretted neck, a finger holding down a string between a pair of frets does select one specific shortening of the string, but it's not a unique mapping to frequency, just a ballpark selection, and the sound is generally poor or amateurish without modulation.  This can vary from just a hint of timbre change to a clear pull to extreme string bending by many semitones, and many different dynamic effects like finger vibrato and release bending and partial muting are used continually during play.  This actually barely touches on the range of possible effects, and the same fundamental pitch is available in different timbres on different strings for added variety.  The ordinary guitar most definitely does not have the character of a digital instrument, and treating it as one produces only sterile notes.

• MIDI keyboards and other MIDI controllers provide such a direct mapping from action to sound that for all intents and purposes, MIDI as a genre is musicianship for programmers.   Even continuous effects like pitch modulation are entirely deterministic.  If you have a programmer's mind, making quite reasonable and expressive music with MIDI instruments is very straightforward to the point of being easy, and it's quite rapidly gratifying.  (MIDI also opens up playing to computer control of course, but that's a different subject.)

The contrast between these two types of instrument is stark.  I have various kinds of guitar but despite decades of trying, I can't get what I consider "musical sound" out of any of them, just ugly notes.  It's clearly not "my instrument" (despite being my first and my most practiced), and I put that squarely down to it being highly analogue --- its sound depends on the intersection of two analogue controls in a multi-dimensional analogue control space.  I don't really "think guitar";  navigating this control space is alien to me despite long acquaintance.

MIDI keyboard in contrast "worked" for me instantly (the fact that it was MIDI rather than a traditional piano was incidental), and I could produce relatively pleasing musical phrases just a few days after purchasing my first MIDI master (lots of controllers now).  A large range of perceptually non-digital effects like velocity and aftertouch modulation provide effective expressive power, but it doesn't reduce the strongly deterministic "digital" character of this class of instrument which is a consequence of its cleanly quantized control space.  (Most of this applies to stringed pianos too, because it's the keys that define its essential character.)

So, regarding the tutorial effect of playing musical instruments on subsequent programming, I'll just say that for the guitar, absolutely none at all if one excludes the beneficial effect of doing something different.  Analogue and digital realms don't really intersect significantly in practical terms (other than as dimensional constraints), despite doing so theoretically at a fundamental level.

Morgaine.

coder27 wrote:

 

Just so I can't be accused of letting you down by neglecting to report significant RPi news,

or in case anyone's writing a book on the history of RPi, here are some perhaps underreported tidbits.

 

by liz » Wed Jun 26, 2013 5:12 pm

This thread remains locked, but zerxy also appears to be the person who's been busily trying to vandalise the Wikipedia page on Raspberry Pi, which resulted in it being put under protection (which we don't contribute to because of NPOV - doesn't stop us reading the history page, though,

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=29&t=45512&start=36

I'm zerxy.  I suggest to anyone interested that they check out my "vandalism" of the Raspberry Pi page on Wikipedia.