What a week! We are all safely back at Pi Towers following a trip to San Jose, California, to attend our first ever SiliCon with Adam Savage.
Raspberry Pi set up a booth at the McEnery Convention Center alongside the best in pop culture, tech, science, makers, and artists. And we saw tons of amazing cosplay all around.
Out of this world
We felt at home with the heavy lean toward Star Wars fandom. Our booth was in sight of NASA’s, who attracted loads of visitors with their huge inflatable rocket. Even Doc Brown himself (aka Christopher Lloyd) visited and took a photo with a replica of the VIPER Moon Rover.
Meeting makers
Tinkering Rocks (aka Sean O’Steen) took our bedazzling challenge to the next level and made a raspberry beret with controllable LEDs. He, along with Geek Mom Projects, was one of the many makers with whom we’re social media friends who stopped by to show us their creations in person.
Jorvon Moss (aka @Odd_Jay) came ready with a different robot to showcase on each day of the event. We were also super pleased to bump into Alex Glow and Queen of Shitty Robots Simone Giertz, as well as pestering wearable tech guru Sophy Wong to sign a copy of the book she made with HackSpace magazine.
Lighting up LEDs is easy peasy
While gawping at the amazing cosplay on display distracted us a fair bit, our main aim was to encourage visitors to take a seat at one of our workstations and try their hand at lighting up an LED strip using Raspberry Pi Pico W.
Just a few lines of code lit up an LED strip in green. A couple of extra keystrokes saw the LEDs change colours. And an additional few lines of code levelled up our booth visitors’ skills to the point where they could flash LEDs on and off in sequence.
Our very own Head of Documentation, Alasdair Allan, presented from the Savage MakerVerse stage on day one. He showed everyone how to get started by blinking a single LED with a Raspberry Pi Pico, then keep going through to chasing rainbow lights around a NeoPixel ring, all in less than hour. See — told you it was easy.
We thought Pico W was the perfect Raspberry Pi product to showcase at SiliCon. Its small size means that it’s easily tucked into cosplay to offer the wearer more pizzazz and wow factor.
Drop a comment with your automated cosplay ideas. We happen to have a maker in residence at Pi Towers who might just bring your ideas to life.