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This is the Southend-On-Sea Linux User Group, or SOSLUG, where I am exploring the hands-on part of learning about computing. I joined last year after giving a talk about a project I was working on. They had just been donated a lot of broken computers from a school, and they were taking them apart, testing them, building working machines from the parts and loading them with linux for social and educational projects. I spent a blissful four hours peacefully plugging and unplugging things and learning my first bit of Linux.

Every time I go there is something new going on. People bring projects they are working on, talk through problems and solutions and share information. I find it very inspiring, useful and also very simply enjoyable. There are a wide range of members (only some are seen here) all with different skills and experience so there is always some spark of something new or a different perspective on something old.

Here we are working out how to make a playstation 2 camera work with the Pi, to see if we can run a link to the fete on March 1st, which co-incides with a Raspberry Pi event they are holding here at TAP, a forward-thinking local art venue that hosts the SOSLUG meetings.

The process of connecting the camera involved downloading new packages, altering their code, learning about connecting to a Pi via SSH, and an extended command line program called VIM. I haven't documented every stage of this as it moves so fast, and I don't understand every step myself. At the moment, I am following it at speed at the meetings, and then replicating the working steps at home on another SD card to cement it in. Those bits I will document more.

The camera mostly worked, although there were problems as what we were using was designed to work with a PS3 camera not a PS2. But it was a great learning experience and did manage to capture some movement activated still images which could be seen on the pi and on another machine via SSH.

Here we connected the Pi to a projector using an hdmi-vga adaptor, and members could speak with Pinnochion#1 through the Pi for the first time, using my adapted html version of the Pandorabots interface embedded into my own website, which I brought up in a browser on the Pi. So at a very basic level, the Pi works as a conduit for Pinnochion#1. The next step is to improve on that, and to define the aesthetic of the stall.

(You can see the transcript of these brief test conversations with members of SOSLUG here and here.)

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