Raspberry Pi Turns 5 and Fans Show Off Its Flexibility

Like making a piano with paper clips or turing it into a wrist computer.

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The Raspberry Pi is five years old now, and fans of the small computer got together at a Pi Party in Cambridge as part of a birthday weekend to celebrate.

Much of the event revolved around showcasing what the single-board Pi could do through showcases and workshops. One of the more interesting things was this music setup tweeted by exa.foundation:

Other highlights were running Windows 98 on the small unit and turning it into a wrist device, playing Pong on a ScrollBot, and a Pi-powered Robot Arm that anyone can build. The latter is on Kickstarter and has already garnered five times what the developers were originally seeking.

The event was posted as a Twitter Technology moment, which included even more ideas and showed of some of the workshops being held, including an Astro Lab for International Space Station programming, and a couple teaching people how to code.

There have been several generations of the Pi since it launched in 2012, with the smaller WiFi and Bluetooth-enabled Pi Zero W released late last month. The Raspberry Pi 3 Model B is the current mainline unit, which was released in February last year, and sports a Broadcom BCM2837 SoC with a 1.2 GHz 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex-A53 processor, with 512 KB shared L2 cache. The boards sell for anywhere between $5 and $35.

Happy birthday, Pi! Have some cake.

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