Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Play the Piper on Pi Day with Shree Bose”.
My name is tree bose, i’m actually currently in beautiful north carolina in durham. I am currently an fd phd student at duke university, which is why i’m here, but i’m really excited to share something that we’ve been working on at piper, which is a company i co-founded, while i was an undergrad in college at harvard and piper is all about Making technology more accessible and more easy for kids to get started with. We started with the computer kit, the piper computer kit, which is a really fun minecraft, based way to play, games and start building hardware in front of you. But one of the really exciting things that i wanted to actually use this platform to announce is the launch of piper make, which is a new browser-based drag-and-drop coding platform that we’ve designed to correspond with the raspberry pi pico, which is a really powerful microcontroller. That only recently got released from the raspberry pi foundation, and so we’ve created this entire interface around the raspberry pi pico, and so i i would love to just give you a sneak peek at what we’ve created.
So this is make.playpiper.com and basically this site is going to be finalized as of pi day, because we’re big on doing pi related things. But basically, this site is going to have new tutorials that are released every month and those tutorials are going to correspond to hardware that we’re releasing through the monthly makers club. So instead of having to dig through off-the-shelf parts, not really knowing. What’S great like good to use for your kids, this is going to be a monthly kit shipped to your doorstep every month and there’s going to be projects on this platform, which is going to be free for everyone, and those projects are going to be really powerful Things which is exciting because it’s going to correspond to the things that you actually build right in front of you. So if we build like a little traffic light, let’s say in our piper make universe here where we’re dragging and dropping code, we can actually get that to connect with our piper make. This is micro usb to usb right in our computer.
We will have all of the firmware loaded on for all of our users, but for people who maybe aren’t a part of the monthly makers club but have a pico and don’t know how to start building with that. We have actually a way to set up your pico in your browser as well, so this platform is going to be accessible to anybody who wants to get started with their raspberry. Pi pizza will load up code onto your p. We’Ve set this up so that you can actually see if you’re, just looking to get a sense of how drag-and-drop code translates into python. You can look at that down here. You can look at the digital view and get a sense of what the pico’s pins look like, and all of this is basically meant to interface with the hardware in really cool, powerful ways, which is what piper is all about. This is using google broccoli. So all of the drag-and-drop codes that you would use with google blockly, you could do functions.
We have we actually have an extended starter pack, which comes with three different sensors, a temperature sensor, color sensor and an ultrasonic rangefinder. We have all of those things loaded up in here, but yeah google, why we invent the wheel. Google blockly is a fantastic way to get started with coding, and so we just wanted to marry those two worlds to make pico really accessible through using google blockly. And this is the first platform that does that, and so someone who has obviously scratch experience can really come into this environment easily.
Absolutely and we’ve set up these tutorials in a way where we’re really hoping to guide you through the coding, but instead of making a really prescriptive way of doing the code, we want you to actually understand how the circuitry works as well. So you’ll see you’ll see these tutorials we’ve created that are all based on actually understanding the sorts of connections that you’re building, how the circuitry works, and so we feel like it’s a much more engaging way for kids to start building with their hands and understanding how These all connect, we are launching on pi day. You can get a sneak peek right now at make.playpiper.com you’ll see you can also sign up for the monthly makers club, which the first month you sign up. You actually get the pico, plus the lights and the wires and the resistors, and so you can start playing with these initial starter levels right off the bat and then the next month. What i find amazing about this model is the fact that every month we’re going to come out with new tech.
So if there’s a sensor, that’s particularly cool and particularly hot, whether that’s like a moisture sensor that you can stick in your potted plants like we will send that out for that month, along with the tutorial. But what we, what personally, i’m really excited about? Dale you’ve known me for a few years now, but what i’m really excited about is the fact that we are going to have users who create things that we have never thought of what will happen if you put a temperature sensor with the light like that sort Of combination and that sort of innovation is what’s going to lead to the next great thing and that’s exciting. For me, pico is a very powerful device. You mentioned that you’re in bioengineering at duke and people working on devices with arduinos and raspberry pi. So these aren’t just play things. These are things that scale up to real world applications. I think that got me even more excited about being able to work on a product like this. When you’re in a medical environment, i’m an phd student, i see the medical challenges that can be solved with technology, so getting kids started getting them to a point where they understand that these things can be coded and can be used in ways to solve. Really big problems to create the next ventilator for hospitals that are overwhelmed, that sort of thing can change the world. What’S going to be your ongoing role with with piper? That is a great question. I am co-founder of this thing. Yeah still figuring out, ask me again in a few months and it may have changed, but as a co-founder of this thing, i i feel really passionate about driving the vision of the company piper was created to make creating with technology really accessible. It was created to make the kid in rural iowa be able to build the next big thing that can affect his community, and so this is a step closer to that and i’m excited to push out more new initiatives to be able to do that. Sort of thing in the future as well right on, because i think we need to see computers and sensors as creative tools to help us not only solve problems but also just express ourselves in new ways and not just a computer as a consumer device. But it’s something that we get to choose: what to do, what to build, what to make! Thank you so much and thanks for featuring us, we’re really excited about this and we think it’s gon na it’s gon na be a big next thing. .