Wolfram Computation Meets Knowledge

Raspberry Pi

Education & Academic

A Smart Programming Language for a Smart Cities Hackathon

On Friday, February 20, I had the pleasure of giving a talk to a group of young and smart individuals enlisted to represent Barcelona in the Global Urban Datafest. For this hackathon, the organizers offered one Raspberry Pi platform per team and a variety of sensors to capture physical parameters. Their list of suggested project topics included data acquisition and actuation, monitoring and management, security transport and mobility, the environment, and more. The event lasted three days and was locally organized by Anna Calveras and Josep Paradells with the help of Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona's City Council, iCity Project, Urbiotica, IBM, and Wolfram Research.
Computation & Analysis

Build Your Own Weather Station in a Snap with the Wolfram Cloud!

Recently Stephen Wolfram announced the Wolfram Data Drop, which is a great new tool to upload any type of data from any type of device. I'll show how you can use the Wolfram Data Drop with a weather station you build using some basic hardware and a few lines of code. Once completed, your device will take temperature measurements every second for 60 seconds, and upload their average value to the Wolfram Data Drop every minute. This will give you 60 data points per hour and 1,440 data points per day. With this data you can use Wolfram Programming Cloud to understand how the temperature changes over time. You can find the exact times in a given day when the temperature was the highest or lowest, when the temperature changed the fastest, and maybe even use the data to make predictions! Can you beat your local weather station and make a prediction that is better?
Education & Academic

Serial Interface Control of Astronomical Telescopes

As an amateur astronomer, I'm always interested in ways to use Mathematica in my hobby. In earlier blog posts, I've written about how Mathematica can be used to process and improve images taken of planets and nebulae. However, I'd like to be able to control my astronomical hardware directly with the Wolfram Language. In particular, I've been curious about using the Wolfram Language as a way to drive my telescope mount, for the purpose of automating an observing session. There is precedent for this because some amateurs use their computerized telescopes to hunt down transient phenomena like supernovas. Software already exists for performing many of the tasks that astronomers engage in—locating objects, managing data, and performing image processing. However, it would be quite cool to automate all the different tasks associated with an observing session from one notebook. Mathematica is highly useful because it can perform many of these operations in a unified manner. For example, Mathematica incorporates a vast amount of useful astronomical data, including the celestial coordinates of hundreds of thousands of stars, nebula, galaxies, asteroids, and planets. In addition to this, Mathematica's image processing and data handling functionality are extremely useful when processing astronomical data.
Announcements & Events

Wolfram Language and Mathematica Updated for the Raspberry Pi

Earlier this month we released Mathematica 10, a major update to Wolfram's flagship desktop product. It contains over 700 new functions and improvements to just about every part of the system. Today I'm happy to announce an update for Mathematica and the Wolfram Language for the Raspberry Pi that brings those new features to the Raspberry Pi. To get the new version of the Wolfram Language, simply run this command in a terminal on your Raspberry Pi: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wolfram-engine This new version will also be pre-installed in the next release of NOOBS, the easy setup system for the Raspberry Pi.
Education & Academic

Looking Beyond the “Hour of Code”

For many years, Wolfram Research has promoted and supported initiatives that encourage computation, programming, and STEM education, and we are always thrilled when efforts are taken by others to do the same. As sponsors of organizations like Computer-Based Math™, which is working toward building a completely new math curriculum with computer-based computation at its heart, and the Mathematica Summer Camp, where high school students with limited programming experience learn to code using Mathematica, we're probably more acutely aware than most of how important programming is in schools today.
Leading Edge

Putting the Wolfram Language (and Mathematica) on Every Raspberry Pi

Last week I wrote about our large-scale plan to use new technology we’re building to inject sophisticated computation and knowledge into everything. Today I’m pleased to announce a step in that direction: working with the Raspberry Pi Foundation, effective immediately there’s a pilot release of the Wolfram Language—as well as Mathematica—that will soon be bundled […]