Over the last few weeks I have seen my Philip age 12 really engage for the first time in a digital making project and see it through to completion.
Philip is a year 7 student from Birmingham, my son and an all-round really great kid!
Quite a few people have asked me which bits I did and which bits were his. Essentially I paid for the components and took him to the marker space to laser cut the case and the rest is his!
Over the six weeks school holidays Philip designed, built and programmed a Raspberry Pi powered Pokedex. A Pokedex is an electronic device for storing your Pokemon information in.
His project has two main functions.
– A directory of over 200 Pokemon photos which you recall by typing in their unique Pokemon number.
– A Pokemon Go style function which takes a photo with the Pi camera and then overlays a Pikachu with a transparent background.
The key components used in the construction:
– Raspberry Pi model A+
– An old car reversing monitor for the main display (composite output from the Pi)
– A Nokia 5110 phone screen for additional information
– A 4×4 membrane keypad
– A Raspberry Pi camera
The final project can be found here https://github.com/Flye001/Pokedex
The main code is multi10.py you will also need the libraries for the Nokia display and the keypad. You will also need to set the video output to composite.
Philip did a fantastic job of speaking about his Pokedex at the Cambridge Raspberry Jam in September 2016. He is such a shy boy so I was very proud to hear him speak.
Here is a video of Philip speaking about this project.