Ok so in addition to losing about 5st (31kg) over the last 6 years RaspberyPi’s have really reignited electronics as a hobby. So for a 6th birthday post I thought I would have a dig around and see what my oldest still ‘working’ project was. I remember I got 2 Pi B early on – one was used for a chicken water heating project and eventually suffering terminal water damage when the enclosure leaked  (to date this is the only Pi of in excess of 30 I have killed). So continuing the hunt I found the news reader Pi I built for my wife based around an article in one of the early Pi magazines. Amazingly it is still working. I plugged it into a monitor just to remember

what the old LX  GUI looked like!

As you can see it’s warning us about Storm Emma.

Going on from the Pi’s  it’s worth recognizing that somewhere down the line I have gained a workable knowledge of :-

• Python
• Arduino’s that oddly I had never used before – thanks to the RasPiO^® Duino for getting me into this.
• BBC microbits

Oh yes and run 3 successful kick-starters.

This year things are a little quiet on maker front mainly because out of a shear madness I have signed up to run the London Marathon, training for which is taking up a lot of time a weekends. The charity I am raising money for is the MS Trust. I picked the MS Trust having heard about the support they gave the mother of a colleague. They are not a big charity, so sponsorship money raised through events like this is really important to them. The Trust focuses on helping people live well with MS, helping them to receive the best possible care and the highest quality information. Over 100,000 people in the UK as diagnosed with MS, which remains the most common cause of neurological disability in young adults. Because diagnosis is usually in their 20s and 30s, the impact on the individual and their family if life changing and life-long.

The link to my Virgin just giving page is https://uk.virginmoneygiving.com/DavidMSaul