Author: Jon

Parents – Your Scout Group Needs You!

Post author By Jon
Post date March 10, 2014

Your Scout Group

Our Scout Group belongs to the Baden-Powell Scouts Association. The association and all groups are entirely run by volunteers from top to bottom. Each group owns its own assets and our group specifically is run by the parents of children in the group or who people who have had children in our group. There is no large commercial driven organisation and advertising mechanism behind us. Our group is what you want to make it. The more effort, support and participation you are willing to contribute, the more there will be available for your children and those who follow.

Please do complete the Gift aid form if you are able.

Please do consider helping with fund raising.

Please do help running sections if that is something you will enjoy.

Please do volunteer to help with activities.

Feel welcome to accompany your child if ever necessary or desirable.

Pi Night

Post author By Jon
Post date January 9, 2014

Scouting is about trying new things, whether that is outdoors or indoors. This week we looked at the Raspberry Pi which is a computer about the size of a credit card. It was released a couple of years ago and has taken the world by storm since, with people all over the world making: robots, web servers, games machines, home cinema systems and even a super computer!

The Raspberry Pi was designed to boost the numbers of students studying computing, sadly, a lot of computing has disappeared from our educational system, these days programming and understanding computer architecture has completely disappeared from the Secondary education system and can only be found in AS-level or above–it has been replaced with learning about how to use software, not writing it!

At Scouts, we wanted to introduce the Raspberry Pi and let the Scouts get hands on with it. We are very fortunate as the Raspberry Pi foundation kindly supported us by donating a Pi for us to use. Another leader also bought their own Pi so we could split the Scouts into two groups and rotate them halfway through the evening.

We wanted to accomplish three things: first, to get the Scouts to understand the history of the Pi and the value it stands for; second, to introduce basic programming techniques in both Scratch and Python; third, to get the Scouts to use the GPIO ports to interface with the world and understand event driven programming.

To do this we split them into two groups as follows:

Pi Night The first group was introduced to Scratch, a fantastic programming language that uses coloured blocks as syntax. Each of the blocks is shaped differently depending on what order it can be used and where it can be placed. This allowed the Scouts (with very little tutoring) to start designing a program. They started by moving the character on screen around, getting it to ask questions and respond to certain answers.

Pi Night The second group was taught the basics of Python and how it can be used to control the GPIO ports and respond to events. They created several straight forward programs, one was an alarm system for their house or bedroom. It took an input from a switch (which could be a pressure switch or reed switch in real life), it then processed this signal and sounded the alarm. To stop the intruder from simply stopping the program to silence the alarm, the Scouts cleverly toggled the alarm so even if the Python script was stopped, the alarm would carry on sounding!

The evening was a great success and stood the Seniors on good ground to accomplish their Weather Balloon project next year. The Scouts picked up simple programming very quickly and soon made their own extensions to exercises we set them! This just proves that the Raspberry Pi aim of attracting young people into computing by creating a simple and straightforward platform they can learn on has been accomplished.

Not wishing to sound old but I am sure many adults reading this will remember the very first personal computers in the 1980s which only had a form of BASIC loaded on them. Writing in BASIC was not straightforward and took a long time to get excellent results. The Raspberry Pi on the other hand, accomplishes results with ease and makes the process fun – even for adults!

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Bonfire Night 2013

Post author By Jon
Post date November 5, 2013

Pictures from our annual Bonfire Night, as usual there were fireworks, hot dogs and hot drinks!

A special thank you goes to one of our leaders for videoing the event:

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Project Skyship

Post author By Jon
Post date June 29, 2013

Aims

The Senior Scouts have the following aims that they wish to accomplish with this project:

Construct a holder for the payload
Construct a parachute for landing
Take pictures of Near Space
Take temperature measurements
Communicate GPS position to the ground during flight
Record flight

The first part the Scouts need to consider is the payload and what electronics they wish to use inside.

The Electronics

When we are thinking of ways to tackle this challenge we first need to have a clear idea of what the electronics in the payload needs to accomplish:

Transmit to base station the GPS co-ordinates of payload during flight
Take temperature measurements both internally and externally of the payload
Trigger a set of cameras to take pictures during the flight

Of course, this is a very generalised picture of what needs to accomplished, it is always best to stay away from the technical details at the early stage of planning – failure to do so will complicate the design specification and we will start chasing our tails, so to speak.

We believe there are two main options open to us, both have a certain degree of overlap so if one doesn’t work out it would not be too difficult to change late in the day. The two choices are: use a micro-controller such as PICAXE to control the onboard systems and design all hardware and software, or go for the Raspberry Pi and write our own software with a small amount of adapting for hardware.

Using Raspberry Pi

The Pi allows more possibilities for processing and with their new camera board being released in April it would allow the cameras to be more compact and ‘plug-and-play’ style connection. It also has onboard memory which could be utilized as a buffer to write all the in-flight data into a flat file.

The block diagram for the Pi would be as follows:

The first point to consider is that, by making our own board and design the package is completely bespoke, meaning that it should be as efficient as could be. By doing this, however, we sacrifice time. To design, test, build and test a lot more, a completely bespoke system would take a huge amount of time.

Therefore, we shall continue with the Pi.

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Geo-caching, Hasting Wolf Cub Pack

Post author By Jon
Post date March 23, 2013

It was a tad cold, but a great day was had by all!

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The Rock – Chudleigh 2013

Post author By Jon
Post date February 22, 2013

Our Scouts and Senior Scouts spent a weekend Caving, Tree walking, Abseiling and Rock Climbing at The Rock Centre, Chudleigh.

Our highlight was our GSM, Richard, demonstrating the tree walk skateboard:

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Scout Halloween Salt Dough

Post author By Jon
Post date February 10, 2013

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Scout Outings 2012

Post author By Jon
Post date December 14, 2012

Camp Quantock – Summer Camp 2012

Date: 28th July to 5th August 2012

This year we were camping in Somerset.

Clay Pigeon Shoot

Date: 7th June 2012

Our Scouts and Senior Scouts were invited to take a day shooting clays in the Kent farmland by kind arrangement for our Group by the West Kent Shooting School. We did this some years ago and it was an excellent day out.

Shooting pictures to follow!

“Tom Sawyer & Huck Finn” Bivvi Camp

Date: 24th & 25th March 2012

Consisted of building and sleeping under a large Bivvi, as well as some backwoods cooking instruction.

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Remembrance 2012

Post author By Jon
Post date November 12, 2012

“At the going down of the Sun and in the morning, We will remember them.“

Every year, a local group gets asked to arrange and lead the local Remembrance day parade service. Pioneer Scout Troop and Mountford Troop were asked to lead this year’s service at St Andrew’s Church, Frimley. It has been quite a few years since we were last asked to lead the local service and we wanted to focus on a slightly different view of Remembrance.

At the heart of our service was The Royal British Legion, the charity that makes and distributes the Poppies for the Poppy Appeal every year, as well as being our national symbol for Remembrance. We decided we should use this year’s service to highlight their work and heighten awareness of this incredibly hardworking charity.

Before we could write a service about the charity, we wanted to make sure we understood their work fully and allow us to highlight some of the lesser known facts. After contacting them about the service they arranged for them to spend an evening with the Scouts, this would include a representative to talk about how the charity operates today as well as a veteran that has been helped by them. Unfortunately, due to time restraints we had to delay this visit until after our service. However, the charity sent us a full information pack about them and were happy to answer any questions we had at any time.

During our first discussion about the service we wanted the other groups attending to take part, as the charity we were discussing is very active then we thought we should at least draw a parallel in the way we conducted our service!

Therefore, we designed a giant Poppy!

Remebrance 2012

Above was our Poppy, the defining red Poppy leaves have been detached. On the back of each Poppy leaf we wrote two lines of the poem In Flander’s Field.
Our idea behind this was that we handed these out to members of the Scouting congregation to bring up and read during the service. After reading their part of the poem they could then attach their leaf to the giant Poppy that would be placed in front of the choir stands.

Remembrance 2012 This was our complete Poppy pictured at the front of the choir stands. As planned, each leaf was attached during the service by a member of the congregation after reading out the small passage on the back.