Hello!
I have known about Raspberry Pis for a while but never really looked into them. Then my one of my brothers sent me one as a gift… which I promptly tasked with running Octoprint on my 3D printer for about 6 months and again didn’t think much about it. Then I heard about OpenMediaVault and Plex being run on a Pi, and re-purposed it. On a work trip to St. Louis I stopped in at Micro Center and picked up what I thought would be a replacement for my Octoprint Pi 3B+ but then I gave it to my eldest daughter who expressed an interest in coding (Minecraft of course). I went back to St. Louis again to finish up my work, and bought another, but it didn’t make it to my printer… that will have to wait, because I found SonicPi (yes, I know about the windows version, but somehow I don’t care).
I have had scattered coding experience through my life. Back in the late 70’s in grade school I learned a bit of Basic on the Commodore PET, and of course had a C64 several years later. I have also coughed up some (probably really ugly) visual basic code within Excel in order to help deal with sample lists and the like for analytical lab instrumentation (LC/MS if you’re in the know).
About ten years ago, I was playing around with some synth etc. freeware, TunaFish I think it was called, and some plug-in synths so I learned (just) a little about ADSR envelopes.
Now after playing around with Sonic-Pi for just under a week, I am really blown away! It’s so easy to make interesting things with it. My daughter was excited to try it out with her Pi as well. If I had something like this when I was a kid, I would have learned much more about programming. It’s so cool to hear what just a little code can do!
-Brad
