A very rewarding thing about designing affordable hardware is watching young makers grow up with it, sometimes taking their interest in computing to university and beyond. We’ve seen kids who began playing around with Raspberry Pi go on to use our devices in their professional lives — in fact, that’s how a couple of our own engineers started out. In issue 149 of The MagPi, we spoke to the three siblings behind the GurgleApps YouTube channel. They’ve been sharing STEM projects for ten years now.

We’ve been covering projects from the team of siblings who make up GurgleApps for a long time — most recently their Colour Word Clock (image below) — and they themselves have been using a Raspberry Pi since the year it came out. In fact, it helped turn them into the makers they are today.

“Making became a part of our lives largely due to the influence of our parents, who filled our home with electronics, science, and coding projects,” the GurgleApps trio tell us. “Funnily enough, we weren’t hooked immediately — we had all this amazing equipment and knowledge at home, but took it for granted. The real spark came when Caleb received his first Raspberry Pi in 2012. Our dad playfully ‘forgot’ to tell us about the startx command, so we spent the first month working solely in the terminal, using simple commands like top and programming in Vi (a text editor) to create quiz and adventure games — without realising there was a graphical interface! It was rather frustrating for us at the time, but as our dad reminded us, it was nothing compared to his old ZX Spectrum.”

How did you start making videos together?

We started making videos together somewhat accidentally in 2015. It all kicked off with a prank on our dad where we used a Raspberry Pi to SSH into his computer and close the app he was working on. Amélie demonstrated the prank using simple shell commands, while Caleb handled the filming. Since we were too young for social media, we posted the video on our parents’ account. Unexpectedly, it went viral, gathering 1.4 million views! The overwhelming support inspired us to create more content, leading to the birth of our channel, GurgleApps.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, we noticed that many students — including us — were missing out on hands-on science experiments. We started recreating school physics experiments at home and sharing tutorials on our channel. This allowed others to keep learning and exploring STEM subjects despite the circumstances. We’re dedicated to making STEM education accessible and fun for everyone.

What was your first group maker project?

Our first significant group project was creating the Pico Piano (watch below). We built it using a Raspberry Pi Pico microcontroller and designed our own circuit board right at home. To make the circuit board, we used a DIY method: drawing the circuit design on a copper board with Sharpies and then etching it using ferric chloride. This hands-on process was both challenging and exciting, as it combined electronics, coding, and a bit of chemistry.

How has the channel affected your lives?

Running our YouTube channel has taught us a wide range of skills — from presenting and video editing to live-streaming and valuable maker and business skills. Live streaming helped us handle mistakes on the fly and build confidence. We’ve also been guests on podcasts and other live streams, which allowed us to meet lots of fun and interesting people in the maker community.

Our STEM knowledge has deepened significantly. Supportive viewers often share their expertise; for example, one viewer spent hours teaching us about PCB manufacturing, and another pointed out an inaccuracy in our light gate calculations, helping us learn and improve.

What’s your favourite thing you’ve made together?

Our favourite project we’ve made together is definitely the Word Clock! It’s special to us because it was inspired by our very first word clock project with a tiny 8×8 display over ten years ago. We’ve evolved it into a kit that you can now buy, and we’ve made everything open source — even the 3D print files for the case are available. We spent months perfecting it and putting everything we’ve learned into making it something we’re really proud of. What’s even more exciting is seeing people hack it to do things we never dreamed of. Watching others take our creation, build upon it, and share their own versions has been incredibly rewarding. We’ve recently updated our custom-made RGB LED matrix display — a key component of our word clock — and hopefully it will be ready for purchase from our shop very soon!

To see more of the trio’s projects and tutorials, subscribe to GurgleApps on YouTube.

The MagPi #150 out NOW!

You can grab the latest issue right now from Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Asda, WHSmith, and other newsagents, including the Raspberry Pi Store in Cambridge. It’s also available at our online store, which ships around the world. You can also get it via our app on Android or iOS.

You can also subscribe to the print version of The MagPi. Not only do we deliver it globally, but people who sign up to the six- or twelve-month print subscription get a FREE Raspberry Pi Pico W!

The post Word clocks, SSH pranks, and circuit design: YouTubers grow up with Raspberry Pi appeared first on Raspberry Pi.

Sometimes you need to illustrate graphically what words cannot convey. And with a digital whiteboard tool, you don’t need drawing or design skills to do that. Read on to discover Nextcloud Whiteboard, a brand new app among Nextcloud’s collaborative tools launched with Nextcloud Hub 9.

Nextcloud Whiteboard, an online digital whiteboard

Digital whiteboards, just like their analogue predecessors, are useful in many settings from a classroom to a busy team meeting. For instance, you can use a whiteboard during a brainstorming session to sketch, map out strategies, or visualize workflows. Or assist your project planning by outlining project timelines, assigning tasks, and tracking progress. Whiteboards are also essential to online teaching and training, allowing educators to make lessons more engaging and dynamic by providing a space to interact, annotate, and visualize concepts together.

With Nextcloud Whiteboard, you can do all of that within your own secure environment and while enjoying seamless integration in your file system and video conferencing tools.

Nextcloud Whiteboard is a collaborative whiteboard tool featuring hand-drawn style that is based on Excalidraw app. It lets you enjoy lots of editing features and support for images, web embeds, shapes and other objects. You can easily save and share entire whiteboards and separate sketches to share ideas or invite your team to work together. Nextcloud Whiteboard is a part of our Nextcloud Office bundle that features various universal collaborative tools for editing and data processing in Nextcloud Hub.

Infinite canvas and a variety of instruments

Nextcloud Whiteboard has unlimited canvas, meaning that you can create as many sketches, schemes and illustrations as you need, all in one file. You can invite dozens of users to collaborate with you and let them enjoy their own space on the whiteboard, or move from one task to another without having to wipe clean your valuable ideas.

Many elements, including simple lines, shapes and texts, are designed to resemble hand drawings, adding a relaxed mood to your whiteboards and letting you create freely without worrying about perfection. What matters is your ideas and an ability to express them, and Nextcloud Whiteboard has plenty of tools to make that possible.

Watch a free Nextcloud Whiteboard webinar

On October 17, we are hosting a webinar “Nextcloud Whiteboard: Improve team collaboration for better results”. Join the webinar to learn about use cases, watch a live demo and ask any questions about Nextcloud Whiteboard.

Register

Create a digital whiteboard from Nextcloud Files

Where do we start? No need to look for the Nextcloud Whiteboard icon on your toolbar — it opens automatically when you create or open a whiteboard file. To start using Nextcloud Whiteboard from your file system, you just need to create a new whiteboard file from your “+” menu.

Launch a whiteboard in Nextcloud Talk

Want to work in a whiteboard during a Nextcloud Talk call? You don’t need to go looking for a blank file — just create it right from the attachment menu of the chat. As usual, you can pick one of the available templates to save time coming up with the structure. Once created, the new whiteboard appears in the chat, accessible to all participants.

Host engaging, interactive meetings

We introduced Nextcloud Whiteboard integration features in Nextcloud Talk to enable a variety of new ways to use our video conferencing platform. For example, you can turn your meeting into a virtual classroom or organize an interactive online workshop. Thanks to infinite canvas space, you can use one whiteboard for many different tasks, no matter the scale and number of collaborators.

When you open or create a whiteboard file from the attachment menu, Nextcloud Whiteboard will open the canvas in front of you, without showing it to other participants in your video stream. To join you in editing, they need to click on the whiteboard file inside the conversation and activate their own editor. Now you can start collaborating in real time right inside your group chat, or present your digital whiteboard to others live (make sure to try the Laser Pointer tool!).

Create free drawings

You can draw anything with a hand drawing tool and apply settings like line color, automatic background fill type and color for drawn objects, opacity, and stroke width. The brush is dynamic: it reacts to your motions and drawing speed as you draw, making it look and feel like a real hand drawing!

Build and customize shapes

To save time drawing your schemes and sketches, you can use one of the available shape presets: rectangle, diamond and circle. Once created you can adjust the shape’s appearance by configuring its settings in the left panel.

You can also save shapes and other objects to your personal library to reuse them later, or add shapes created by other users to Nextcloud Whiteboard from Excalidraw library.

Draw schemes with lines and arrows

Arrows and lines in Nextcloud Whiteboard give you a lot of freedom. You can stick them to other objects to preserve scheme structure no matter how you change their positions, bind them freely and as many times as you wish, and even add labels.

You can create a straight arrow or line quickly by pressing your cursor and simply dragging the arrow’s end. To create a complex, bound arrow or line, click on the starting point once to begin drawing, and then lead your line by clicking on each location where you want it to bind. If you hover it near an object while drawing, you can stick it to that object in the desired place.

Perform various actions with objects and lines

You can perform various actions with drawn objects and lines. For example, adjust multiple stroke and shape settings, change color, duplicate them, add hyperlinks, and more. You can also click on an object to rotate, resize and reshape it the way you want to, and even move the pivot points of your lines.

Once your digital whiteboard grows complex, rearranging your objects and sketches might become difficult (and messy!). But Frame tool has got you covered — you can enable it from the right menu of the top toolbar and group any objects you desire in a frame to perform bulk actions with ease.

Type and format texts

Using text tool, you can add any texts to your whiteboards. If you don’t like the default hand-drawn look of the font, you can change the font family to Normal or Code. You can also change the text alignment and opacity and, of course, it’s color. Don’t worry if you made a typo — texts stay editable after saving.

Embed pictures and videos

Using image tool, upload an image or simply drag and image file onto the whiteboard to add it to your canvas. You can also add videos and other web objects using the Web Embed tool from the rightmost drop-down menu of the toolbar.

Save and share your digital whiteboard

You can quickly export your whiteboards and even separate objects as JPG or SVG images to share, embed, print or upload them anywhere you want. Just click the small menu icon on your left and export your content as an image with desired display settings. You can also simply copy it co clipboard to quickly share it in an email or chat without downloading.

You can share your whiteboards in Nextcloud Hub to team members or external collaborators to invite them for collaboration or demonstrate your ideas, just like you share any other files. This is possible with the sidebar share menu where you can choose recipients, secure your link with passwords, set expiry date and apply other protection settings, instantly share the file via email, and much more.

Be connected with Nextcloud Hub 9!

Nextcloud Whiteboard is only one of the exciting new apps and features released together with Nextcloud Hub 9. With the latest update, Nextcloud Hub lets you stay connected like never before
— with new automation features, federated calls, new tools in Nextcloud Assistant, improved Nexcloud Mail and Nextcloud Calendar, and much more.

Note: Nextcloud Whiteboard is a part of the Ultimate tier of Nextcloud Enterprise. Contact us to get a quote. Learn more about Nextcloud Enterprise on the dedicated page.

New to Nextcloud? There’s no better time to try it out! Get control over your data today with the most secure open-source collaboration platform.

Get Nextcloud Hub 9

Download and install Nextcloud Hub 9 here!

Download

The post Collaborate on digital whiteboards online with Nextcloud Whiteboard appeared first on Nextcloud.