Month: August 2020

Joint Exhibition of work by Lani Gregory & Heike Heim

We are delighted to announce the second in our series of exhibitions in the SG ArtShop.

Exhibition at the SG ArtShop.

After all the Covid-19 disruption, we are delighted to be able to continue our series of exhibitions at the SG Artshop with a joint show of new work by Sligo based artists Lani Gregory and Heike Heim.

Lani’s Art has a fun take on her love of all things “by the Sea”. She paints in watercolours & acrylics, enjoying both mediums for their different qualities. Colour is an important part of Lani’s work. If her art can uplift then she’s a happy camper. See more at www.love-lanis-art.com

Heike likes to paint most days, reflecting back on daily walks and places she has been,letting her memory guide her intuitively through a painting. Abstraction of the Landscape is an objective.

‘I think looking closer or looking into a distance the shapes and colours repeat themselves,there is a rhythm that connects’

See more at www.heikeheimartdesign.com

The SG Artshop supplies a range of high quality art and craft materials to local artists, both professional and recreational.We are open 6 days a week and are delighted to welcome you to this show of work by Lani & Heike.

See our ranges of acrylic paints, oil paints and watercolour paints.

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Breakout Boards-what are they and how are they used?

Elecfreaks Breakout board

In the upcoming “Computer Science for Leaving Certificate” textbook by Brett A. Becker and Keith Quille (published by Goldenkey Publishing), Chapter 2 is a comprehensive dive into the wonderful world of programming with the BBC Microbit .

The Elecfreaks Breakout board is mentioned as a useful component to have at hand so today we thought we would take a look at what a breakout board is and how it can be used.

Anyone that has any experience of using the BBC micro:bit knows how much is packed into that small 43 mm × 52 mm frame. There’s USB and buttons, LED’s and an accelerometer, compass, radio and bluetooth. All in all it’s very feature rich. To access most of these features there’s a strip of pins at the bottom. And therein lies the problem-when you start accessing those pins using crocodile clips and wires, it all can get a little crowded down there.micro:bit close-up

Making it easier

To make it easier to work with the Micro:bit, there are a couple of products that make the pins more easily accessible. The first is to use an edge connector breakout board which can make the pins available as row of pin headers and this provides an easy way of connecting circuits using jumper wires. microbit edge connector

Additional features

The other way of doing it is to use a breakout board such as the Elecfreaks Breakout board pictured above.This board offers several advantages over the edge connector board as it allows you to switch the voltage of some I/O serial ports to be 5V rather than the standard 3.3V that the micro:bit uses.This is really handy, as with this function, we can extend the usage of 5V electronic modules and, by sliding a switch only, we can make it compatible with 5V serial port communication devices.

Elecfreaks Breakout board allowing easy connection

You can order the Edge Connector Breakout Board and the Elecfreaks Breakout Board will be available shortly.