Southend Council's Pepper Robot

We were very excited to see that Southend Borough Council bought a £17,000 Pepper Robot to kickstart innovation in social care and inspire people to learn coding and robotics.

We met Pepper and learned to code Pepper at the Southend “Smart City” Raspberry Jam on Sunday 3rd March 2019.

 

 

That aligns closely with the aims of Southend Tech and the Southend Raspberry Jam and we put the word out :

Pepper can be coded in Python, the main language we code the Raspberry Pi, Microbit, robots, artificial intelligence and cloud computing services.
The operating system is Linux as used on the Raspberry Pi.

11,000 impressions, 30 retweets, 39 favs and 10 replies later we decided to hold a “Learn to Code Pepper” workshop at the Southend Makerspace.

Pepper uses a simple drag and drop interface called Choreograph where the underlying Python can be seen and edited. This also shows how to use the Python api standalone.

 

 

 

 

We showed how to program Pepper the robot at the wellbeing@GaronPark – as well as the usual Raspberry Pi, Microbit (which you can borrow from Southend Libraries), Cambridge Raspberry Jam robot kits etc.

 

Pepper uses motors, camera, artificial intelligence vision / voice recognition, RGB lights and sensors.

The Raspberry Pi can be coded using the Google #AIY voice and vision Raspberry Pi kits, cameras, Neopixels, sensors and cloud computing artificial from Google, IBM, Amazon, Microsoft and many others.

Here’s a cute Raspberry Pi robot on its way to Southend Raspberry Jam.

 

Perhaps you could think of an idea to use Pepper, which could also be implemented on a Raspberry Pi.
We held the Southend Hackathon Dementia Challenge to invent solutions to social care issues.

 





More details on Southend Tech here.

In 2024, we ran a Hackathon for Social Impact as part of Basildon Creative Tech Festival.
The hackathon follows our Essex County Council Challenge Dementia Hackathon and Southend Smart City Raspberry Jam following our coding ofSouthend Council's Pepper Robot.


If you are interested in learning more about tech, collaborating on projects, learning about careers and technologies, we would love to meet you at our online Southend Coding Meetups and in person Southend Tech Meetups.


Southend Tech Meetup (over 18s)
Every 3rd Thursday of the month, 7pm – 10pm
The Board Game Hut, just off Southend High Street (£6 on entry to the shop)
More details here.

Southend Coding Meetup - online (over 18s)
Mondays, 7pm-9pm
More details here.



Here is a list of Southend web designers, SEO, PPC, marketing companies who can help you with web development, seo and digital marketing and Basildon web design, SEO, marketing leads,PPC companies and Chelmsford SEO, web designers, digital marketing companies and Web design, PPC, SEO companies in Colchester.

Essex Steamettes

Contact us here if you wish to get involved in hackathons locally.