Coding With The FUZE

The Raspberry Pi is the powerhouse for many excellent projects. However, one project in particular stands head and shoulders above the rest, the FUZE Project. FUZE is a learning environment for the Raspberry Pi that’s amazingly accessible and gets students, teachers and enthusiasts coding and experimenting with the Raspberry Pi quickly and easily.

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Used in hundreds of schools across the UK, the FUZE is the perfect combination of Pi potential, imagination, engineering and education, all presented in a cleverly designed retro-themed keyboard case. More importantly, the FUZE also comes with its own programming language, FUZE BASIC.

With FUZE BASIC you’re able to create simple routines, games, complex algorithms and even interact with robots and other electronics.

Introducing the FUZE Project

The FUZE Project is a learning environment that’s built around the Raspberry Pi and a custom programming language based on BASIC. The FUZE Workstation is the hardware side of the project, incorporating a Raspberry Pi inside a stunning retrothemed case, complete with a full-sized keyboard, IO board and connectivity. The software side is FUZE BASIC, available for both Windows and as a boot image for Raspberry Pi models 2 and 3.

FUZE

• The FUZE Workstation itself, styled on a BBC Micro Model B from the ‘80s, constructed with a metal body and high quality keyboard complete with programmable red coloured F-keys. Note the holes at the top edges: these are compatible with many popular plastic building blocks and electronic construction kits.
• Inside the FUZE workstation is the beating heart of the project, a Raspberry Pi 3. It’s connected to the FUZE IO board via the 40-pin GPIO pins with a ribbon cable, with the other connections branching from it: HDMI, power, SD Card and USB. The USB ports have been routed to a powered USB hub, attached to the rear of the workstation, providing the user with four USB ports accessible through the rear IO back plate; there’s an Ethernet port too.
• The Rear IO back plate is where you plug in your power, connection to a monitor, mouse, SD card, audio and any USB devices you want to include. From left to right, across the backplate, there’s an on/off switch, a power port, a bank of four USB ports, the Ethernet port, SD card slot and HDMI port. You can remove the four corner screws of the backplate to gain access to the Raspberry Pi, USB hub and cables inside the workstation if needed.
• The FUZE IO board, located in the wide slot at the top of the workstation, is the connection to extended hardware. With it you can connect, program and use sensors, LEDs, robotics and all manner of amazing electronic projects.

You also receive an electronics kit as part of the FUZE workstation, to help you get started on some of the projects the FUZE is designed to support. Within the kit you can find 24 coloured LEDs, 1 seven-segment LED, 1 light dependant resistor, 8 micro switches, 30 mixed specification resistors, 20 jumper cables and 60 jumper wires.

Electronic component kit fuze

Complimenting the electronics project kit, the FUZE team also bundles an 840-socket solderless breadboard which you can use to wire up interesting projects and use FUZE BASIC together with the Raspberry Pi and the FUZE IO board to control the components from the electronics kit. In case you’re wondering why it’s called a breadboard, it’s because in the early days of electronics users would use a bread board for the base of their projects.

Alongside the other components with the FUZE workstation, you also get either a wired USB or wireless (batteries are included if necessary) mouse and ‘FUZE’ logo mouse mat.

The kit comes with two ring-bound books containing project ideas for the electronics kit and a programmer’s reference guide for FUZE BASIC. If you’ve purchased the FUZE kit, then it’s certainly worth your while reading through this book and familiarising yourself with how everything works.

Depending on which FUZE workstation kit you’ve purchased, you could also have a robot arm that requires building, along with four D-sized batteries, a BBC micro:bit or even a Capacitive Touch kit.

Needless to say, there’s plenty of project potential with the FUZE.

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