...well, 'elegance' might be overdoing it a bit. With a mixture of skill, cunning and brute force (read: a vague plan and a pair of scissors) I have equipped my Raspberry Pi 3 with a 25-pin serial 'port'. Essentially I removed the old 9-pin female connector from the RS232/TTL converter I was using with a 25-pin male connector. This means that all the fiddling about poking wires into serial connectors is no longer necessary, as I can just plug the Comms Link into the Pi for lovely reliable 1200-baud communication :)

Suffice to say this all relies on some slightly dodgy soldering, but I think it's a great improvement on last week's experimental arrangement. The entire device now fits in the palms of two hands!

The Pi-on Organiser (yes that's what I'm going to call it!) can be used to read RSS feeds, by means of a simple Python script. I can also read mail using mailx, though it is a little difficult.

Assuming my soldering survives, I'm going to be demonstrating the Pi-on Organiser as part of Institute of Physics events this Sunday at the WOMAD festival. (Fits in quite nicely with the 'history of electronics' theme of the day!) I'm setting up Python Twitter Tools - a command-line Twitter client - on my Pi 3 so hopefully punters will be able to write and post tweets from the Organiser II over the Comms Link. Whether anyone will find this remotely interesting (pun not intended) is, of course, yet to be seen...

Update about 2 hours later: Twitter client installed & working! Keep an eye on @PsionOnline this Sunday 28th.