Mar 292015
 
RasPiO Duino as a Lipo Monitor

I’ve been using lithium polymer (lipo) batteries since 2006, when I nervously shelled out £30 for a 3 cell 1600 mAh 10C HiModel lipo to power my EasyStar RC plane. I also spent about the same on a charger and balancer for it. Thankfully, all these things have come down a lot in price since then. I don’t think I’d expect to pay much more than £10 for an equivalent battery now. Typical lipo batteries for large devices have multiple cells. A lipo cell has a no-load resting voltage of 4.2 V when fully charged […more…]

Mar 092015
 
Pete Lomas Talks to Alex Eames at the Raspberry Pi Birthday Weekend

At the Raspberry Pi 3rd Birthday weekend, I met Pete Lomas for the first time. Pete is a Founding Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation (in his spare time). For his day job, he’s Director of Engineering at Norcott Technologies. Pete has been involved in the Raspberry Pi story since very near the beginning. He designed the original model B & A production PCB. I had a chance to have a chat with him on day 2 of the Raspberry Pi birthday celebrations. If you’re a Pi geek or interested in how it all happened, […more…]

Mar 022015
 
Raspberry Pi Birthday Party Weekend

Well that was a wonderful, but tiring, weekend. Last night I got back from a weekend in Cambridge where 1300 people got together to celebrate all things Raspberry Pi. There were two lecture theatres, two large workshop areas, a large marketplace area and a show-and-tell area. The facilities were perfect, with plenty of space at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. I took part in two discussion panels and gave a short talk on PCB Design for Beginners. I also managed to take in talks by Eben Upton, Dave Honess, Pete Lomas and Dave Akerman and I […more…]