I’m going to combine days 4 and 5 into one final blog post and video because I want to get it finished and out there. You can find day 1 here, day 2 here and day 3 here. I’m also publishing the code today in a slightly less documented/polished state than I usually do. But it works pretty well. I’ve been using these lights on my bike since Mid September (~6 weeks at the time of posting) and I’m really pleased with them. On the road, cars treat me like another car because I am […more…]
Today we’ll take a closer look at the PiJuice and how to use it. We’ll also do a bit of testing of the PiJuice HAT and the 6W/40W solar panels. This carries on from the previous post where I had an initial look at the PiJuice. It’s mostly a video review, but there will be some extra information here in the blog. Calculations Before running the testing I did some calculations to predict how long the PiJuice battery might last. The BP7X battery has 1820 mAh and a nominal 3.7V. Multiplying these gives 6734 mWh […more…]
I’ve just received an early production PiJuice and two solar panels from Pi-Supply. It’s a loaner as there aren’t many of them in existence at the moment. In this video I take a first look at them and give my perspective on how/why it came to be so late. The DIP switch is to change the charge profile, not the i2c address as I said in the video. It all looks very nice so far. I will start “playing” with it today. I’ve got this to play with for a few more days. I’ll publish […more…]
A few months ago I thought it would be cool to use some of my RasPiO InsPiRing LEDs to make some indicators (turn signals) for my bicycle. But then I got busy completing and shipping the InsPiRing KickStarter, and then went away for the summer. But just as I was coming back, Lorraine Underwood tweeted about her High Visibility Jacket which reminded me of the idea. Obviously I wanted to do it my way and install something permanently on the bike with wireless control. Also I was due to purchase a new bike, which everyone […more…]
Last week I had a bit of a scare. Having tested all 100 of the trial batch of RasPiO InsPiRing straight-8 boards and found 100/100 working perfectly, I issued an update to let the KickStarter backers know. Testing was done with a DigiSpark, which is based on an ATtiny microcontroller. It’s the same device I sent to the manufacturers for their QC testing because it is small, cheap, pretty bullet-proof and I would not have to explain to them how to use a Pi (which would also need a screen, keyboard, mouse etc. thus making […more…]
I’ve been messing about with the Pi Zero W and one of my RasPiO InsPiRing boards to make a colourful clock that keeps accurate time using NTP (Network Time Protocol). Because the Zero W has WiFi onboard, it’s perfect for things like this. It’s quite a visual thing, so I made a video about it… Here’s the Code If you want a walk-through of the code, I made a little walk-through video of it, but decided to keep that separate because not everybody would want that level of detail. You can find that after the […more…]
It’s become traditional for me to do power measurements of any new Pi and update my chart. People have even started asking me about it on launch days (the cheek of it)… @DavidGlaude No. Not yet. Patience. That's usually a day 2 thing :) — RasPi.TV (@RasPiTV) February 28, 2017 Needless to say I have done some power measurements in my Zero W testing and here are the results. Essentially, the Pi Zero W seems to require 20 mA more than the no-wifi Zero. This is almost certainly due to the new radio chip. Methodology […more…]
Raspberry Pi launches the Pi Zero W today – on the 5th anniversary of the original Pi1 launch. The Zero W sports the same WiFi and Bluetooth chip as the Pi3B. It costs $10 plus shipping and local taxes. Since the Pi Zero release in November 2015, people have been conjuring up ingenious ways of getting it online, such as; ethernet via SPI; soldering a WiFi USB dongle to the back; kickstarter projects for ethernet add-ons; USB hubs providing extra ports; even an IoT pHAT It was clear that people could find a lot of […more…]
I have received a fairly enormous selection of Raspberry Pi audio cards from four suppliers (Pimoroni, IQaudIO, HiFiBerry and JustBoom). It’s a bewildering array of DACs and AMPs, which allow you to turn your Pi into a HiFi system capable of playing sound files up to 32-bit 384 kHz, in theory. In reality 24-bit audio is about the highest quality you can buy and it’s questionable whether human ears can resolve any higher anyway. Anyway – I’m not planning to turn into a raving audiophile (anyone seen my gold speaker leads?) so here’s the stuff […more…]
If you’ve been hanging around the RasPi.TV blog for a while you’ll have heard of the RasPiO Portsplus board. It’s a little PCB with the Pi’s GPIO port numbers on that you can use to avoid counting pins when wiring up your GPIO projects. A few months ago I was visiting Pi Towers. Ben Nuttall mentioned that they use the Portsplus at Picademy, but sometimes people put them on the wrong way up and it causes confusion. The original Portsplus has GPIO port numbers one one side and pin numbers on the other side. It […more…]