Apr 152016
 
Central Heating Furnace Monitoring and Control with RasPiO Duino and Raspberry Pi

We went to Poland for the Easter holiday. When we got there the house was really cold (6°C), having been vacant for several months. We’ve got a fairly substantial solid-fuel furnace in the basement and a large room full of coal to burn. We have a gas boiler too, but we want to get rid of the coal to repurpose the space it occupies. Burning it is the most logical solution, but it involves some work. But I’ve tried to make it a bit more fun. The furnace is an interesting beast. It’s taken me […more…]

Oct 292015
 
RasPiO Duino Videos Complete

Last Thursday I decided I needed to do the “Analog Inputs Video” for RasPiO® Duino. All the other basic functionality was well covered in the previous assembly/setup/tutorial videos. There’s also the 47 page user guide (FREE Download – good intro to Arduino programming) and a GitHub repository with the example sketches in. But I wanted to complete the basic set of videos, so at midday I started planning. I filmed in the afternoon and cut the video in the evening. At about 2230 I was done, so I started uploading it to YouTube (~2.4 Gigabytes […more…]

Jun 062015
 
RasPiO Duino Goes On General Sale With Free Arduino Programming eBook

Having completed the KickStarter fulfilment a long way ahead of schedule, we’re now ready to launch RasPiO® Duino on general sale. We thought it would be nice to launch it officially today at the Cambridge Jam. What Is A RasPiO® Duino? RasPiO® Duino is a small plug-on board for Raspberry Pi. It has similar functionality to an Arduino Uno, but is fully programmable from the Raspberry Pi. Once programmed, it can be removed from the Pi and used on its own. If you’re interested in the full product description you can find that here. Free […more…]

May 182015
 
Twitter-controlled RasPiO Duino based Pan and Tilt, Tweeting, DropBoxing, Raspberry Pi Security Camera

Around about this time three years ago, I bought and installed five EasyN pan-and-tilt ip cameras to keep an eye on various viewpoints of our houses in the UK and Poland. I think they were about £45 each on Amazon. They’re not too hard to set up and they work tolerably well. The main downside is that their resolution is only 640 x 480 pixels, which is not enough to read a car numberplate from across the street. It’s fairly poor resolution, but you can see something. The colours are a bit washed out too […more…]

Apr 212015
 
RasPi.TV, RasPiO Duino and HDMIPi on the Gadget Show

A few weeks ago I was approached by the production company that makes the Gadget Show. They wanted some shots of things people have done with their Raspberry Pi. So I invited them to browse the RasPi.TV YouTube channel and see if there was anything suitable. In the end they selected clips from four of my videos, I gave them permission to use them, and last night the show was aired. The videos used were part of a ‘Raspberry Pi hack’ slot involving making an internet radio. You can find the whole show here Here […more…]

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…]