Jul 172018
 
RasPiO Night Light KickStarter Launches

Today sees the launch of my shiny new KickStarter project, the RasPiO Night Light It uses a passive infrared (PIR) motion sensor to detect the presence of a person and a light-dependent resistor (LDR) to measure light levels. When a person is detected, if it’s dark enough, the RGB LEDs will light to the chosen colour and brightness levels. This provides some transient lighting on-demand. It’s a lot of fun and very useful. Come on over to the KickStarter page and have a look. Here’s the KickStarter Video… Click here to go to the KickStarter […more…]

 Posted by at 10:30 am
Jul 042017
 
Pimoroni Pirate Radio Review - Make an Internet Radio in about an hour

Back in February, just before I was about to pull the trigger on the RasPiO InsPiRing Kickstarter campaign, I had an email from Emma at Pimoroni. Essentially it was “Would you like to have a look at one of our new Pi Zero W kits?” Damn-right I would! :) But I warned that I would be unlikely to do much with it for a while because of the impending Kickstarter campaign. So, last week on Thursday I finished shipping RasPiO InsPiRing rewards (3 months ahead of schedule – YAY), which meant I could do some […more…]

Dec 022015
 
Ethernet On Pi Zero - How To Put An Ethernet Port On Your Pi

The Pi Zero attracted a huge amount of attention, which is great for the educational mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Whenever a new product is released, people air their opinions in the forums on what they would have liked it to have. One of the most common “I wish it had”s was an ethernet port. There are reasons why ethernet was not included. The two most obvious ones are cost and board size (it would have almost doubled the size of the Zero) So What’s To Be Done If You Need Ethernet? Well the […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…]

Feb 062014
 
Tweeting System Information from the Raspberry Pi - part 3 Pi Twitter app series

Today I’m going to show you how to tweet some system information from your Raspberry Pi. In part 2, we did a basic tweet entered at the command line, with a standard, fixed, default message if no tweet text was entered. But That Default Text was Pretty Boring So let’s do something more fun with it. Let’s make it tweet the time, date and processor temperature if you don’t enter any tweet text. I got the ‘tweet the cpu temperature’ idea from Chris Mobberly’s blog. Here’s a condensed code snippet we’re going to borrow from […more…]

Jan 162014
 
Texys 2.8 inch touchscreen with RasPiCamcorder - step 1

At the end of August, I bought one of Texy’s 2.8 inch 320×240 touch-screens to have a play with. I thought it’d be great if I could somehow get it working with my RasPiCamcorder. Although, at the time, you had to jump through quite a few hoops to get the drivers working, and nobody had yet done the necessary work to enable camera output to be displayed on it. Then I got busy with KickStarter and HDMIPi and it lay untouched until December. I periodically looked in on the camera section of the Raspberry Pi […more…]

Oct 292013
 
Pi NoIR filmed by RasPiCamcorder at Raspberry Pi HQ

While I was at the Raspberry Pi HQ in Cambridge last week, I thought it would be fun to shoot a little video of the new Pi NoIR camera using my RasPiCamcorder and some close-up lenses. It seemed like an unmissable opportunity. It’s a rather short video, but you should see some people you’ll recognise in it. I also tacked onto the end a quick comparison of daylight use of the Pi NoIR and RasPiCam. This shows why Sunny were a bit reluctant to release a version with no IR filter in case people tried […more…]