After trying out the new Pi NoIR camera in a daylight comparison, it was time to test it for its main role. Apart from specialist applications in botany, etc. the “killer app” for Pi NoIR is night vision. You need an infra-red source to illuminate the target area. The only one I had to hand was an IP cam, which has a light sensor on it and ten infra-red LEDs. When it starts to get dark, the leds switch on. I’ve got another IR source on the way from Phenoptix, which I plan to dedicate […more…]
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…]
The PiNoIR Raspberry Pi camera without infra-red filter is about to hit the streets. It looks like the first purchased units have shipped already. Matt “Raspberry Pi Spy” Hawkins has got one he bought from RS. I’m not quite sure what happened there, since the product isn’t officially launched yet. But no doubt others will have them soon enough. Needless to say, before it even officially hits the streets, people are arguing about what it is, what it isn’t and how the Raspberry Pi Foundation should and shouldn’t be referring to it. (What a pedantic, […more…]
I went to visit the Raspberry Pi Foundation in Cambridge on Friday. It was really nice to finally meet Liz and the ever-growing team. We exchanged “black boards”. I gave them samples of some prototypes I’ve been working on, and they gave me one of the new Pi NoIR camera boards with “No IR” filter. I tried it out with John (who’s been working with Gordon on solving the USB issues). It works exactly the same way as the green PiCam. The only difference is that, because there’s no infra-red filter, daytime colours look a […more…]
I wanted to be able to interact with my twitter account(s) using Python scripts. I’d heard there was a Python library called tweepy that does a lot of the Applications Programming Interface (API) work for you. I’d also seen quite a few posts in the Python section of the Raspberry Pi Forums, where people had problems with it. Prize Draw I thought I’d take a look, spurred on by the idea that I’d like to be able to select a random twitter follower every once-in-a-while for a prize draw. So, last week, I spent a […more…]
Pi Supply is an external power switch for your Raspberry Pi. I have to be scrupulously honest here and say that, when I first heard about it, I thought “well that solves a problem I haven’t got”. But in the Raspberry Pi forums, quite a lot of people complained about not having a power switch. It’s never been an issue for me. I don’t find unplugging a micro USB cable all that hard. I’ve never broken the capacitor off the Pi (although I have broken a couple of SD card slots and fried a couple […more…]
I watched one of Carrie-Anne Philbin’s Geek Gurl Diaries videos yesterday about the newly released Sonic Pi application. Sonic Pi is a clever way of introducing programming concepts through making music. It looked like fun, so I had to have a play straight away. I have a ‘musical past’, so this was rather irresistable. For some time I’ve been harbouring an urge to make a solenoid-powered glockenspiel play Rimsky-Korsakoff’s “Flight of the Bumblebee”, which is an amazing piece because it’s so fast. Solenoids are costly, software isn’t But that’s a really expensive project (solenoids + […more…]