Feb 252015
 

Mainly video today. A little video showing a few simple examples of the sort of things you can do with the RasPiO Duino. Obviously you can do much more sophisticated things too. My next step will be to control the speed of the LEDs using the light sensor and the analog inputs. Endless fun, and useful too, when you think that an LED could represent any device you wanted to control… Don’t forget to check out the RasPiO Duino KickStarter, which finishes in a few days,

Feb 242015
 
Updated Pi Family Photo to include Pi 2 B

Obviously I’ve been fairly pre-occupied recently with the RasPiO Duino kickstarter (2 weeks in, just 1 week to go). But within the last week, at least 3 people have asked me if I’ve updated my “Raspberry Pi Family Photo” to include the new Pi2 model B. I realised, last week, when Zak Zebrowski, Matt Manning and Carrie-Anne all asked me about it, that “it’s become a thing“. I finally made time for it this morning. It takes a couple of hours to dust them all off, lay them out straight and get the lighting right […more…]

Feb 192015
 
Interactive Graphing for the Web on Raspberry Pi using Plot.ly

I’d never done graphing on the Pi or in Python before, but for my KickStarter tracker I wanted something that… was web based would work in Python had decent instructions I could get going with fairly quickly I’d seen Rachel Rayns tweet about using plot.ly for graphing the temperature output of her Chef’s HAT sous vide cooker. I know Rachel loves “human readable instructions”, as do I. So I thought there was a good chance the plotly documentation was good. I decided to give them a shot. Sign Up For An Account The first thing […more…]

Feb 102015
 
Have a go at Arduino Programming on your Raspberry Pi

Today marks a rather special day. I’ve just launched a KickStarter campaign for a brand new Raspberry Pi add-on board called the RasPiO Duino. “Why is that special?” I hear you ask. Well it’s special for us because it’s our first fully solo venture in hardware. Also, my wife Malgosia is coming on-board to help with the kitting, shipping and admin. So it’s the start of a new family enterprise as well, which is all very exciting. It’s been in the works for a long time, but certain other things had to line up before […more…]

Feb 032015
 
Raspberry Pi2 - Power and Performance Measurement

The new Raspberry Pi 2 has a quad-core CPU (BCM2836), but it costs the same as the previous B+. All that extra CPU power isn’t a completely free lunch though. If you use it, it’ll cost you slightly more electrical power than the B+. But how much? That’s what we’re here to look at. In my testing, hammering different numbers of cores in parallel, it worked out at roughly 50 mA (250 mW) per core. But before I show you the full results, let me back up and show you how we got them because […more…]

Feb 022015
 
Raspberry Pi 2 - the New Quad-core A7 Pi2

New Raspberry Pi 2 Launched The Raspberry Pi 2 is out today. What? They only just launched the B+ and A+? I know! But you know tech companies like to spring surprises on us. It’s remarkably similar to the B+ in layout (in fact you might say the B+ was a ‘stepping stone’ towards Pi2) but has some significant upgrades… So What’s New With The Pi 2? Actually the video covers it pretty well, but if you prefer to read… It’s a quad-core A7 CPU with the same VC4 GPU as the original Pi. It […more…]