Witty Pi Full Review

 Electronics, Raspberry Pi Hardware, Review  12 Responses »
Aug 212015
 
Witty Pi Full Review

Back in July I did a mailbag video and got you guys to vote on which item I should do a more in-depth review of. WittyPi got about 50% of the vote by the time I had to make the decision. So here is the UUGear WittyPi review. WittyPi is an A+/B+/Pi2B add-on that gives you a safe on-off switch and enables timed shutdowns and startups of your Raspberry Pi. It has a battery-backed realtime clock (RTC) that controls the startup times and allows your Pi to retain the correct time even if not connected […more…]

RPi. GPIO GPIO.getmode() function

 Electronics, python programming, raspberry pi  5 Responses »
Aug 122015
 
RPi. GPIO GPIO.getmode() function

Another new RPi.GPIO feature that I discovered last week is GPIO.getmode(). This appeared in RPi.GPIO 0.5.11 and allows you to query RPi.GPIO to see whether GPIO.setmode() has been set up as BCM, BOARD, or UNSET mode. This could be useful if you are running a suite of scripts or modules which work together. GPIO.getmode() returns… -1 if GPIO.setmode() is not set 11 if GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM) is active 10 if GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD) is active Below you can see a live python session showing what you get when you use GPIO.getmode() with different modes set… Why Did You Bother […more…]

RPI.GPIO New Feature GPIO.RPI_INFO replaces GPIO.RPI_REVISION

 Electronics, python programming, raspberry pi  8 Responses »
Aug 102015
 
RPI.GPIO New Feature GPIO.RPI_INFO replaces GPIO.RPI_REVISION

In RPi.GPIO 0.5.10 (we’re now on 0.5.11) Ben Croston ‘deprecated’ GPIO.RPI_REVISION, which used to be the preferred way to find out what kind of Raspberry Pi board a program was running on. This was a useful feature to make it possible to write software that will work on any Pi, regardless of how its GPIO pins are arranged. To date, we’ve had three different GPIO pin header layouts for the standard Raspberry Pis (four if you count the compute module). But GPIO.RPI_REVISION has been deprecated (fallen out of favour) because there is now something better. […more…]

New Official Raspberry Pi WiFi Dongle 3-way testing Vs ThePiHut and Edimax

 Raspberry Pi Hardware, Review  21 Responses »
Aug 062015
 
New Official Raspberry Pi WiFi Dongle 3-way testing Vs ThePiHut and Edimax

A few weeks ago, Raspberry Pi launched a new official WiFi dongle with the following specs… 802.11 b/g/n USB 2.0 BCM43143 chipset 150Mbps maximum throughput Supports Access Point/Infrastructure mode Works with Raspbian out of the box (other OS yet to be supported) It’s been designed by the Raspberry Pi hardware team, uses a Broadcom chip and has a larger antenna than the other two dongles I’m testing it against. This makes it a little longer than the other two, but how does it stack up against them in terms of performance? That’s what we’re here […more…]