Which is the best Raspberry Pi sound card? DAC review

 Raspberry Pi Hardware, Review  28 Responses »
Dec 122016
 
Which is the best Raspberry Pi sound card? DAC review

I have received a fairly enormous selection of Raspberry Pi audio cards from four suppliers (Pimoroni, IQaudIO, HiFiBerry and JustBoom). It’s a bewildering array of DACs and AMPs, which allow you to turn your Pi into a HiFi system capable of playing sound files up to 32-bit 384 kHz, in theory. In reality 24-bit audio is about the highest quality you can buy and it’s questionable whether human ears can resolve any higher anyway. Anyway – I’m not planning to turn into a raving audiophile (anyone seen my gold speaker leads?) so here’s the stuff […more…]

RasPiO Portsplus Picademy – NEW product.

 Electronics, Product Launch, Raspberry Pi Hardware  1 Response »
Dec 072016
 
RasPiO Portsplus Picademy - NEW product.

If you’ve been hanging around the RasPi.TV blog for a while you’ll have heard of the RasPiO Portsplus board. It’s a little PCB with the Pi’s GPIO port numbers on that you can use to avoid counting pins when wiring up your GPIO projects. A few months ago I was visiting Pi Towers. Ben Nuttall mentioned that they use the Portsplus at Picademy, but sometimes people put them on the wrong way up and it causes confusion. The original Portsplus has GPIO port numbers one one side and pin numbers on the other side. It […more…]

Raspberry Pi Family photo update November 2016

 Raspberry Pi Hardware  3 Responses »
Nov 232016
 
Raspberry Pi Family photo update November 2016

Since the February 2016 launch of the Raspberry Pi 3B there have been three new Pi released. They’re not major revisions, but they are different. Around May the A+ got a 512 MB memory upgrade. I pre-ordered one immediately and it materialised at the end of August. But that alone didn’t warrant a new family photo. Also in May the new Pi Zero 1.3 with camera port was released. But it was last week’s arrival of the new Pi2B 1.2 with BCM2837 processor that made me decide it was time to get the camera out. […more…]

New Raspberry Pi 2B 1.2 with Pi3 BCM2837 Processor

 Product Launch, Raspberry Pi Hardware  12 Responses »
Nov 172016
 
New Raspberry Pi 2B 1.2 with Pi3 BCM2837 Processor

Back in September a new version of the Pi2 quietly appeared on Farnell’s website without a fanfare. It’s exactly the same as the original Pi2 except the processor is BCM2837 running at 900 MHz instead of the BCM2836. Why the New Revision? By changing processors to the Pi3’s BCM2837, the older BCM2836 can cease production and the Pi2 gets an upgrade to the newer, faster A53 CPU. To keep the BCM2836 in production in small quantities no longer made economic sense. I pre-ordered one immediately. It arrived yesterday and I tweeted some quick photos straight […more…]

get_iplayer on Raspberry Pi – update November 2016

 get_iplayer, raspberry pi  52 Responses »
Nov 152016
 
get_iplayer on Raspberry Pi - update November 2016

I’ve posted several times in the past about get_iplayer – a very useful set of scripts that allow you to download BBC iPlayer content for offline viewing. I’ve even written a MagPi article about it, which also appears in the Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book There have been several software updates since then, but something broke some time over the last few months (I wasn’t watching closely) and get_iplayer now requires a manual install of FFMPEG or it won’t convert the downloaded .ts files to .MP4 I think what broke was that the file format […more…]

Extending Python Vocab Tester With Dictionary Lookups and Storage

 python programming, raspberry pi  1 Response »
Nov 112016
 
Extending Python Vocab Tester With Dictionary Lookups and Storage

In my previous blog post, I showed you my Python based vocabulary tester and suggested some ways it could be “taken further”. You probably won’t be overly surprised to hear that I have taken it a bit further myself. Actually, I’ve taken it rather a LOT further, but this blog article is to show you the next couple of steps. Let’s Compile a List The first, fairly easy, tweak I made was to store the words I don’t know in a file. I figured it would be good to make a list of these so […more…]

How to Estimate Your Vocabulary Using a Python Script and the Scrabble Word List

 python programming, raspberry pi  15 Responses »
Oct 132016
 
How to Estimate Your Vocabulary Using a Python Script and the Scrabble Word List

The other day I read an article on the BBC website which suggested a method to estimate your vocabulary. Essentially, you sample 20 pages of your dictionary and note down how many words you know on each page. Then you add up the total, divide by 20, then multiply this by the number of pages in your dictionary. This gives you an estimate of your vocabulary. (Results will depend on the number of words in the dictionary, so use the largest you have.) This seemed like a good idea, so I tried it. I used […more…]

Pixel Tips and Tweaks – how to Tweak Aspects of the new Raspbian Skin

 Linux usage, raspberry pi  21 Responses »
Oct 072016
 
Pixel Tips and Tweaks - how to Tweak Aspects of the new Raspbian Skin

Last week. Simon Long from Raspberry Pi released a new version of Raspbian with several new features. The most visible of these is the new-look desktop skin, named PIXEL (Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight). There’s a lot of user interface (UI) tweaks both functional and visual… new splash screen on boot stunning background images added a whole new set of icons larger ‘drag handles’ for resizing windows (that’s bugged me for years) windows now have rounded corners new font rendering package for better typography I think the new look is a big improvement and I […more…]

How to Flash an SD Card with Larger than 4GB Image – Raspbian September 2016 update

 Linux usage, raspberry pi, software installation  15 Responses »
Sep 292016
 
How to Flash an SD Card with Larger than 4GB Image - Raspbian September 2016 update

Yesterday (28 Sep 2016) a new version of Raspbian was released with a brand new skin called PIXEL. I downloaded it on my Mac and tried to unzip it in the usual way. It threw an error, so I assumed the download was faulty and downloaded again. But the error persisted. GAH!!! My friend Albert Hickey (who runs the Egham Jam) had a similar issue on Windows… Les Pounder said it worked fine in Ubuntu though. Didn’t Unzip on Pi I tried unzipping it on a Pi, but that failed too. BOO! However, it was […more…]

Playing With Papirus Zero

 Raspberry Pi Hardware, raspberry pihardware, Review  13 Responses »
Aug 052016
 
Playing With Papirus Zero

A few weeks ago I did a “mailbag” video/blog and ran a poll on which product(s) you’d like me to review. There was a clear winner right from day one. Pi-Supply’s Papirus Zero took first place and held it by a comfortable margin for three weeks. So I’m going to have a play with that one first and share my findings with you. Initial Impressions It’s a nice dainty little display. In my review pack there were two displays of different sizes; 1.44 inch and 2.0 inch. It just so happens that the height of […more…]

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