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…]

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…]

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…]

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…]