You may remember this time last year I KickStarted a 6-inch ruler with the most important RPi.GPIO code on it. I’ve been using it myself an awful lot in the last year when coding. So it won’t surprise you to learn that I’m now doing another one for GPIO Zero. Since GPIO Zero is about the easiest way imaginable to get into Python GPIO tinkering, I think this will be really helpful for people. I’ve already been using the prototypes and find them an extremely helpful reference. Here’s what it looks like… It’s twice as […more…]

This time last year I did a “mailbag” video which was well received. So, with the review box filling up, I thought I’d do another. This time I’m covering seven products. I was going to do a G+ poll so you can tell me which one is the most interesting to you, but their surveys are limited to 5 options and I need 7. So I’ve chosen to use a different survey mechanism. I hope it works out. There’s a list of products with links beneath the video and poll. Since this is mostly a […more…]

My Dell Studio 1557 laptop died some time back in early 2014. It started conking out a few months earlier, but I managed to “heat-gun” the GPU into submission and it worked for a few more months. My wife had an identical machine, bought at the same time, which lasted a year longer. So we had these two dead Dells with lovely, flawless 15.6 inch full HD, low-power screens in the loft, waiting to be targeted for termination. I’d wondered for a while about getting a driver board and seeing if I could re-use them. […more…]

Exciting news today. I’ve just launched a new KickStarter project for a Pi Zero sized analog board. I’ve called it the RasPiO Analog Zero. It works with GPIO Zero and is very easy to use. Here’s what it looks like… …and here’s the KickStarter video showing some of the things you could use it for… If you like the look of it, please come and back us on KickStarter.

It’s only a few days since the Pi Zero 1.3 came out, but people are already asking for me to “fill in the gap” on my power chart. Which gap? The “Pi Zero shooting 1080p video” gap. With no camera port, the previous Pi Zero couldn’t do this, so there was no measurement to report. I’ve made some measurements this morning and here are the results… No Real Surprises I tried both old and new cameras and there wasn’t any significant difference (that I could measure) between them. The results are comparable to that of […more…]
A new Raspberry Pi Zero with camera port is released today. It’s revision 1.3. Some power circuitry was moved and some unpopulated pads at U13 were removed to make space for the new mini camera port which is right on the end of the Pi Zero 1.3. Other than that, the new Zero looks much the same as the previous version. I did a little walkaround video, showing use of the camera port and camera output. Adding a camera port to the Zero has opened up a whole new range of project possibilities. It’s added […more…]

I thought it would be fun to run the same tests on the new Pi cameras that I did on the original one back in May 2013. Unfortunately my first Pi camera 2.1 was faulty so I had to wait an extra day before I could do it. (It’s the first time out of about 50 Raspberry Pi products that I have ever had a faulty one.) But now here are the results. I’ve compared both 2.1 cameras with both 1.3 Raspberry Pi cameras. Methodology I shot the scene out of an open window, trying […more…]

There are occasions when you may want to free up some space on your (micro)-SD card. If it’s getting full, or you want to store large media files, or install a large application, you may find you run out of space. There’s an awful lot of good stuff in the default Raspbian Jessie distro these days, but you may not be using all of it on all of your Pis. So, let’s have a look at which of the pre-installed packages take up a lot of space and could give us “an easy win” here. […more…]

The new 8 Megapixel Raspberry Pi camera is released today. It’s fully backward compatible with all camera-enabled Raspberry Pis produced to-date. It uses a SONY IMX219 sensor capable of 3280 x 2464 pixel stills. It’s mechanically almost identical to the previous camera model (V1.3) except for rounded corners on the PCB – and there’s no red LED on the front. There’s also a NOIR version being released at the same time. They both support 1080p30, 720p60 and 640x480p90 video. Here’s a video overview… Specifications Lens: Fixed focus Megapixels: 8 megapixel native resolution sensor Camera Resolution: […more…]