At Last week-end’s Cambridge Jam I met Albert Hickey @winkleink, who showed me this extremely cool brain-wave controlled version of Flappy Bird. This is a video post, so I’ll let the video do the talking… Albert runs the Egham Raspberry Jam and his blog can be found here. He’s written the project up and shared the code there. @RasPiTV Thank you for doing this. Will have all set up to play at @EghamJam on the 12th of July. http://t.co/t99JvPNT8d — Winkleink (@winkleink) June 15, 2015
Around about this time three years ago, I bought and installed five EasyN pan-and-tilt ip cameras to keep an eye on various viewpoints of our houses in the UK and Poland. I think they were about £45 each on Amazon. They’re not too hard to set up and they work tolerably well. The main downside is that their resolution is only 640 x 480 pixels, which is not enough to read a car numberplate from across the street. It’s fairly poor resolution, but you can see something. The colours are a bit washed out too […more…]
I’ve been using lithium polymer (lipo) batteries since 2006, when I nervously shelled out £30 for a 3 cell 1600 mAh 10C HiModel lipo to power my EasyStar RC plane. I also spent about the same on a charger and balancer for it. Thankfully, all these things have come down a lot in price since then. I don’t think I’d expect to pay much more than £10 for an equivalent battery now. Typical lipo batteries for large devices have multiple cells. A lipo cell has a no-load resting voltage of 4.2 V when fully charged […more…]
At the Raspberry Pi 3rd Birthday weekend, I met Pete Lomas for the first time. Pete is a Founding Trustee of the Raspberry Pi Foundation (in his spare time). For his day job, he’s Director of Engineering at Norcott Technologies. Pete has been involved in the Raspberry Pi story since very near the beginning. He designed the original model B & A production PCB. I had a chance to have a chat with him on day 2 of the Raspberry Pi birthday celebrations. If you’re a Pi geek or interested in how it all happened, […more…]
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,
In a recent post, I showed you how to hack the HDMIPi power switch so that you can turn the screen on and off from the Pi. But no sooner had I done that than my friend Peter Onion, wondering if there was a way to detect if the LCD is on or off in case it gets “out of sync”, tweeted this… @RasPiTV Is there a switched 3v3 supply to the LCD pannel ? Wire that to a GPIO input pin ? Or can you test monitor "on" via hdmi ? — Peter Onion […more…]
The HDMIPi driver board is a fairly complex design. I didn’t design it, although I did have some input into the feature list. I don’t fully understand how it works (something to do with the magic white smoke in the chips, I think), but I have messed around with it probably as much as anyone. Recently, several people have been asking if we can switch HDMIPi on and off programmatically from the Pi. Göran Roseen wants to be able to do it with this HDMIPi based clock… @Raspberry_Pi wall clock with go-to-school indicator that goes […more…]
On Saturday was the first PiWars competition at Cambridge Raspberry Jam (#CamJam). It was an excellent event. I was one of the judges, which proved to be quite difficult, but a lot of fun. The whole day went very well, there were several competition events… Sumo – Robots trying to push each other beyond the boundary Obstacle course – negotiate a range of different obstacles, some of which were positively evil Speed test (straight line) Line following – following a twisty, turny course Golf – try to direct the ball into the hole as efficiently […more…]
Today the CamJam Edukit 2 is being launched at the first Cambridge Raspberry Jam PiWars event. I’ll be judging the smallest robot and the best non-competing robot categories at PiWars, but today’s blog is about the kit. This is the second kit in the series, which adds some sensors (temperature, light and PIR) into the bundle. The full kit contents is shown and described below. What’s in the Kit? A 400 point bread board including dual power rails Immersable DS18B20 temperature sensor Light Dependent Resistor (LDR) Passive InfraRed (PIR) sensor Piezo buzzer 4 male-male blue […more…]
Aaron Shaw from Pi-Supply sent me one of his early Gert VGA 666 adaptors for testing and comment, so I thought I’d share my findings. I followed the diagram in Gert’s manual. It’s a fairly simple build, just 20 resistors and two connectors. It took about 20 minutes, being careful to get all the resistors in the right places. The hardest part was the stacking header. The final product will ship with a slightly shorter stacking header. This should be a bit easier to solder. To get it working on the Pi, you need to […more…]