Now we have the A+, I thought it’d be a good time to celebrate its ‘birth’ by having a rundown of the various mass-produced models of Raspberry Pi. I had a look through my collection and was somewhat surprised to see that I have 10 different variants of Raspberry Pi now. There is one I don’t have, but more about that later. Here’s the family photo. You can click it for a higher resolution version. Rev 1 Model B In row 1, column 1 we have the Rev 1 model B. Although I was up […more…]
Two Raspberry Pi A+ arrived from Farnell yesterday, so I spent the afternoon doing some power measurements. I also made a comparison video showing power measurements for an A+, a B+ and an old model A Pi. As before, when I did a similar thing for the B+, I used my trusty eMeter. But this time I used it inline with an ISO-TECH IPS 3303D bench power supply (at 5.2V) to corroborate the readings. Methodology I wanted to see how much current each Pi would consume under four circumstances…. Idling in command line – low […more…]
In my previous blog post I started a series on how to program a KickStarter tracker. That will continue soon. In the meantime, one of the KickStarter campaigns I’ve been tracking is for a nice little board called the ProtoCam. It’s a simple, but original, idea by Richard Saville, who blogs under the name of ‘AverageManVsRaspberryPi’. (His emphasis is on quality articles, often with complete ‘how-tos’ for specific things he’s learned to do.) So he came up with this original idea for a prototyping board with space for a Pi camera on. You can put […more…]
A Raspberry Pi SmartWatch? You’re kidding me right? Errrm. Yes. I mean… Well… This has a lot of the functionality of a smartwatch, but it wasn’t built for that purpose. It’s a little big, for starters. Let me back up and explain. Last week, Apple released photos of their new smartwatch. Twitter, Google+ and every social network was awash with photos, comparison photos, criticism, analysis and good old-fashioned Apple-hating. By Thursday I was rather bored of it all, so I decided to make a joke tweet. I had this rather large Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) […more…]
I went to the Cambridge Jam yesterday and displayed HDMIPi production model #1, met lots of people, including Eben, Liz, and a multitude of Pi enthusiasts and bloggers (quite normal for a #CamJam). There was also a CNBC news crew there to film some Pi action. They shot a brief clip of me doing something like this… Matt Hawkins @RPiSpy kindly took this one for me using my camera. Good job he’s not a monkey, or we might have a copyright dispute. It was really nice to spend some time chatting to Matt. (Thanks for […more…]
Many of you probably will have heard of Ryan Walmsley, the guy who created Raspberry Pi tracker Rastrack. Ryan’s been working for several months on a robotics project he’s called Turtlteck. It’s basically a simple wheeled robot with a microcontroller board which he’s programmed to act rather like a classic “turtle”. You program it with the direction buttons and hit the middle button to make it ‘GO’. I backed the project on KickStarter early on because it’s interesting and because, even though it doesn’t directly involve the Raspberry Pi, Ryan’s budding electronics business stems largely […more…]
Today I’m launching the RasPiO Portsplus 2. It’s a simple port ID board for the Raspberry Pi model B+. It’s available over at https://rasp.io/portsplus2 but full information below… RasPiO® Portsplus 2 The RasPiO® Portsplus 2 board is designed for the new Raspberry Pi B+. It labels the ports clearly for you so that you don’t need to count pins. This will help you avoid wiring errors and damage… You can slip it over the B+ GPIO header if you want, or hold it next to the header (many people tell me they do this – and this […more…]
On Friday I noticed a bit of ‘weirdness’ happening with my new model B+ Raspberry Pi. When I shut it down with sudo halt it would shut down fine. But when my hand, or the wireless keyboard I was using, got close to the GPIO pins, the Pi would start up again all by itself. I didn’t even need to touch it. Getting close was enough. Let’s Ask the Twitterverse I wasn’t sure if this was a quirk of the B+ or something to do with the dodgy wiring in our house in Poland (not […more…]
A couple of weeks ago, Russell Barnes interviewed me via a skype voice call. We had a half-hour discussion about HDMIPi, RasPi.TV and RasPiO as well as the Raspberry Pi in general and a bit of background stuff that I don’t tend to blog about. Russell is doing a great job with his RasPi.Today podcast and web site. He really did his homework in advance of the interview and in post production. There was definitely a need for a high quality Raspberry Pi based podcast, and I’m glad Russell has decided to fill the gap. […more…]
I managed to get some GPIO action on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. Gordon Henderson tweeted, jokily, about a lack of LEDs in my first video, so I got out some LED boards I made last year, plugged them in and modified a python script to incorporate 32 ports :). The video below shows the results, and also gives you a close-up of the ports, the compute module itself and removal and insertion.