interfacing – RasPi.TV

Using Wemos D1 mini to control a brushless motor with ESC and servo signals

Electronics, Input and Output, interfacing, Wemos 4 Responses »

Feb 122018

Using Wemos D1 mini to control a brushless motor with ESC and servo signals

I’ve recently become interested in making “machines” of various sorts. I was sorting through some of my RC (radio control) plane “stash” the other day and came across various brushless motors and electronic speed controllers (ESC) like these. In RC, Brushless ESCs are usually connected to a radio receiver which generates servo control pulses. So this morning I thought it would be fun to try and get a Wemos D1 mini controlling a brushless motor. I’ve done similar before. I can remember, back in the dark ages of 2013, using a Guzunty Pi to generate […more…]

Wireless Remote Sensing with Wemos D1 mini, Arduino IDE, Raspberry Pi and lighttpd web server

Electronics, interfacing, python programming 94 Responses »

Jan 262017

Wireless Remote Sensing with Wemos D1 mini, Arduino IDE, Raspberry Pi and lighttpd web server

For a long time now I’ve wanted wireless temperature sensors scattered around the house and garden reporting their temperatures regularly to a central server. It’s not something I really need, but something nice to have. I’d originally planned to do it with a RasPiO Duino or Arduino nano and inexpensive NRF24L01 radio boards. Albert @winkleink Hickey, a friend of mine, who also runs the Egham Jam put me onto these when he did his buttonflash game. Albert has a useful hobby of trawling ebay for bargain-basement electronics. A few weeks ago he showed me the […more…]

RasPiO GPIO Zero Ruler

Electronics, Input and Output, interfacing, raspberry pi No Responses »

Jul 212016

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…]

Central Heating Furnace Monitoring and Control with RasPiO Duino and Raspberry Pi

Electronics, interfacing, Raspberry Pi Hardware, RasPiO Duino 23 Responses »

Apr 152016

We went to Poland for the Easter holiday. When we got there the house was really cold (6°C), having been vacant for several months. We’ve got a fairly substantial solid-fuel furnace in the basement and a large room full of coal to burn. We have a gas boiler too, but we want to get rid of the coal to repurpose the space it occupies. Burning it is the most logical solution, but it involves some work. But I’ve tried to make it a bit more fun. The furnace is an interesting beast. It’s taken me […more…]

Using MCP3008 to measure temperature with GPIO Zero and RasPiO Pro Hat

Electronics, Input and Output, interfacing, python programming 18 Responses »

Feb 032016

Using MCP3008 to measure temperature with GPIO Zero and RasPiO Pro Hat

In the previous article I showed you the GPIO Zero Experimenter’s Kit I put together to go with the RasPiO® Pro Hat. Today I’m going to give a quick overview of how to use the MCP3008 analogue to digital converter to read the TMP-36 temperature sensor. This gives us a temperature reading (in °C) that we can use to make “decisions” in our Python program. In our case, we’re going to switch on a red LED when the temperature is 24 °C or greater. But there are all sorts of other things you could do, […more…]

Ethernet On Pi Zero – How To Put An Ethernet Port On Your Pi

Input and Output, interfacing, Raspberry Pi Hardware, Uncategorized 114 Responses »

Dec 022015

Ethernet On Pi Zero - How To Put An Ethernet Port On Your Pi

The Pi Zero attracted a huge amount of attention, which is great for the educational mission of the Raspberry Pi Foundation. Whenever a new product is released, people air their opinions in the forums on what they would have liked it to have. One of the most common “I wish it had”s was an ethernet port. There are reasons why ethernet was not included. The two most obvious ones are cost and board size (it would have almost doubled the size of the Zero) So What’s To Be Done If You Need Ethernet? Well the […more…]

7 segment display Python Raspberry Pi – countdown ticker

Electronics, interfacing, python programming, Raspberry Pi Hardware 48 Responses »

Nov 182015

7 segment display Python Raspberry Pi - countdown ticker

Continuing with our theme of 7-segment displays driven directly from the Raspberry Pi’s GPIO using Python, I was asked for an explanation of the code from the previous post. In order to explain something, you first have to fully understand it, so I took some time to have a good look at the ‘business end’ of Bertwert’s code and figured out exactly how it works. I’ve now put a full code walkthrough of that script in the comments section of the previous post. Having done that, and having had a tweet from David Meiklejohn saying […more…]

How to drive a 7 segment display directly on Raspberry Pi in Python

Electronics, Input and Output, interfacing, python programming, Raspberry Pi Hardware 96 Responses »

Nov 162015

Last week I bought some 4-digit, 7-segment displays to experiment with. Strangely enough it was something I’d never tried before, so I was interested to see how they work. I googled around looking to see if someone else had done this before. It seems there are several different sorts of 7-segment displays, so you have to find a good match for the one you’ve bought. You can get them in various guises including: i2c backpack; 12 pins; 16 pins; resistors built-in; common anode; common cathode etc. The ones I bought are 12 pin, bare, no […more…]

RasPiO Duino Videos Complete

Electronics, Input and Output, interfacing, RasPiO Duino 2 Responses »

Oct 292015

Last Thursday I decided I needed to do the “Analog Inputs Video” for RasPiO® Duino. All the other basic functionality was well covered in the previous assembly/setup/tutorial videos. There’s also the 47 page user guide (FREE Download – good intro to Arduino programming) and a GitHub repository with the example sketches in. But I wanted to complete the basic set of videos, so at midday I started planning. I filmed in the afternoon and cut the video in the evening. At about 2230 I was done, so I started uploading it to YouTube (~2.4 Gigabytes […more…]

RasPiO GPIO Ruler goes on general sale

Electronics, Input and Output, interfacing, python programming, Raspberry Pi Hardware 8 Responses »

Oct 222015

You may remember I ran a KickStarter campaign in August for the RasPiO® GPIO Ruler. The KickStarter rewards were all sent out in the first week of October. (We finished shipping 3 weeks early.) So now it’s time to launch the product officially and make it available to all on general sale. If you missed out on the KickStarter, now you can buy one. In case you haven’t seen it before, this is what it looks like… What Is The RasPiO® GPIO Ruler? It’s a coding crib-sheet for RPi.GPIO, a port ID guide, a multi-scale […more…]

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