Oct 182012
 
Getting an inexpensive 16x2 LCD screen working on the raspberry pi

I finally freed up one of my breadboards. I got my semi-permanent temperature sensing interface fully up and running with the Pi Cobbler – logging to COSM. So now I could take the components off my other breadboard and free up the Gertboard for other experiments. LCD Next The next thing I wanted to get working was a 16 x 2 LCD panel. (£6 from Tandy) Having seen other people get these working, I figured it couldn’t be all that hard and it wasn’t too bad actually. But I did make one small mistake along […more…]

Oct 122012
 
Adafruit Pi Cobbler Review

Most of my recent posts have been focussed around the Gertboard. Not surprisingly, since not many are out there yet. Now that Farnell Element 14 has started shipping (I got mine today), we should expect to see a proliferation of info about clever things people have done with theirs. One thing Gertboard has done for me though, is kindled an interest in interfacing. Previously I posted about temperature sensors and logging. Since developing the temperature data logging capability, I now want to keep that going, but still be able to mess around with the Gertboard. […more…]

Oct 082012
 
Using Temperature Sensors with Gertboard and the Raspberry Pi TMP36 and LM335z

I spent much of last week’s “Pi time” wrestling to get temperature sensors working through the Atmega on the Gertboard. It was quite time consuming, but I managed to find some great helpful web sites and glean a bit of info from each. Once I’d got two different types of sensors calibrated, installed and working (and a third type temporarily abandoned), I started fooling around with logging the temperature readings. As things do, it evolved roughly like this… View the temperature data on the screen updating every second Make the temparature data stop scrolling and […more…]

Oct 032012
 

This video is about Ken Thompson’s work on TBOplayer. (KenT on the Raspberry Pi forums, KenT2 on Github – where you can download his work.) Ken’s written a GUI (graphical user interface) for Omxplayer – the only video player currently available which can utilise the full capabilities of the Raspberry Pi’s GPU. (Graphics Processing Unit). The reason he did this was for a museum display, where they want to play four different videos which are to be user-selectable by pressing buttons. Ken needed to complete the project for £500 or under. And the Raspberry Pi […more…]

Aug 102012
 
Where's my Pi? pifind - locate your missing raspberry pi

pifind.py A week or two ago, the illustrious Jim Manley ran a Raspberry Jam – a meeting of people interested in the Pi. Unfortunately someone walked off with his Raspberry Pi. A bunch of us were chewing over ideas, on the Raspberry Pi forums, for how to add security features to make it possible to locate a stolen Pi. The whole thing reminded me of a fabulous book I used to love as a kid: The Great Pie Robbery by Richard Scarry Except the pies in the book were cherry, not raspberry. Someone else (rurwin) […more…]