May 182015
 
Twitter-controlled RasPiO Duino based Pan and Tilt, Tweeting, DropBoxing, Raspberry Pi Security Camera

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…]

Apr 212015
 
RasPi.TV, RasPiO Duino and HDMIPi on the Gadget Show

A few weeks ago I was approached by the production company that makes the Gadget Show. They wanted some shots of things people have done with their Raspberry Pi. So I invited them to browse the RasPi.TV YouTube channel and see if there was anything suitable. In the end they selected clips from four of my videos, I gave them permission to use them, and last night the show was aired. The videos used were part of a ‘Raspberry Pi hack’ slot involving making an internet radio. You can find the whole show here Here […more…]

Apr 012015
 
Raspberry Pi Model C

They’ve done it again. This time with almost no leaks. Today marks the launch of the next model Raspberry Pi, the model C. It’s an upgraded version of the Pi2 model B with some exciting new features. “People have been whinging since day one about 100 Mbit ethernet. Frankly we’re sick of it.” Says Eben Upton, “But while we were in the Far East recently, we found a new supplier who had some really good value Gigabit chips, with matching ports. We negotiated a deal. As you know, price is a key factor in Pi […more…]

Mar 092015
 
Pete Lomas Talks to Alex Eames at the Raspberry Pi Birthday Weekend

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…]

Feb 252015
 

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,

Feb 242015
 
Updated Pi Family Photo to include Pi 2 B

Obviously I’ve been fairly pre-occupied recently with the RasPiO Duino kickstarter (2 weeks in, just 1 week to go). But within the last week, at least 3 people have asked me if I’ve updated my “Raspberry Pi Family Photo” to include the new Pi2 model B. I realised, last week, when Zak Zebrowski, Matt Manning and Carrie-Anne all asked me about it, that “it’s become a thing“. I finally made time for it this morning. It takes a couple of hours to dust them all off, lay them out straight and get the lighting right […more…]

Feb 102015
 
Have a go at Arduino Programming on your Raspberry Pi

Today marks a rather special day. I’ve just launched a KickStarter campaign for a brand new Raspberry Pi add-on board called the RasPiO Duino. “Why is that special?” I hear you ask. Well it’s special for us because it’s our first fully solo venture in hardware. Also, my wife Malgosia is coming on-board to help with the kitting, shipping and admin. So it’s the start of a new family enterprise as well, which is all very exciting. It’s been in the works for a long time, but certain other things had to line up before […more…]

Feb 032015
 
Raspberry Pi2 - Power and Performance Measurement

The new Raspberry Pi 2 has a quad-core CPU (BCM2836), but it costs the same as the previous B+. All that extra CPU power isn’t a completely free lunch though. If you use it, it’ll cost you slightly more electrical power than the B+. But how much? That’s what we’re here to look at. In my testing, hammering different numbers of cores in parallel, it worked out at roughly 50 mA (250 mW) per core. But before I show you the full results, let me back up and show you how we got them because […more…]

Feb 022015
 
Raspberry Pi 2 - the New Quad-core A7 Pi2

New Raspberry Pi 2 Launched The Raspberry Pi 2 is out today. What? They only just launched the B+ and A+? I know! But you know tech companies like to spring surprises on us. It’s remarkably similar to the B+ in layout (in fact you might say the B+ was a ‘stepping stone’ towards Pi2) but has some significant upgrades… So What’s New With The Pi 2? Actually the video covers it pretty well, but if you prefer to read… It’s a quad-core A7 CPU with the same VC4 GPU as the original Pi. It […more…]

Jan 282015
 
Hacking HDMIPi Power Switch with Feedback

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…]