Back in November 2014 I wrote about the various production revisions of Raspberry Pi. I also published a “family photo” of the 10 different kinds of Pi I then owned. Since then, I’ve been given a 256 Mb Rev 2 model B by George Dowds of ThePiZone (thank you George) and I bought myself a red B+ from AliExpress. So now there are 12 Pi in the family photo, I thought it was worth a reshoot. If you fancy a closer look, you can click the below image for a higher resolution version. I set […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…]
I’m always a bit blown away by how nice people in the Raspberry Pi Community are. At PiWars last Saturday I was given no less than 5 presents. I quite often give away a few beta samples of potential products at CamJam, and this time was no exception. But I ended up receiving some stuff too, which was really nice. Three of the items were accessories that people had made for their HDMIPi. I’ll show you those three first… DIY corrugated cardboard HDMIPi stand + cheeky screwdriver from Andrew Scheller HDMIPuck Tim Richardson Button Covers […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…]
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…]
In the 11 days since the Raspberry Pi A+ was launched, a few different case options have materialised. Here is a little video walkthrough of the options so far… Naked Pi – no case at all Altoids tin – yes the A+ actually fits in one (see the video) Cyntech/ModMyPi case – this is a B+ case, but the A+ fits in it too, albeit with plenty of room to spare A+ Pibow Royale Coupé – Pibow specially designed for the A+ 3d printed cases Mike Redrobe’s @RasPiTV @RPiSpy @climberhunt I just made a minimal […more…]
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…]
Today, Raspberry Pi launches its new Raspberry Pi A+. Just like the model B was upgraded to B+, the model A now gets some love. So what’s it like? Essentially, it’s like a model B+ with the USB and networking end cut off. When I was at Raspberry Pi HQ a couple of weeks ago, I was allowed (under strict NDA and embargo) to shoot some photos and video. Here’s what it looks like… So What’s New & Different? The first three are the main changes – size, weight and cost. The rest are pretty […more…]
On Wednesday I went to Cambridge to visit the Raspberry Pi Headquarters, affectionately known as ‘Pi Towers’, to hang out for the day. I met and talked to pretty-much everybody during the day. ‘Everybody’ is now quite a lot of people. There must be about 20 people working at Pi Towers now. In May there was a large, unoccupied space on one side of the office. This time, that space was full of people working on computers. Raspberry Pi has recently hired a bunch of new engineering talent as a result of Broadcom closing down […more…]