Feb 112014
 
Tweeted Photos on a Pi  from the Cambridge Jam

There was a Raspberry Jam in Cambridge on Saturday. I went along to help Carrie-Anne Philbin at the Sonic Pi workshop. I also took the two HDMIPi prototypes to display. Because I’ve been doing a series on making a Twitter App on the Pi, I decided that it’d be fun to use it to tweet some photos live from the event. So, armed with a pre-tested script and the wifi login details, I set it up. And I have to say it worked quite well in the quieter moments when there weren’t millions of people […more…]

Feb 062014
 
Tweeting System Information from the Raspberry Pi - part 3 Pi Twitter app series

Today I’m going to show you how to tweet some system information from your Raspberry Pi. In part 2, we did a basic tweet entered at the command line, with a standard, fixed, default message if no tweet text was entered. But That Default Text was Pretty Boring So let’s do something more fun with it. Let’s make it tweet the time, date and processor temperature if you don’t enter any tweet text. I got the ‘tweet the cpu temperature’ idea from Chris Mobberly’s blog. Here’s a condensed code snippet we’re going to borrow from […more…]

Feb 022014
 
Tweeting with Python tweepy on the Raspberry Pi - part 2 pi twitter app series

In late October I started a series on Twitter and Python tweepy. Then it got pushed to one side by HDMIPi. But now I’ve managed to find some “recreational” time to play with tweepy a bit more. So in this post, which is part 2, I’m going to show you how to post a tweet using a Python program on the Raspberry Pi. Create Your Twitter App Create a twitter app on your twitter account, as we did in part 1 here Give Your App Permission to Write Then make your app read/write. You won’t […more…]

Jan 262014
 
Top Ten Android Apps for use with Raspberry Pi

I regularly use my Nexus 7 or my Android smartphone (was Galaxy S2, now Nexus 5) to help me with my Raspberry Pi activities. Here is a ‘top ten’ roundup of my favourite Android apps that I use with Pi. Sorry iPhone users. I don’t have an iPhone, but I expect many/most of these apps are available for iPhone too. These apps are used for a whole range of activities, so I’ll try to put them in a reasonably logical order. Each app has an icon by its title. Clicking it, takes you to the […more…]

Jan 162014
 
Texys 2.8 inch touchscreen with RasPiCamcorder - step 1

At the end of August, I bought one of Texy’s 2.8 inch 320×240 touch-screens to have a play with. I thought it’d be great if I could somehow get it working with my RasPiCamcorder. Although, at the time, you had to jump through quite a few hoops to get the drivers working, and nobody had yet done the necessary work to enable camera output to be displayed on it. Then I got busy with KickStarter and HDMIPi and it lay untouched until December. I periodically looked in on the camera section of the Raspberry Pi […more…]

Dec 222013
 
RasPi.TV Festive Twitter Draw

Back in October, I did part 1 of a series on interfacing Python to the Twitter API using Tweepy. Part 2 hasn’t happened yet because HDMIPi took over my life for several weeks as our KickStarter campaign went ballistic. But you’ll probably be delighted to hear that today’s post is not about HDMIPi. It’s about a Prize Draw that I’ll be holding for @RasPiTV twitter followers. I’ll be using the script I wrote in part 1 to pick a @RasPiTV twitter follower at random on Friday 27th December, and again on New Year’s Day. I […more…]

Dec 132013
 
Cambridge Raspberry Jam

Last Saturday (7th December) there was a Raspberry Jam at Cambridge Institute of Astronomy. This one was a bit different from previous jams because we had some beginners’ Scratch workshops for children in the morning. I was tasked to lead the workshop. The support was tremendous. There was a small army of people setting up ~20 Raspberry Pi systems when I arrived. Another small army assisted with the workshop itself, intervening when the children needed a prod in the right direction. Thank you to all these helpers. It couldn’t have been done without you. We […more…]

Nov 212013
 
HDMIPi Update - The Mega Bundle and the China Trip

Yet another post about HDMIPi? I hear you groan. Well, yes. I’m afraid so. But this may well be one of the last before the HDMIPi Kickstarter campaign ends at the end of November. If you read it, you’ll find out why. (Executive summary: going to Hong Kong and China next week). If you haven’t yet heard of HDMIPi, it’s a 9″ Affordable HDMI screen Kickstarter project I’ve set up as a joint venture with Cyntech. The rest of this post is pretty much swiped from this update page (which I wrote, so it’s my […more…]

Nov 172013
 
Sonic Pi flight of bumblebee video with HDMIPi

A few weeks ago I blogged about the flight of the bumblebee on Sonic Pi, but didn’t get a video done at the time because the GPU on my computer was playing up. I later reflowed it with my paint-stripper heat gun and it’s working pretty well now. (Jason “boeeerb” Barnett explained how to do it in about 3 tweets on twitter.) I thought now was the time to kill two birds with one stone and show you Sonic Pi flight of the bumblebee in video, whilst simultaneously demonstrating the HDMIPi V1 prototype (with sound) […more…]