Well, today is the day we actually get to use RPi.GPIO a little bit. But, before we get to that, you should know about the two different numbering systems you can use with RPi.GPIO. If you take a look at the main GPIO header (P1) of the Raspberry Pi, you’ll see that there are 26 pins. The top left pin (as we look at this photo) is called pin 1, the one to the right of it is pin 2. So the next row is 3, 4 etc. and on down to 25, 26. This […more…]
You might think I’m going about this series in a funny way. You’d be right! I am. That’s because I’m trying to highlight the bits that people don’t read about in other tutorials/documentation/manuals/books. These bits are useful, important and often overlooked. If I covered inputs and outputs first, you might not get to the rest because you’d already “know all I need”. That’s only partially true though. Although you can get away with not knowing or using this stuff, it’s much better and safer if you know it and use it. So today we’re focussing […more…]
It all started in September 2012. The Raspberry Pi Foundation went and made some improvements to the Pi. How dare they!! ;) Seriously, though, there were some significant improvements to the Pi and a Rev 2 version was launched with double the RAM and some other changes/additions/improvements. This threw up some minor headaches for developers because some of the GPIO pinouts were changed and some new GPIO ports were made available on a brand new “solder it yourself if you want it” header called P5 (see the leaning header of Pi5a) GPIO 0 became GPIO […more…]
It struck me the other day that I’ve published some fairly advanced RPi.GPIO tutorials, (e.g. interrupts and PWM) but not done anything more basic, apart from the Gertboard examples. So here’s an attempt to remedy that situation. Over the next few days, we’re going to have a walk around Ben Croston’s RPi.GPIO, which is now at version 0.5.3a. Some of this stuff may be new to you even if you’ve been using RPi.GPIO’s more advanced features, so it’s worth having a look. What is RPi.GPIO? It’s an easy way of controlling the Pi’s General Purpose […more…]
I’d like to introduce a new Raspberry Pi related Google Plus community. It’s called RasPi Videos and it’s for sharing and discussing videos about the Raspberry Pi. It’s very small at the moment – there’s just 10 of us at the time of publication, but amongst those 10 we’ve got some fabulous Raspberry Pi bloggers and vloggers… Who? Matthew Manning – Raspberry Pi Beginners. A top Raspberry Pi vlogger. Carrie Anne Philbin – Geek Gurl Diaries. Teacher extraordinaire, vlogger and blogger, champion of getting more girls into coding. (This is much needed! If you could […more…]
The Raspberry Pi Camera is a fixed focus module, so that anything from about 0.5m to infinity is acceptably sharp. This has strengths and weaknesses, as with every design decision. The weakness in this case is that if you want to film or photograph anything closer than about 50-75cm it will be out of focus. With large SLR cameras, what people do is change the lens for a macro or close-up lens. We can’t do that easily. The other (cheaper, but generally less good) option photographers use is to add a small, screw-in, close-up magnifying […more…]
This is going to be short and sweet. I picked it up from a video by the Marvellous Matthew Manning (reminds me of the “marvellous mechanical mouse organ” from Bagpuss – Google it if you need to ask) otherwise known as RaspberryPi4Beginners. Matt’s made a video which complements several of my recent blogs about the Raspberry Pi Camera. His channel is Raspberry Pi For Beginners, but that doesn’t mean that only beginners can learn something from it. I learnt this alternative way of wrapping an .h264 stream to .mp4. It’s much simpler than using FFMPEG […more…]
After reading a few comments in the Pi forums about perceived quality differences between stills and video, I thought I’d test it out for myself. Some people are saying that the video quality is better than stills. “Quality” is quite a subjective thing, but resolution is a bit easier to test. This was a pretty simple test. I left the camera propped up facing the same Nissan Micra as yesterday’s blog and remotely took a still shot (by ssh) raspistill -t 3000 -vf -o reg-plate.jpg …and then I shot a few seconds of 1080p@30fps video… […more…]
Gordon Hollingworth announces a New Out Of Box System for Raspberry Pi owners at the Cambridge Jam. It’s a setup/recovery system to make it easy to set up your SD card from the outset and also recover it if something corrupts. It boots in seconds. To activate it, you hold down the shift key while powering up the Pi. Very impressive and should make a big difference to those for whom flashing an SD card image is the stuff of nightmares. It should be out in a week or so.
I arose with the larks on 29th February 2012 to participate in the great global DDOS of RS and Farnell’s websites (whilst attempting to order a Raspberry Pi or two). It was with great delight on May 15th that I received my first Raspberry Pi from RS, a week or two after the first lucky 10,000 got theirs after the ethernet port refit. I had everything ready, including an SD card with the early version of Debian Squeeze on. I’d had months to get it all ready. I connected it all up, using my Galaxy […more…]