New Raspberry Pi Family Photo 28 Feb 2017

 Electronics, raspberry pi  12 Responses »
Mar 032017
 
New Raspberry Pi Family Photo 28 Feb 2017

This week the new Pi Zero W was launched. A few weeks ago the new compute Module 3 was launched. It’s the Pi birthday party tomorrow. This can only mean one thing. It’s time for a new Pi family photo. I had an interesting exchange with a publisher this week who wanted to use the November family photo in a book. They made me an offer. I added some terms. A contract was then sent to me, which absolutely didn’t reflect my terms and was very biased towards them. Under advice I declined it. So […more…]

How much power does Pi Zero W use?

 Electronics, raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  25 Responses »
Mar 012017
 
How much power does Pi Zero W use?

It’s become traditional for me to do power measurements of any new Pi and update my chart. People have even started asking me about it on launch days (the cheek of it)… @DavidGlaude No. Not yet. Patience. That's usually a day 2 thing :) — RasPi.TV (@RasPiTV) February 28, 2017 Needless to say I have done some power measurements in my Zero W testing and here are the results. Essentially, the Pi Zero W seems to require 20 mA more than the no-wifi Zero. This is almost certainly due to the new radio chip. Methodology […more…]

get_iplayer on Raspberry Pi – update November 2016

 get_iplayer, raspberry pi  52 Responses »
Nov 152016
 
get_iplayer on Raspberry Pi - update November 2016

I’ve posted several times in the past about get_iplayer – a very useful set of scripts that allow you to download BBC iPlayer content for offline viewing. I’ve even written a MagPi article about it, which also appears in the Official Raspberry Pi Projects Book There have been several software updates since then, but something broke some time over the last few months (I wasn’t watching closely) and get_iplayer now requires a manual install of FFMPEG or it won’t convert the downloaded .ts files to .MP4 I think what broke was that the file format […more…]

Extending Python Vocab Tester With Dictionary Lookups and Storage

 python programming, raspberry pi  1 Response »
Nov 112016
 
Extending Python Vocab Tester With Dictionary Lookups and Storage

In my previous blog post, I showed you my Python based vocabulary tester and suggested some ways it could be “taken further”. You probably won’t be overly surprised to hear that I have taken it a bit further myself. Actually, I’ve taken it rather a LOT further, but this blog article is to show you the next couple of steps. Let’s Compile a List The first, fairly easy, tweak I made was to store the words I don’t know in a file. I figured it would be good to make a list of these so […more…]

How to Estimate Your Vocabulary Using a Python Script and the Scrabble Word List

 python programming, raspberry pi  15 Responses »
Oct 132016
 
How to Estimate Your Vocabulary Using a Python Script and the Scrabble Word List

The other day I read an article on the BBC website which suggested a method to estimate your vocabulary. Essentially, you sample 20 pages of your dictionary and note down how many words you know on each page. Then you add up the total, divide by 20, then multiply this by the number of pages in your dictionary. This gives you an estimate of your vocabulary. (Results will depend on the number of words in the dictionary, so use the largest you have.) This seemed like a good idea, so I tried it. I used […more…]

Pixel Tips and Tweaks – how to Tweak Aspects of the new Raspbian Skin

 Linux usage, raspberry pi  21 Responses »
Oct 072016
 
Pixel Tips and Tweaks - how to Tweak Aspects of the new Raspbian Skin

Last week. Simon Long from Raspberry Pi released a new version of Raspbian with several new features. The most visible of these is the new-look desktop skin, named PIXEL (Pi Improved Xwindows Environment, Lightweight). There’s a lot of user interface (UI) tweaks both functional and visual… new splash screen on boot stunning background images added a whole new set of icons larger ‘drag handles’ for resizing windows (that’s bugged me for years) windows now have rounded corners new font rendering package for better typography I think the new look is a big improvement and I […more…]

How to Flash an SD Card with Larger than 4GB Image – Raspbian September 2016 update

 Linux usage, raspberry pi, software installation  15 Responses »
Sep 292016
 
How to Flash an SD Card with Larger than 4GB Image - Raspbian September 2016 update

Yesterday (28 Sep 2016) a new version of Raspbian was released with a brand new skin called PIXEL. I downloaded it on my Mac and tried to unzip it in the usual way. It threw an error, so I assumed the download was faulty and downloaded again. But the error persisted. GAH!!! My friend Albert Hickey (who runs the Egham Jam) had a similar issue on Windows… Les Pounder said it worked fine in Ubuntu though. Didn’t Unzip on Pi I tried unzipping it on a Pi, but that failed too. BOO! However, it was […more…]

RasPiO GPIO Zero Ruler

 Electronics, Input and Output, interfacing, raspberry pi  No Responses »
Jul 212016
 
RasPiO GPIO Zero Ruler

You may remember this time last year I KickStarted a 6-inch ruler with the most important RPi.GPIO code on it. I’ve been using it myself an awful lot in the last year when coding. So it won’t surprise you to learn that I’m now doing another one for GPIO Zero. Since GPIO Zero is about the easiest way imaginable to get into Python GPIO tinkering, I think this will be really helpful for people. I’ve already been using the prototypes and find them an extremely helpful reference. Here’s what it looks like… It’s twice as […more…]

Raspberry Pi Zero 1.3 with camera port

 raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Camera, Raspberry Pi Hardware  4 Responses »
May 162016
 
Raspberry Pi Zero 1.3 with camera port

A new Raspberry Pi Zero with camera port is released today. It’s revision 1.3. Some power circuitry was moved and some unpopulated pads at U13 were removed to make space for the new mini camera port which is right on the end of the Pi Zero 1.3. Other than that, the new Zero looks much the same as the previous version. I did a little walkaround video, showing use of the camera port and camera output. Adding a camera port to the Zero has opened up a whole new range of project possibilities. It’s added […more…]

How To Free Up Some Space On Your Raspbian SD Card? Remove Wolfram & LibreOffice

 raspberry pi, software installation  23 Responses »
Apr 272016
 
How To Free Up Some Space On Your Raspbian SD Card? Remove Wolfram & LibreOffice

There are occasions when you may want to free up some space on your (micro)-SD card. If it’s getting full, or you want to store large media files, or install a large application, you may find you run out of space. There’s an awful lot of good stuff in the default Raspbian Jessie distro these days, but you may not be using all of it on all of your Pis. So, let’s have a look at which of the pre-installed packages take up a lot of space and could give us “an easy win” here. […more…]

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