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

 Electronics, raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  3 Responses »
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…]

Raspberry Pi Birthday Party Weekend

 raspberry pi  6 Responses »
Mar 022015
 
Raspberry Pi Birthday Party Weekend

Well that was a wonderful, but tiring, weekend. Last night I got back from a weekend in Cambridge where 1300 people got together to celebrate all things Raspberry Pi. There were two lecture theatres, two large workshop areas, a large marketplace area and a show-and-tell area. The facilities were perfect, with plenty of space at the Cambridge Computer Laboratory. I took part in two discussion panels and gave a short talk on PCB Design for Beginners. I also managed to take in talks by Eben Upton, Dave Honess, Pete Lomas and Dave Akerman and I […more…]

Updated Pi Family Photo to include Pi 2 B

 raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  15 Responses »
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…]

Interactive Graphing for the Web on Raspberry Pi using Plot.ly

 python programming, raspberry pi  4 Responses »
Feb 192015
 
Interactive Graphing for the Web on Raspberry Pi using Plot.ly

I’d never done graphing on the Pi or in Python before, but for my KickStarter tracker I wanted something that… was web based would work in Python had decent instructions I could get going with fairly quickly I’d seen Rachel Rayns tweet about using plot.ly for graphing the temperature output of her Chef’s HAT sous vide cooker. I know Rachel loves “human readable instructions”, as do I. So I thought there was a good chance the plotly documentation was good. I decided to give them a shot. Sign Up For An Account The first thing […more…]

Have a go at Arduino Programming on your Raspberry Pi

 raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  6 Responses »
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…]

Raspberry Pi2 – Power and Performance Measurement

 raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware, Review  76 Responses »
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…]

Raspberry Pi 2 – the New Quad-core A7 Pi2

 Product Launch, raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  25 Responses »
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…]

Hacking HDMIPi Power Switch with Feedback

 Electronics, python programming, raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  15 Responses »
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…]

Raspberry Pi Family Photo Update – The Red B+ and 256 Mb Rev 2 B

 raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  16 Responses »
Jan 232015
 
Raspberry Pi Family Photo Update - The Red B+ and 256 Mb Rev 2 B

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…]

Documentation and Commenting Your Code

 Linux usage, python programming, raspberry pi  27 Responses »
Jan 052015
 
Documentation and Commenting Your Code

From observation of the computer industry going back to 1987, when I did a pre-university year at IBM Scientific Centre in Winchester, it seems that the very brightest and best programmers (software creatives) are often not very good at or not very keen on documenting their work. I think the reason for this is often misunderstood. Poor documentation is a source of great consternation in the world of Linux. In fact it’s a large part of the raison d’être for RasPi.TV. We, the users, often feel that the geniuses who write awesome software can’t be […more…]

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