I wanted to check out the GPIO ports on the Raspberry Pi B+. The new B+ has 26 ports available for GPIO work. The previous model B had 17 on the main (P1) header and four more on the now deleted P5 header. The top 26 pins are all the same, but the 14 new pins contain 9 GPIO ports. There’s a full explanation of the ports in the diagram here… How to Test All 26 ports? Why with LEDs of course. You can do it by connecting an LED and resistor (~330 Ohms is […more…]
The power circuit on the new Raspberry Pi B+ has been completely redesigned. It now has an efficient switching regulator. So I decided to take my trusty emeter, a tool I spent far too much money on a few years ago whilst in the grip of the aero-modelling ‘bug’, and make some measurements. I measured the current and voltage going into the Raspberry Pi. The emeter has a calibrated shunt (small blue rectange in the photo with ‘battery’ and ‘load’ at each end) that’s good for up to 20 Amps. This is a way of […more…]
Today the Raspberry Pi model B+ is officially announced. It’s a well polished upgrade of the previous model B rev 2. I was fortunate enough to get my hands on one a bit early, so had time to examine, photograph, video and briefly try out the new Pi model B+ with HDMIPi. Here’s what it looks like… What’s New? What’s Changed? The processor and board size are the same, but there are lots of changes. We now have… a metal micro SD card slot on the back. Having previously broken (and fixed) two of the […more…]
A couple of weeks ago, Russell Barnes interviewed me via a skype voice call. We had a half-hour discussion about HDMIPi, RasPi.TV and RasPiO as well as the Raspberry Pi in general and a bit of background stuff that I don’t tend to blog about. Russell is doing a great job with his RasPi.Today podcast and web site. He really did his homework in advance of the interview and in post production. There was definitely a need for a high quality Raspberry Pi based podcast, and I’m glad Russell has decided to fill the gap. […more…]
You may remember seeing the special UNICEF edition HDMIPi, which I blogged about in a guest post on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog a few weeks ago. This was a temporary solution to get them up and running quickly before the mainstream HDMIPi gets going. It’s a 10″ screen, a bit more expensive than the 9″ regular HDMIPi. It’s currently using a standard driver board. I visited Dave at Cyntech on Monday to discuss various HDMIPi related things. I walked away with one of the UNICEF edition demo HDMIPis, which I decided to take and […more…]
I managed to get some GPIO action on the Raspberry Pi Compute Module. Gordon Henderson tweeted, jokily, about a lack of LEDs in my first video, so I got out some LED boards I made last year, plugged them in and modified a python script to incorporate 32 ports :). The video below shows the results, and also gives you a close-up of the ports, the compute module itself and removal and insertion.
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module was launched yesterday and I felt I owed it to you, dear readers, to get one. ;) OK. So, maybe it’s not fair to blame you guys for it. I’d have bought one anyway, but you helped me to not dither over the decision. I also have ideas for something I might do with it. But that’s top secret, so don’t tell anyone! So What is the Compute Module? It’s a small module in the same SODIMM form factor as a laptop memory module. You can see it in the […more…]
I’ve recently been working on a new board called the RasPiO® duino. You might guess from the name that it’s a bit Arduino-like, and it is. I’m currently on iteration 5 and there’s going to be at least one more before production. All iterations have worked, but I keep getting ideas and suggestions from my beta testers (and myself) that I want to include. But the board is not really what today’s post is about. I want a way of preventing the water inlet pipe freezing in the basement of our house in Poland. In […more…]
I’m publishing this post just after we hit 2 million page views, which will be around 1600 on Friday 13th June 2014 (lucky for some). It’s interesting this week that the Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced sale of 3 million Pis. We can’t quite match that, but let’s have some fun with stats anyway… 3 Million Pis sold – announced this week 2 Million page views on RasPi.TV – reached today 1 Million minutes of video watched on the RasPi.TV YouTube channel – in the next couple of weeks 1 Million visitors to RasPi.TV blog […more…]
SPI – Serial Peripheral Interface Demystified I was in need of an interesting signal to check out the logic analyser functionality of the BitScope micro. So, another of my current RasPiO® Beta boards was used as a convenient way to connect an mcp3008 analog to digital converter (ADC) to the Pi and the scope. I don’t claim to be an expert on SPI, but having spent the best part of a day playing with it, the mcp3008 data sheet and the BitScope Micro, I understand it a lot better now. Four pins are used… CEO […more…]