Get_iplayer Raspberry Pi Update

 get_iplayer, raspberry pi, software installation  22 Responses »
Nov 052014
 
Get_iplayer Raspberry Pi Update

Latest update here. This article is left intact for historical reasons. Last week there was a great hoo-ha as the BBC announced changes to iPlayer and the way it will work, going forward. Basically they removed the RSS program indexing system, which was used by quite a few smart TVs and also 3rd-party apps like Get_iplayer. Although this doesn’t stop Get_iplayer from downloading a file if you know the correct PID, it did break the functionality of finding the PID automatically with Get_iplayer. It also broke the PVR (personal video recorder) functionality. But within a […more…]

A Visit to Pi Towers.

 raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  No Responses »
Oct 252014
 
A Visit to Pi Towers.

On Wednesday I went to Cambridge to visit the Raspberry Pi Headquarters, affectionately known as ‘Pi Towers’, to hang out for the day. I met and talked to pretty-much everybody during the day. ‘Everybody’ is now quite a lot of people. There must be about 20 people working at Pi Towers now. In May there was a large, unoccupied space on one side of the office. This time, that space was full of people working on computers. Raspberry Pi has recently hired a bunch of new engineering talent as a result of Broadcom closing down […more…]

Do you want touch on a Raspberry Pi screen, and if so, why?

 raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  9 Responses »
Oct 142014
 
Do you want touch on a Raspberry Pi screen, and if so, why?

Google+ has recently launched a poll feature. I thought it’d be fun to see what people’s attitudes are towards touchscreens on the Raspberry Pi. So yesterday I started a little poll. If you’d like to add your voice, you can vote with your G+ account. If you don’t have a G+ account, feel free to leave a comment below. https://plus.google.com/116371886106894368991/posts/cKXyYhSfmrp (If the poll doesn’t appear embedded above, you can find it here.) Early Results At the time of posting, the results were… So what do you think? Do you want touch on a Raspberry Pi […more…]

Programming a KickStarter Tracker in Python. Part 2.

 python programming, raspberry pi  7 Responses »
Oct 032014
 
Programming a KickStarter Tracker in Python. Part 2.

So this is part 2 of the KickStarter Tracker in Python. (If you’ve not seen part 1 yet, that’s here.) We got the basics working last time. Now we want to make it look nicer, add more campaigns and have it running continously. So first let’s see about how we can introduce some colour… Adding Colour To Console Output There may well be more elegant ways to get the job done here, but I found a way that uses what’s called “escape sequences”. These are basically codes which can be used to modify the characteristics […more…]

protocam

 Electronics, Raspberry Pi Camera, Raspberry Pi Hardware, Review  3 Responses »
Sep 292014
 
protocam

In my previous blog post I started a series on how to program a KickStarter tracker. That will continue soon. In the meantime, one of the KickStarter campaigns I’ve been tracking is for a nice little board called the ProtoCam. It’s a simple, but original, idea by Richard Saville, who blogs under the name of ‘AverageManVsRaspberryPi’. (His emphasis is on quality articles, often with complete ‘how-tos’ for specific things he’s learned to do.) So he came up with this original idea for a prototyping board with space for a Pi camera on. You can put […more…]

Programming a KickStarter Tracker in Python. Part 1.

 python programming, raspberry pi  9 Responses »
Sep 222014
 
Programming a KickStarter Tracker in Python. Part 1.

Ever since the HDMIPi KickStarter I’ve been very interested in watching the progress of other campaigns. I’m following four or five Pi-based campaigns at the moment. Are they going to make it? Are they not? It’s nice to keep an eye on things. But monitoring more than one or two wastes a lot of time. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could have a little computer and screen set up so that it checked these campaigns, say, once a minute, and reported on how they’re doing? I know there’s a decent Python library called urllib2. […more…]

Raspberry Pi SmartWatch Joke

 Electronics, python programming, raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  1 Response »
Sep 152014
 
Raspberry Pi SmartWatch Joke

A Raspberry Pi SmartWatch? You’re kidding me right? Errrm. Yes. I mean… Well… This has a lot of the functionality of a smartwatch, but it wasn’t built for that purpose. It’s a little big, for starters. Let me back up and explain. Last week, Apple released photos of their new smartwatch. Twitter, Google+ and every social network was awash with photos, comparison photos, criticism, analysis and good old-fashioned Apple-hating. By Thursday I was rather bored of it all, so I decided to make a joke tweet. I had this rather large Vacuum Fluorescent Display (VFD) […more…]

VGA for Pi Debuts at CamJam, alongside HDMIPi production model No. 1

 Electronics, Input and Output, Raspberry Pi Hardware  41 Responses »
Sep 072014
 
VGA for Pi Debuts at CamJam, alongside HDMIPi production model No. 1

I went to the Cambridge Jam yesterday and displayed HDMIPi production model #1, met lots of people, including Eben, Liz, and a multitude of Pi enthusiasts and bloggers (quite normal for a #CamJam). There was also a CNBC news crew there to film some Pi action. They shot a brief clip of me doing something like this… Matt Hawkins @RPiSpy kindly took this one for me using my camera. Good job he’s not a monkey, or we might have a copyright dispute. It was really nice to spend some time chatting to Matt. (Thanks for […more…]

Turtlteck – Ryan’s new Turtle Robot

 Electronics, Review  No Responses »
Sep 042014
 
Turtlteck - Ryan's new Turtle Robot

Many of you probably will have heard of Ryan Walmsley, the guy who created Raspberry Pi tracker Rastrack. Ryan’s been working for several months on a robotics project he’s called Turtlteck. It’s basically a simple wheeled robot with a microcontroller board which he’s programmed to act rather like a classic “turtle”. You program it with the direction buttons and hit the middle button to make it ‘GO’. I backed the project on KickStarter early on because it’s interesting and because, even though it doesn’t directly involve the Raspberry Pi, Ryan’s budding electronics business stems largely […more…]

RPi.GPIO – port function checker

 Input and Output, interfacing, python programming, raspberry pi  10 Responses »
Sep 012014
 
RPi.GPIO - port function checker

A few weeks ago I blogged about RPi.GPIO updates for the model B and updated my RPi.GPIO documentation and quick reference sheets. But there was one feature I held back on because I needed a bit more time to mess about with it. (And then got busy with other things.) So What Was It? gpio_function() Another RPi.GPIO feature that sneaked in while I wasn’t looking is gpio_function() This is a feature that’s been inserted in RPi.GPIO to enable you to query the setup status of a port to see how it’s configured. import RPi.GPIO as […more…]

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