Talk to any photography geek and you’ll hear that the glass is a lot more important than the number of pixels. This is definitely true. It doesn’t matter how many pixels you’ve got if the light isn’t gathered and focussed nicely onto the sensor. Sensor size is the other large factor. The larger the sensor, the better the pictures (generally). The optimum is therefore good glass and a big sensor. With phone cameras, you usually have a small sensor and a small lens, which is far from ideal. Good glass costs hundreds or thousands and […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.
Yesterday I went to the Cambridge Jam. It was a very good Jam. I met four members of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and they were all extremely nice people. I took three demos with me: Gertboard “Whackadoodle” Wii controller Wii controller nunchuk Guzunty car RasPiCamCorder I had the RasPiCamcorder streaming live video to my PC via my phone as WiFi router. It worked quite well, but with poor latency. It took several seconds for changes to appear on the screen. I hadn’t had time to monkey about with the commands and was streaming 1080p at […more…]
On day 2 of Raspberry Pi Camera ownership I decided it was time to make the new RasPiCam into a camcorder that could be taken anywhere and used to shoot video. Hold on, there’s issues with that aren’t there? Sure there are, but there’s ways round ’em too ;) So here’s how I did it. I’ll be taking this to the Cambridge Jam tomorrow. :) Ingredients 1 Switching regulator 1 Bluetooth serial adaptor 1 Raspberry Pi with latest updated Raspbian 1 Raspberry Pi Camera Connectors for battery, reg and Bluetooth adaptor 1 power source (I’m […more…]
Yesterday I got my shiny new “RasPiCam” Raspberry Pi camera module about half an hour before I had to go out and teach. Being a good boy scout (although I never was one) I was ready for it and had it up and running within five minutes of it coming through the letterbox. But when I got back from school, I shot some test videos that I wanted to edit and publish. You know how it is. You have to publish something on day 1 or it didn’t happen, right? :) I knew there must […more…]
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…]
A multimeter is the Swiss Army Knife of electronics. You really do need one to debug your circuits when things aren’t working. GRRRRRR! Where is that dodgy connection? I’ve managed for years with a very cheap multimeter, but recently RS Components sent me this ISO-TECH IDM99III for review. Could it be “the one”? My brief is “an honest video review”. I receive no payment or kickback for doing this, but I do get to keep the product. I’m getting quite a lot of stuff in for review at the moment, from lots of different sources. […more…]
The Cyntech GPIO paddle board is a new type of breakout board for the Raspberry Pi. It’s nice and small (about half the size of the Pi) elegantly simple, and I like the connectors. To connect a wire, you hold down the orange tab, push your wire into the hole and release the tab. The wire is gripped by a spring-loaded contact. It comes with a very nice “rainbow” ribbon cable, which is much more cheerful to look at than a grey one and it’s a decent 20cm length as well. You don’t always want […more…]
In part 1 of this series, we looked at the basic commands for using software pulse-width modulation (PWM) in RPi.GPIO 0.5.2a and higher. In this article we’ll get a bit more hands-on and into some practical applications for it. It’s all very well being able to make nice square-wave pulses on an oscilloscope, but what’s it actually useful for? Our servo said? EEEEH AAAAH I tried using RPi.GPIO soft PWM with servos in response to a query after the last article, but, although it did change the servo positions, it was jittery. Servos require quite […more…]