The latest big news in the world of Raspberry Pi Python GPIO programming is that Ben Croston has released an update for RPi.GPIO. Why is that a big deal? Because this version has interrupts. “What’s an interrupt?” I hear you say. It’s a way of waiting for something to happen without checking constantly whether or not it’s happening. Imagine that you’re waiting for a delivery – something you’re really excited about – like a Pi camera.You spend far too much time looking down the street in eager anticipation of the postman’s arrival. You can’t fully […more…]
Last night I went along to the Oxford Geek Night #30 to see Eben Upton talking about the Raspberry Pi. It was a good evening, but it was absolutely wall-to-wall people. Fortunately, it was obvious that it was going to be busy, so I got there very early and got a seat at a table near the stage. But you can be too clever sometimes can’t you? The fact that there were so many people ‘standing in the gap’ meant that I couldn’t see the stage. :( I enjoyed Eben’s talk though. The sound system […more…]
After the recent call for items for the demo table over at Raspberry Pi HQ, I thought I’d send over a flag-waving set. It’s not a product for sale, but it’s one of the most eye-catching and memorable Raspberry Pi demos I’ve made. People mention it more than any of the others when I don’t take it along to Jams. There’s a video, at the end of the page, showing three Pis all waving flags together (based on three different drive systems). Making the flag So I set about making a flag. It’s pretty easy. […more…]
Lithium polymer batteries are light and powerful, but they can’t be run completely flat or they are ruined. I’ve been using them for several years to fly model planes, so I have plenty of them around. I’ve also been using them at Raspberry Jam meetings to power some of my Pi demos. I thought it would be fun to make a circuit so the Pi could monitor its own battery voltage. I used an analog to digital converter (mcp3002) and had the Pi check the battery voltage every minute and shut down when the battery […more…]
On Wednesday of this week, I went to film Dave Akerman and Anthony Stirk launching two high altitude weather balloons. One of them had a Raspberry Pi inside a TARDIS as its payload. It was cold. In the video you’ll see it looks almost as if Dave is smoking at one point. That would have been a bad idea as the 70 kg red cylinders are full of highly explosive Hydrogen gas. Slight cheating on the Vid I confess in advance that I did have to cheat slightly with the video. Dave was really keen […more…]
A few days ago I was playing about with my Raspberry Pi Model A. I wanted to measure the power consumption, since I started a thread on the Pi forums that talks all about this. This threw up an interesting problem because I wanted to measure the power consumption of the Pi both with and without my wifi dongle. But if I pull out the dongle, I’m not sure it will reconnect when I re-attach it, and then I won’t be able to communicate with it (I was using it headless – no monitor/keyboard). Eventually […more…]
There’s still some free tickets left for the Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam this coming Sunday 24 Feb 2013. Click here to reserve a ticket http://www.eventbrite.com/event/5421371468 What’s so special about the MK Jam? The Milton Keynes Jam is rather special because it is held at the National Museum of Computing, which is on the same site as Bletchley Park. They’ve got the oldest working digital computer in the world – the WITCH. Also there is Colossus – the famous code-breaking computer from World War 2. If you like computers, it’s an awesome place. (And if you […more…]
BBC Technology program Click just used a segment from the video I posted a couple of weeks ago on the model A release. It’s right in the middle of this 6 minute video. About 8 seconds starting around 4:28. It’s a real shame I was out yesterday afternoon when Liz was trying to get in touch – I could have given them a much nicer 1080i HD version. :( Watch the whole 6 minutes though, it’s a good one about hackers, makers and Pi users.
Matt Hawkins from Raspberry Pi Spy has done the leg-work enabling Pi users to use a Wii controller – along with a Bluetooth USB dongle to send inputs to the Raspberry Pi. It uses a Python library called “CWiid” (I imagine this is pronounced “seaweed”). This is awesome because the Wii controller has 11 different digital inputs. When you consider combinations of inputs, that gives you a lot of extra possible “input commands” to play with. Theoretically*, with 11 buttons, there are 55 different 2-button combinations (11C2). That should be enough for most uses. If […more…]
I was keeping an eye on the RS and Farnell sites on Monday morning because I’d heard a ‘reliable whisper’ that the model A was launching this week. I didn’t know what day, but I figured it might be Monday. No sign of anything early morning, but then I forgot and didn’t see Liz’s announcement on the Pi blog until a couple of hours after they went live. By that time, RS was showing back order, but Farnell had stock levels of ~1800, so I snagged one. I got a “shipped” email about 3 hours […more…]