There are occasions when you may want to free up some space on your (micro)-SD card. If it’s getting full, or you want to store large media files, or install a large application, you may find you run out of space. There’s an awful lot of good stuff in the default Raspbian Jessie distro these days, but you may not be using all of it on all of your Pis. So, let’s have a look at which of the pre-installed packages take up a lot of space and could give us “an easy win” here. […more…]
The new 8 Megapixel Raspberry Pi camera is released today. It’s fully backward compatible with all camera-enabled Raspberry Pis produced to-date. It uses a SONY IMX219 sensor capable of 3280 x 2464 pixel stills. It’s mechanically almost identical to the previous camera model (V1.3) except for rounded corners on the PCB – and there’s no red LED on the front. There’s also a NOIR version being released at the same time. They both support 1080p30, 720p60 and 640x480p90 video. Here’s a video overview… Specifications Lens: Fixed focus Megapixels: 8 megapixel native resolution sensor Camera Resolution: […more…]
Shawn from UUGear sent me one of their new Zero4U 4-port USB hubs for the Pi Zero to review. It works well, looks nice and is extremely well priced. This is a video review… Where Can I Buy One? From the UUGear website for around £6/$8.50/€7.50
We went to Poland for the Easter holiday. When we got there the house was really cold (6°C), having been vacant for several months. We’ve got a fairly substantial solid-fuel furnace in the basement and a large room full of coal to burn. We have a gas boiler too, but we want to get rid of the coal to repurpose the space it occupies. Burning it is the most logical solution, but it involves some work. But I’ve tried to make it a bit more fun. The furnace is an interesting beast. It’s taken me […more…]
Last summer I wrote a blog post that, at the time, I didn’t publish. I showed it to Mike @recantha Horne and we both agreed its natural tone would come across better as a talk, not a blog post. Last weekend I had a chance to deliver this talk at the Raspberry Pi Birthday Weekend in Cambridge. I managed to get an audio recording (thanks to @AndyBateyPi) to which I have synchronised my slides in the video below (26 minutes including questions). Enjoy… Also Available As Text If you prefer the (slightly fuller) original written […more…]
It’s become a bit of a new model launch tradition now that I release a new “Pi family photo” with all the main revisions of Raspberry Pi in it. I’ve done things a little differently from last time in order to get a better resolution result. As usual I make this 1500px version available to the world under a CC-BY-SA-4 licence with the only condition being that the RasPi.TV credit stays intact. Aside from that, it may be used as you wish. I have ‘gone to town’ on this one slightly. Where previously I’d always […more…]
The Raspberry Pi 3, launched this week, is more powerful than the Pi2. It also requires a bit more electrical power if you’re going to be hammering those four A53 CPU cores. How much more? The recommended PSU is 5.1V, 2.5A, which is 0.5A higher than for previous Pis. That doesn’t mean the Pi itself needs that much, but with four USB ports onboard, the PSU has to cater for power-hungry USB devices as well. I usually publish some power measurements each time a new Pi is released. But this time I learnt something new […more…]
Raspberry Pi 3 model B launch is today’s big news. The new Pi sports a 64-bit quad-core ARM Cortex A53 CPU with VideoCore IV GPU packaged into the new BCM2837 chip. This 1.2GHz CPU offers ~50% speed improvement over the Pi 2’s BCM2836. Video Overview Pretty much all the information and impressions I have of the Raspberry Pi 3 model B are in this short video… …but if you prefer to read, it’s all here too… Now With Built-in WiFi & Bluetooth The other major news is that the Raspberry Pi 3B now has built-in […more…]
In the previous article I showed you the GPIO Zero Experimenter’s Kit I put together to go with the RasPiO® Pro Hat. Today I’m going to give a quick overview of how to use the MCP3008 analogue to digital converter to read the TMP-36 temperature sensor. This gives us a temperature reading (in °C) that we can use to make “decisions” in our Python program. In our case, we’re going to switch on a red LED when the temperature is 24 °C or greater. But there are all sorts of other things you could do, […more…]
On Tuesday I had a funny thing happen. I was testing an analogue to digital converter (ADC) chip – the MCP3008 – to see how well it worked on the RasPiO® Pro Hat. I had it all wired up, and powered up the Pi, typed a few lines of GPIO Zero code, and… It worked, but not quite how I thought it should. Instead of giving a value of 1.0 for 3V3 and 0 for 0V it was giving 0.67 for 3V3. I left it running and went for lunch. During lunch the ‘lights went […more…]