Feb 032016
 
Using MCP3008 to measure temperature with GPIO Zero and RasPiO Pro Hat

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…]

Jan 282016
 
GPIO Zero Experimenter's Kit and RasPiO Pro Hat

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…]