Which is the best Raspberry Pi sound card? DAC review

 Raspberry Pi Hardware, Review  28 Responses »
Dec 122016
 
Which is the best Raspberry Pi sound card? DAC review

I have received a fairly enormous selection of Raspberry Pi audio cards from four suppliers (Pimoroni, IQaudIO, HiFiBerry and JustBoom). It’s a bewildering array of DACs and AMPs, which allow you to turn your Pi into a HiFi system capable of playing sound files up to 32-bit 384 kHz, in theory. In reality 24-bit audio is about the highest quality you can buy and it’s questionable whether human ears can resolve any higher anyway. Anyway – I’m not planning to turn into a raving audiophile (anyone seen my gold speaker leads?) so here’s the stuff […more…]

Trip to Pimoroni to discuss HDMIPi case design

 raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  5 Responses »
Nov 082013
 
Trip to Pimoroni to discuss HDMIPi case design

Yesterday, Dave Mellor and I went to visit Paul and Jon at Pimoroni. One of the main things we wanted to do was discuss the case/surround design of our HDMIPi screen Kickstarter project with the guys. So we showed Paul and Jon the V1 prototype in action and left a V2 LCD screen with Paul for the mechanical design. We hope to be able to show some designs or sketches in due course. We actually shot some of our Kickstarter video at Pimoroni. The pick and place machine in the video is the one that […more…]

PiHub powering four Raspberry Pis at once

 raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware  1 Response »
Sep 102013
 
PiHub powering four Raspberry Pis at once

This is a gratuitously silly video post. Yesterday, Stewart “PenguinTutor” Watkiss posted a comment on the Raspberry Pi Foundation blog… “I wonder if you can run 2 or 3 Raspberry Pis from it if you don’t need it for connecting extra USB accessories to. Based on the power of the power supply it should be, in which case could provide a good way to power multiple Raspberry Pis in a classroom (although I don’t suppose that is officially supported).” …which was far too irresistable a challenge and had to be tried out immediately. I didn’t […more…]

PiHub from Cyntech and Pimoroni – a new powered USB Hub for the Raspberry Pi

 raspberry pi, Raspberry Pi Hardware, Review  9 Responses »
Sep 092013
 
PiHub from Cyntech and Pimoroni - a new powered USB Hub for the Raspberry Pi

PiHub, a new powered USB hub, designed specifically for the Raspberry Pi, has been released today. I first saw an early prototype of this when I visited Cyntech back in May 2013. It was on a table of goodies and it jumped out at me immediately. It’s absolutely beautiful to look at. Modelled in the shape and colours of the Raspberry Pi logo, it has four downstream USB ports, a barrel connector for power and an USB B upstream port that connects to a USB port on the Pi. Here’s what the final production version […more…]

Using PiGlow with GPIO button control on the Raspberry Pi

 Electronics, Input and Output, python programming, raspberry pi, Review  4 Responses »
Sep 062013
 
Using PiGlow with GPIO button control on the Raspberry Pi

Pimoroni released the PiGlow in August while I was away in Poland. It’s a small, purple board (that fits inside a PiBow) with 18 LEDs in 6 colour groups, arranged in a 3 armed spiral formation. It has an 8 bit, 18-way PWM controller that can be used to control the brightness of the LEDs (0 = OFF, 255 = Fully ON). (More on PWM here) Although I was abroad when it came out, there was plenty of banter about it on twitter. In a few short weeks, various people have written Python classes to […more…]