Pi Wars – The TractorBot Story
A team from Ipswich Makerspace took their robot ‘TractorBot’ to Pi Wars 2014 in Cambridge. This is the story of how they got on.
Archive of entries posted by Frank
Raspberry Pi B+ and Altoids
Just in case you have not noticed the hype that is all over our corner of the internet, there is a new version of the Raspberry Pi, called the “B+”. I won’t bother going into detail about its features, that’s covered very well by many others including Adafruit, Gordon Henderson, Carrie-Ann Philbin and, of course, …
A busy evening with the Ipswich Makerspace
On Thursday I popped along to the latest “Soldering irons and Software” evening with the Ipswich Makerspace group. This was easily the best attended so far with a wide range of projects in various stages of completion. The thing I found most intriguing about the number and variety of people was how quickly we have …
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Arduino Mini Pro and ultrasonic distance sensor
I’ve not blogged here for a few days. Unfortunately my “real job” got very busy. In the meanwhile I received another package of bits I had ordered from China weeks ago and mostly forgotten about ;) Among other things in this package were some clone Arduino Mini Pro boards. These little boards have a SMD …
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Building a “xino” Arduino clone kit
You’d think I would be fed up with Arduinos after all that messing about with one connected to a Raspberry Pi, but while playing with that it occurred to me that some months ago I had bought a nicely cheap Arduino board kit (Xino Basic for Atmel), assembled it, but not managed to program it, …
Kickstarter and LPLC PIC18 development board
It looks like this is a good time of year for Kickstarter projects to turn up. Not only did I receive my MoPi board yesterday, but today I got three of Mike Hibbett’s LPLC PIC18 development board in the post. I must admit that I am a complete newbie when it comes to PIC development. …
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MoPi has arrived
A pleasant surprise today – I received two packages. One was a bunch of stuff from Cool Components, who are having a summer sale for just a few days, and had tempted me to spend more cash. I’ll work through those bits another time. The smaller, but potentially more interesting package was the MoPi board …
Problem with the new Raspberry Pi Compute board
I suppose it’s what you get for being an early adopter, but today I received a slightly worrying email from Farnell: Important Product Information for the Raspberry Pi Compute Module Development Kit Replacement Display and Camera Adapter Boards Please be aware that there is a fault with the display and camera adapter boards included as …
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First demo of my display screen project coming up
It seems a long time ago, but my plan when I first worked through installing and using node.js on a Raspberry Pi was to put the groundwork in place for a system of multiple information displays, centrally managed and connected over a network. The Raspberry Pi is great choice for this sort of thing, as …
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Another university visit – Loughborough
Not much of a blog today, as I have spent the whole day travelling. Either driving the 150 miles each way from home to Loughborough University, or walking (and more walking) round what they claim is the largest university campus in Europe. It certainly felt that way! As well as visiting general facilities (Students’ Union, …
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