I have been enjoying reading a blog by Ken at Sustainable Suburbia recently, and one post in particular sparked me into action. Not because of its main topic (although that is thought-provoking, too) but because of the mention of an odd early programming language named “BURP” (Basic Using Reverse Polish). Sufficiently intrigued by this idea, …
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 …
Continue reading ‘First demo of my display screen project coming up’ »
The programming language landscape is always changing, and in my “day job” as a software developer I use a wide range of languages. Over the last year or so I can remember working with Awk, C, C++, Java, JavaScript, Ruby, shell script and SQL. And that’s not counting all the specialist configuration, scripting and data …
Continue reading ‘Installing and using node.js on Raspberry Pi’ »
Following my review of Ryan Walmsley’s RPi MCB, and my previous review of the RasPi Robot board it only made sense to also assemble and review the Boeeerb MotorPiTX which I also received recently. The MotorPiTX is a multi-function board. It has two A/B motor drivers, two servo controllers, a bunch of headers and most …
It’s been a while since I did any assembly, but I seem to have built up a pile of bits again, so it’s time to break out the soldering iron… First in the queue is the RPi MCB (Motor Control Board), the first hardware product from Ryan Walmsley (the Rastrack guy). This is an interesting …
I always have several different projects on the go at any one time, and recently this has meant that I have been setting up and tearing down remote virtual machines frequently in order to try out different system configurations and run experiments. As you might imagine, I got well and truly sick of slogging through …
Continue reading ‘Using Raspberry Pi and Chef to set up remote servers (Part 1)’ »
I love the Raspberry Pi. Sure it has its warts, but overall it is very well suited to an amazingly large range of uses. What I’m not so keen on, though, is the Python. Not that I have anything against the programming language (or John Cleese, Eric Idle et al., come to that), but it’s …
Continue reading ‘Programming Raspberry Pi add-ons (a rant and a plea)’ »
After spending the last few days messing with a MCP3002 SPI ADC chip, I’m beginning to wonder if it is not really suitable for my needs after all. Both the SPI libraries I have tried have had problems with excess waiting around transfers, which becomes very significant when each new sample requires a whole new …
Continue reading ‘Reading an analogue value in C on a Freescale Freedom KL25Z’ »
Yesterday I used Gordon’s WiringPi library to successfully read analogue voltage values from an MCP3002 chip over SPI. My plan for today was to try and read data as fast as possible, to begin building one version of an ultrasonic “bat detector”. However, I got a bit distracted.. When I looked in detail at the …
I got a bit disappointed with my little bus pirate yesterday. I’ll investigate how to update it to fix the odd SPI behaviour another time, but for now, its on to trying to read the MCP3002 SPI ADC chip directly using the Raspberry Pi. However, this one I’m going to do a bit differently. My …
Continue reading ‘Reading analogue data on a Raspberry Pi using MCP3002’ »