As you might imagine, if you have read many of these posts, I was very excited to hear of the launch of the Raspberry Pi Zero, and ordered one straight away. It arrived this morning, so I am now the proud owner of a Zero, and also a case and the first ‘pHat’ from the …
For the hundredth time I found myself trying to solder some small circuit board and annoyed by the way it skittered across my desk. I had tried ‘helping hands‘ but these are fiddly and annoying to set up, the screws keep coming loose, and they hold the boards at wonky angles. I had just about …
Continue reading ‘A handy (and cheap) gadget for holding small PCBs’ »
A team from Ipswich Makerspace took their robot ‘TractorBot’ to Pi Wars 2014 in Cambridge. This is the story of how they got on.
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 …
Continue reading ‘A busy evening with the Ipswich Makerspace’ »
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 …
Continue reading ‘Arduino Mini Pro and ultrasonic distance sensor’ »
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 …
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 …
Continue reading ‘Problem with the new Raspberry Pi Compute board’ »
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’ »
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, …
Continue reading ‘Another university visit – Loughborough’ »
This is exciting. A Raspberry Pi Compute Module Development Kit (a.k.a “Model C”) arrived in the post today. At last I have a “Raspberry Pi” with a decent number of GPIO pins. Just as when the Original Pi launched, there is not much information or third-party support yet. In particular, I’d love to see a …