I'm still struggling to find time to write here, but I really am pretty excited about two new arrivals I picked up today.
It's fair to say that the first has been getting a lot of press recently:
The second is more of a rarity. Following my comments a few months ago, and despite my failure to win a limited edition "Blue Pi" :(, I now have another one for the collection:
I have had a few weeks off from electronic tinkering and from posting here, but I'm hoping to ramp up my post schedule again.
Today I picked up my new Beaglebone Black. On "paper", both this and the Cubieboard seem to be serious competitors of the Raspberry Pi. They are around the same price, and have arguably similar or even better features.
The picture shows the new Beagleboard blinking an LED. For scale, the board is shown next to the similar-looking but marginally smaller Freescale Freedom KL25Z.
As you may recall, I have plans to use a Freescale ARM development board (such as a KL25Z, or a K20D50M) as an I/O interface for at least one Raspberry Pi project. These boards are a bit like a super-Arduino: small enough to fit in the archetypal mint ton, bristling with pins for digital, analog, PWM and the like, but packing a 32-bit ARM Core running several times faster than any of the regular Arduinos. However, it's not all roses. One of the best things about Arduino is the software environment. Writing a program (known as a "sketch") for an Arduino is surprisingly simple. The combination of a standard architecture, built-in bootloader and a freely available IDE means that getting software onto the device is as easy as pasting some text into a box and clicking a button.
After my previous post on delimiter-free languages it occurred to me that the idea of txtzyme has merit for communication between some of the devices I have to hand.
Some while ago I spent some time producing some bare-metal code examples for the Raspberry Pi (flashing morse code, GPIO control and uart stuff, for example), but never got much further before being distracted by the idea of building a bare-metal operating system and programming language. The basic bare-metal platform which I produced should not need much change to implement some of the basics of txtzyme. Digital pins, console input/output, and microsecond timing are already there, and a few other features can easily be added.
Pretty much everything I have done with my Raspberry Pi boards so far has either used the Raspbian Linux operating system, or my own "bare metal" code. From time to time I have been a bit frustrated with some of the choices in Raspbian, such as the difficulty in building device drivers. I have also been noticing quite a few projects recently which have been based on Arch Linux instead.
Arch Linux has been available on the Raspberry Pi foundation downloads page for as long as I can remember, but I have never got around to giving it a try. Looks like today is the day!
A few weeks ago I was experimenting with the clever little "bus pirate" board and its odd control language. A little later I was reading an article about some of the fun things Ward Cunningham has been getting up to with electronics, and I came across "txtzyme".
Thinking further on the similarities between the two systems led to the idea of delimiter-free languages, and idea which I think bears further thought.
It recently occurred to me that I have been accumulating microcontroller development boards for a while, so I thought I'd lay them out for a photo!
Reading left to right, top to bottom you can see:
Digistump Digispark, with and without headers
Xino Arduino kit, not yet assembled
Despite mentioning it months ago, I still have not got myself organized when it comes to looking after the growing collection of SD cards with different versions of Raspberry Pi software on them. It doesn't help that many of them are outwardly identical, either.
Having failed to buy any little stickers, I have now decided that it's more important that I know what's on the cards than that they are pretty, so I am taking a two-fold approach.
The day after we got back from our holiday travels, I popped in to a nearby Aldi store. Every week they have "special buys", and sometimes they can be bargains. What tempted me in was the idea of a relatively low-cost battery-operated LED light, with an infra-red remote control. I bought one, but I haven't done anything with that yet. Something for a future blog post, I suppose.
While looking for the LED light, I came across what Aldi describe as a "Hobby Storage Case". Although the pictures all show it filled with paints and craft materials, it looked a good fit for some of the electronics bits and bobs I have scattered around my desk. So I gambled £3.99 and bought one.
It all started when I took a hurried bag full of Raspberry Pi-related bits and bobs to Norwich, and then spent over an hour trying to get a simple network connection working between my laptop and the Raspberry Pi. Ever since then I have been looking for a way to quickly and simply connect the two devices.
I have tried some things which kind of worked: connecting using a serial port (slow, and often conflicts with expansion boards and other plug-in devices), a portable access point with built-in DHCP (faster, but needs extra power and cables, and is clumsy to transport and use) . I have also spent a lot of time trying to get other approaches working: Windows ICS (Internet Connection Sharing) is supposed to provide DHCP to connected devices, but every time I have tried to set it up it has broken some other aspect of the networking. There are several installable DHCP servers which can run on Windows (see here, or here, for example) - I have used these successfully on a local network connected through a switch, but have not yet managed to succeed using a simple wire between the laptop and the Pi.