Simpler than a Shrimp – Arduino with no crystal

As I mentioned at the end of my previous Arduino post, I want to build my “learning timer” into a stand-alone project, with its own battery and enclosure. While I could just transfer the circuit exactly as it is to some proto board, I thought I’d take the opportunity to see how much more I …

Continue reading ‘Simpler than a Shrimp – Arduino with no crystal’ »

Building my own Arduino: shrimp and ArduinoISP

A few days ago I wrote about a “learning timer” that I had built using an Arduino Uno. Arduino boards are pretty easy to come by, and also easy to work with, but can be a bit expensive to build in to things (a genuine Arduino Uno from the manufacturer will set you back 20 …

Continue reading ‘Building my own Arduino: shrimp and ArduinoISP’ »

Reading analogue data on a Raspberry Pi using MCP3002

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’ »

My new favourite Raspberry Pi accessory

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 …

Continue reading ‘My new favourite Raspberry Pi accessory’ »

A few new goodies

It seems like ages ago that I was complaining about not being able to access the UART pins when an add on board is attached to the GPIO header of my Raspberry Pi. I even drew a picture of what I was looking for. I still haven’t found anything exactly like that, but I have …

Continue reading ‘A few new goodies’ »

New Toys!

Aha! the new toys I ordered have arrived. Two new Raspberry Pi boards, two ModMyPi “gamble” cases, and some miscellaneous hardware. The two new Raspberry Pis are both 512MB “revision 2” boards with mounting holes, and I have already fixed them snugly in their new cases. The cases which arrived were black top/red bottom, and …

Continue reading ‘New Toys!’ »