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 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)’ »
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: STM32 “value line” Discovery board STM32-L Discovery board STM32-F0 Discovery board STM32-F4 Discovery Board Cubieboard Freescale Freedom KL05Z Freescale …
Continue reading ‘Is it possible to have too many microcontrollers?’ »
My presentation to IPRUG about the Raspberry Pi a few weeks ago went down well, so when Kerry, the leader of the group, asked if anyone was willing to join in for an evening of five-minute “lightning” talks I thought I’d have another go. This time I put together a slide deck and some chat …
I feel as though I have been spending most of my CORNELIUS efforts on the ELIUS (language) part, and neglecting the CORN (operating system) part. Recently, though, I have been thinking about the notion of a “hardware abstraction layer” (HAL). This is a common part of many systems, and serves to isolate the messy, hardware-specific …
That’ll teach me to go away for a weekend. It seems my previous post “Automatic Raspberry Pi board revision detection: model A, B1 and B2” was surprisingly popular. It was picked up by several important Raspberry Pi web sites and led to a significant spike in visitors. If you are someone who found their way …
Continue reading ‘My post about board revisions seems to have been quite popular’ »
When the raspberry Pi model A was announced a few days ago, I ordered one straight away. With three different models of raspberry Pi now available (or four, if you count the red Chinese variant), working out the capabilities of the board is becoming increasingly important. It’s vital for anyone involved in making hardware or …
Continue reading ‘Automatic Raspberry Pi board revision detection: model A, B1 and B2’ »
As I mentioned yesterday, I now have some new Raspberry Pi boards to play with, and also some extra hardware. I had planned to spend this evening writing some GPIO code to control the colours and brightness of the LEDborg. I even got as far as plugging it in to one of the boards. Then …
Continue reading ‘How to read Raspberry Pi board revision and memory size’ »
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 …