I have had a kit of parts for a RaspiRobot board in my “to do pile” for a while now. Today I had a bit of spare time so I followed the construction instructions and put it together. Step one was to check I had the right bits. I opened the packet and laid the …
Continue reading ‘Building and testing a Raspi Robot board’ »
I’m a bit of a sucker for cheap little electronics. After playing around with single LEDs and traffic lights for a while I wanted something a bit more interesting, so just over a pound for an “8 Channel Flowing Water Light LED DIY Kit” seemed too much fun to pass up. The circuit is very …
Continue reading ‘Building and testing a “flowing water light”’ »
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, …
Continue reading ‘Code Warrior, Eclipse, and Freedom boards’ »
I have had an Arduino board sitting in one of my electronics boxes for months. While chatting with an ex colleague yesterday evening, it occurred to me that I had never actually done anything with it. Although it may seem that Arduino and Raspberry Pi are in some sense competitors, I’m seeing more and more …
Continue reading ‘Not just Raspberry Pi – playing with an Arduino’ »
This is turning out to be a great week for new stuff. Yesterday I got a package of goodies from China and today I got a HotPi board from local Raspberry Pi specialists “The Pi Hut“. The board was funded by a kickstarter project. Unfortunately I did not know about it until after the kickstarter …
I recently got a comment on my article from 1st February about Soldering a Slice of Pi/O asking for some help in programming it in Python. This reminded me that I have not got very far with this little board beyond checking that the Raspberry Pi could see it. So I decided to see what …
Continue reading ‘Controlling a Slice of Pi/O with Python’ »
Introduction A while ago I ordered and received a LEDBorg bright, three-colour LED for my Raspberry Pi. I am a fan of LEDs since I first saw those large LEDÂ screens in Seattle, and so this time wanted to have a go at writing software to drive the GPIO pins, but didn’t want to go to …
Continue reading ‘Hardware review: LEDBorg for Raspberry Pi’ »
Since getting all excited about flashing Morse code on a on a LEDBorg, I have been wondering about how to control it to get the best out of its three LED colours.The way to do this is to individually turn up and down the brightness of the three LEDs, thus changing the proportions of the …
Continue reading ‘Pulse Width Modulation for dimming LEDs’ »
I have already proved to myself that I can set up and control the OK LED on the Raspberry PI board from a bare-metal C program, but I didn’t really feel that I entirely understood what was going on. The cop-and-paste code to set up and switch the GPIO line used for the OK LED …
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 …