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)’ »
I was very excited to read about the new PiFace Control and Display board. On a first look at the spec it seems to have a really sweet set of features. A two line display, some general purpose buttons, a left/right/click joggle wheel and an infra-red sensor. This little board opens up a world of …
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’ »
As I slowly build my bare-metal operating system and language for the Raspberry Pi, I like to keep looking around for more sources of inspiration. I found a list of stack-based languages somewhere which (among many others) pointed me at Raven, an interesting combination of FORTH, Python and perl. A bit more digging on the …
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’ »
I have spent a few days planning for my talk at IPRUG tomorrow evening. One of the things I was hoping to do was demonstrate a standalone Raspberry Pi controlling a USB missile launcher that I have had laying around unused for a few years. I got the device out of its box, found some …
After my grumpiness yesterday, I thought I’d better strike out in a different direction while I consider my options with the various sub-projects I have on the go at the moment. I have mentioned before that I am a member of local Ruby user group “IPRUG”. This is on my mind at the moment as …
Continue reading ‘Controlling Raspberry Pi GPIO from Ruby’ »
When I was first learning about computer science in the early 1980s, much was made of the difference between “low-level” and “high level” languages. Back then, it seemed as if the distinction was fairly clear: “low level” languages are languages which require you to understand the mechanics of how a computer works, and tell it …