Arduino Mini Pro and ultrasonic distance sensor

I’ve not blogged here for a few days. Unfortunately my “real job” got very busy. In the meanwhile I received another package of bits I had ordered from China weeks ago and mostly forgotten about ;) Among other things in this package were some clone Arduino Mini Pro boards. These little boards have a SMD …

Continue reading ‘Arduino Mini Pro and ultrasonic distance sensor’ »

“Cerberus” a single USB cable for Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Freedom boards

If your workbench is anything like mine it’s covered in cables of one sort or another. Anything that helps manage that tangled complexity is a good thing, so I was very interested when I saw the “cerberus” multi-headed USB cable available from Sparkfun and distributors. As I hope you can see from the picture, it …

Continue reading ‘“Cerberus” a single USB cable for Raspberry Pi, Arduino and Freedom boards’ »

Testing a MAX7219 LED array with Bus Pirate

After thinking about how to drive the MAX7219 LED array I built yesterday, it occurred to me that maybe this is an ideal time to get to the bottom of how to use the Bus Pirate board that I failed to use with a MCP3002 ADC chip. This time I was determined to get it …

Continue reading ‘Testing a MAX7219 LED array with Bus Pirate’ »

Using Raspberry Pi with a Freescale KL25z

In my continuing quest to get ultrasonic sound information in to a Raspberry Pi so I can do interesting stuff with bat sounds, one of the candidate devices I have identified is the Freescale Freedom KL25z board. Unlike the MCP3002 that I tried to connect to recently, this is not just an analogue to digital …

Continue reading ‘Using Raspberry Pi with a Freescale KL25z’ »

Pirates and SPIs

“Pirates and SPIs” sounds like a cheesy adventure story, but I’m afraid it’s more likely to be a serial than an exciting drama. A few days ago I had a delivery of some components I had ordered, including a MCP3002 analogue to digital converter. The data sheet for this device claims that it can do …

Continue reading ‘Pirates and SPIs’ »

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’ »

More adventures with Minecraft

Following yesterday’s bumpy start, I was determined to make some progress with Minecraft today. I had hunted round our storage and gathered the following: A Dell Vostro 200 desktop with 1GB RAM which my wife used before she got her laptop. We stopped using this because its hard drive broke and it refused to boot …

Continue reading ‘More adventures with Minecraft’ »

No success (yet?) with USB

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 …

Continue reading ‘No success (yet?) with USB’ »

Serial port shenanigans

Before I left for our holiday travels, I ordered a couple of extra toys for my Raspberry Pi, both from UK dealer Proto-PIC.co.uk The first was a “prototyping plate” from Aadafruit which brings out the on-board connections to a circuit board and some screw connectors for solderless cabling. This one is “some assembly required”, so …

Continue reading ‘Serial port shenanigans’ »