"Collaborative production is simple: no one person can take credit for what gets created, and the project could not come into being without the participation of many"
The weekly show-and-tell is SATURDAY NIGHT 6/30/12 at 9:30pm ET!
NEW INSTRUCTIONS ON HOW TO BE ON THE SHOW AND TELL. If you are on Google+ and want to join, post a message/comment on Limor’s post on Google+ and say you want to show off a project and she will add you the “Show and Tell” circle. Then just look for the hangout announcement on the very same page later for your invite. There’s an 8 to 10 (at the same time) people limit per hangout, so if it’s full try later or just pop by next week same time. Some weeks are packed!
At 9:30pm ET you will see a link to the hang out. Just keep your mics muted until we call on you and have your project ready.
Google is allowing some accounts to broadcast and record – Ladyada is trying this out, with your help
Previously we broadcasted the hangouts on Google to Ustream using their Producer tool to capture the hangout. We’re still using Ustream for “ASK AN ENGINEER”.
So if anything goes wrong, it’s all very new, but that’s also part of the fun
ASK AN ENGINEER – 10PM ET! SATURDAY 6/30/2012… with Amanda “w0z” WozniakASK AN ENGINEER!
By popular demand – “Ask an engineer” with special guest Amanda“w0z” Wozniak. w0z was on a few previous shows (our most info-packed ones so far) – and she designed the MONOCHRON clock enclosure. W0z also designed the very popular and amazing DefCon Ninja Party Badges. W0z is a staff Electrical Engineer at Wyss Institute and formerly an applications Engineer at Analog Devices. This will be a great show, you’ll need to watch it many times at half-speed just to keep up as w0z drops knowledge bombs on us.
What is “Ask an engineer”? From the electronics enthusiast to the professional community – “Ask an Engineer” has a little bit of everything for everyone. If you’re a beginner, or a seasoned engineer – stop in and see what we’re up to! We have demos of projects and products we’re working on, we answer your engineering and electronics questions and we have a trivia question + give away each week. Mosfet the cat stops by too. Previous chats can be viewed at http://www.adafruit.com/ask
And don’t forget, 30 minutes before the show we’re doing our weekly show-and-tell. If you are on Google+ and want to join, just add/follow +Limor Fried’s (Ladyada) page and post a comment so you can be added to the show and tell circle. At 9:30pm ET you will see a link to the hang out. Just keep your mics muted until we call on you and have your project ready.
For those who just want to watch, you’ll be able to watch it live on Ustream here and we usually have a recorded version posted later.
This builds on the sterling work done here https://sites.google.com/site/repurposelinux/df3120 to hack Linux onto the DF3120. When I first saw this post, I bought a few of the frames as they looked like they might come in handy for something. The basic idea is to set up Bluetooth networking with the Pi, and use SDL VNC viewer to display the X screen on the Parrot.
As seen above, the infrared thermometer shows a temperature of 38.8 degrees Celcius. That’s a difference of 17.3 degrees from the average temperature during network video playback! That much improvement will go a long way towards overall system efficiency and stability. Further implementation can be done with a 5v low profile brushless fan that came from a dead netbook. The fan could be powered directly from the GPIO pins. If it is possible to read core temperature with the SoC, then it could even be possible to utilize the GPIO with the fan in order to have the fan be intelligently controlled based on the SoC temperature, all with a simple python script.
I got my case for my Raspberry Pi. And while many people will say “big deal, it’s a plastic box” I want to say that I was blown away by the engineering detail that went into the case. From the non-slip fingers to the perfect sized GPIO cable slot to the little spacer under the network connector it was clear that somebody spent some serious time and thought on the design. I have the beagle board case, but the lack of hardware on the Adafruit case makes it a clear design winner. Very nice job! Thanks!
Here are some derivatives others have made as well.
The magazine work has been, you may have noticed, slow of late. There’s a very good reason for this: I’ve been working on a semi-secret project which can now be officially unveiled. That project is the Raspberry Pi User Guide. (That’s a rough draft cover, by the way.)
Written in collaboration with Eben Upton, co-founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation and inventor of the device itself, it’s a 240-page manual which aims to gently introduce the user into the world of the Raspberry Pi. No real technical knowledge is assumed – although by the time you get to to the sections on the GPIO port, it probably helps – and it aims to allow those without Linux experience to get up and running quickly on the remarkably sub-$35 single-board computer.
Subjects covered in the book include a quick introduction to Linux including system administration and maintenance, flashing the SD card, programming the Pi in Scratch and Python, making use of the 26-pin GPIO port, using the Pi as a home theatre system or general-purpose PC, and even a beginner’s guide to soldering.
The book is being published by Wiley & Sons in the UK and US in dead-tree and eBook formats, alongside an eBook-only introductory guide called Meet the Raspberry Pi. This slimmed-down version includes the first six chapters of the full-size book – which cover getting started and practical uses for the Pi – along with an extract from the ‘Hardware Hacking’ chapter. For those who just want to get started, it’s a cut-price alternative to the dead-tree release.
The book is undergoing final review and production now, with a view to getting Meet the Raspberry Pi out in the coming weeks and the Raspberry Pi User Guide whenever the printing presses can churn copies out fast enough. The electronic versions will be available in ePub, Kindle and PDF formats.
Issue 2 is now available online (the front page of the MagPi website now has links to PDFs for those of you who didn’t like the Flash interface). It’s a free download, full of articles written by members of the Raspberry Pi community, listings for you to type in if you’re learning to program, more on that robot arm, tips on setting up your Raspberry Pi’s SD card, and a two-page spread dissecting a Raspi.
There are a multitude of ways that a Raspberry Pi could slip into a future project. This tour provides a summary of all the ways you can interface with it.
The Raspberry Pi (model B) includes the following plugs:
- USB 2.0 (2)
- SD card (1)
- HDMI 1.3a (1)
- RCA Video (1)
- 3.5mm Stereo Plug (1)
- USB mini plug (1)
- Ethernet (1)
- Expansion Header (26 pins)
- Camera Plug CSI (1)
- Video Plug DSI (1)
Let’s review these different plugs one at a time.
USB 2.0 (2) – Model B of the Raspberry Pi has two USB plugs. In the beginning you might just use the USB plugs for a keyboard and mouse. Later on you might find that a USB hub is necessary for port expansion to support a USB drive or a USB wifi device.
SD card – Up to 32GB SD Cards have been tested and found to work with the Raspberry Pi. Adafruit sells a 4GB card.
HDMI (v1.3a) – This will be used for video output connected to modern TVs, monitors and projectors. It can also supports audio over HDMI. If you do not have a HDMI ready display a inexpensive ($2) HDMI to DVI adapter can be obtained. Converting HDMI to VGA would be expensive and lossy.
RCA Video – Connects to old school NTSC / Pal TVs for output. If you can’t make it work with a digital HDMI connector try this plug.
3.5mm Stereo Plug – This is the audio out jack. When connecting to a TV or amplifier you may use a 3.5mm to dual RCA (white/red) stereo plug. If you need audio in a USB mic can be used.
USB mini plug – This port powers the raspberry pi. There is no on or off switch just remove the power when you want to shut it off. It has a hefty 700mA @ 5V requirement which mean you will want to pickup a power supply and a USB A –> Micro B cable. If portability is critical this unit could run off 4xAAs.
Ethernet – Model B includes ethernet support for 10/100 MB. It does not include power over ethernet at this time, although it is being considered.
Expansion Header – 26 pins have been broken out from the Raspberry Pi in a 2×13 grid. The pins include 8 GPIOS, a UART, SPI, and I2C. A ribbon cable can be connected to breakout boards and breadboard adapters to simplify working with the raspi. These pins are what you will use to turn work with LEDs, relays, serial consoles and anything you might have done with a Arduino. It’s important to note that these pins are not 5V tolerant. You must level shift the voltage to 3.3v. Note: the kernel outputs during boot at 115200bps to the UART.
Camera Plug CSI - Still somewhat experimental the connectors for the CSI ports were not included on all models. The idea here is that the type of cameras used in cell phones could be plugged in and used with the raspi. There is a lot of discussion in the forums including photos taken by working CSI cameras that have been plugged in. At the time of this writing nobody is shipping a header board or camera which can plug directly into the CSI connector.
Video Plug DSI – The DSI is another somewhat experimental connector which was not populated on all models. The Display Serial Interface makes use of a 15-way flat flex connector. The idea is that you could have dual displays and interface with the kind of raw LCDs used in cell phones (including touch screens). I was unable to locate any reports of successful use of the DSI plug.
If you didn’t know, Raspberry Pi is very small sized, cheap, low power ARM computer. I won’t write more about this – you can read it on official page. So Wednesday I wanted to go shopping and I remembered my Pi is on the way (I’ve got email informing about it), so I looked into mailbox and almost screamed… I gave up on shopping and started hacking.
In the video above – LED diode changes color depending on system load. Green for less than 20%, blue for less than 50%, red for more.
This laser cut Raspberry Pi enclosure design features light pipes for the status LEDs and obscures the T-slots for a nice clean looking enclosure.
All off board connectors are accessible with the top off and you can use standard ribbon cable connectors through the case to hook up the expansion header as well. Spacing of the top layers have been adjusted so these should be compatible with pi plates when they become available with minimal additional hardware.
In a blog post last month I looked at how a Raspberry Pi can be used to emulate a formidable IBM mainframe, and in this post I describe how a pair can be used to emulate VAX computers which can then be configured to form a VMScluster.
One of the major problems plaguing the RasPi is the lack of GPIO, and the weird placement and random numbered GPIO pins broken out, making any code using them much more disorganized than if consecutive GPIO pins had been used. In addition to the inconvinience of using the GPIO, the LCD uses 5v, while the RasPi is strict 3.3v. In order to prevent any chance of damage to my Pi, and to solve the problem, I opted to use a PCF8574 I2C 8 bit IO expander. This makes it easy enough to use the bottom four bits of the expander for LCD data, and the next 3 bits for RS, R/W, and EN. To control the LCD this way, I wrote up a nice library to get things working on the lcd. In addition to this, I added a few extra bits to the library so that anyone can add more devices to it, and wrote a class for the tmp102 so we can have some live data to display.
Printable catalog (PDF) or (EPUB)
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