If you are interested in the Raspberry Pi from an electronics point of view you may be interested in soldering. This is a skill that can be extremely useful not just for hobbyist electronics but for repairing electrical devices. Thanks to YouTube you can get a good idea of what is involved from other people to hopefully make it easier to give it a try yourself. Here are two videos that give you everything you need to know to start soldering.
Author: Matt
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OK so people keep waffling on about the Raspberry Pi. They say it’s sold 4 million units, is being used to teach real kids in real classrooms, has a load of free resources and a World wide fan base but what’s so great about all that? According to the respected Fox News entertainment network it “can’t even play World of Warcraft”. Here I take a look at the Raspberry Pi and explain why the Raspberry Pi sucks. Bad.
UPDATE: Unfortunately fim has been dropped from the Debian repository and as a result is no longer available in the latest version of Raspbian. Take a look at How to Display Images on Raspbian Command Line with fbi instead. If you are using your Pi to capture images using the camera it can be useful to display those images without launching a desktop environment. One of the ways of doing this is to use a utility called “fim”.
This is a great Raspberry Pi infographic as it not only tells you about the Pi and what it can do but it also advises you about things the Pi can’t do. One of which is run Windows 8. I think I speak for a large number of people when I say that is probably a bonus!
This nfographic by WhoIsHostingThis.com provides a gentle introduction to the Raspberry Pi to a beginner. It also includes some suggested links to tutorials and projects to get you started.
At the last Cambridge Jam I picked up a 32×32 LED matrix panel from SK Pang. This consists of 1024 RGB leds and is used as a building block for those large displays you see in stadiums. I could only afford one so my screen is slightly smaller.
The 8th CamJam was held on September 6th 2014 at the Institute of Astronomy (IoA). Due to the number of talks and workshops the start time was moved forward to 11am and this meant an early start for me and Graham (@rpiSchool) who were travelling from Bristol.
The great thing about Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi is that you write Python scripts to manipulate the game world. This opens up a lot of creative possibilities. It can also make Python a lot more appealing to budding programmers. In this tutorial I want to explain how to create a Pyramid using Minecraft.
When you’ve installed Minecraft on the Raspberry Pi and setup the Python API you will want to get creating scripts to manipulate the Minecraft World. This is going to involve a lot of block manipulation. Each type of block (sand, dirt, water etc) has a unique ID number associated with it. It is helpful to have a list of these numbers to hand so you can use them in your code.
Occasionally I forget the Raspberry Pi password on my projects. It’s a pain but this guide provides a technique to reset the password and gain access to the system and get it back up and running. You need physical access to the SD card, a separate PC and the ability to connect your Pi to a monitor and keyboard. I used a Windows PC but this should work fine on a Mac or Linux machine.
This infographic from TrendLabs attempts to illustrate some security issues you need to be aware of when connecting your Pi to the internet. It asks “Do you really need to secure something this small”. It’s slightly vague but the three red boxes are useful reminders for any computer system you may be using.
The PiFace Control and Display (PiFace CAD) addon for the Raspberry Pi is a great way of adding a screen and buttons to your Pi. Once you’ve installed the Python libraries it is easy to get your code to interact with the screen while receiving input from the five buttons and rocker switch.
The Raspberry Pi has an SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface) bus which can be enabled on Pins 19,21,23,24 & 26. It is a synchronous serial data link standard and is used for short distance single master communication between devices. As far as the Pi is concerned this is usually relevant to certain sensors and add-on boards.
Recently I was sent a new USB Power Bank by Lumsing. Rather than test it in isolation I decided to test against the three existing battery packs I already had. This would give a better point of comparison but would also allow me to revist the performance of the devices I tested when they were new.
The Element14 Community are hosting a free webinar where Eben Upton, the inventor of the Raspberry Pi and founder of the Raspberry Pi Foundation, is presenting. It’s free to sign-up so why not login and see what he has to say!
The Pi Model B+, Pi 2, Pi 3 and Pi 4 features a 4-pole 3.5mm audio jack which also includes the composite video signal. This has allowed for the removal of the composite video socket found on the original Model B. The new jack is a 4-pole socket which carries both audio and video signals. It’s similar to sockets found on other multimedia devices such as iPods, MP3 players and smartphones. It now used on the A+, B+, Pi 2, Pi 3 and Pi 4.
My Raspberry Pi Model B+ arrived from RS Components on Thursday so here are some thoughts on the revised Pi design, what I think of it, what has changed and how this impacts existing and new users. I also took a set of photos to highlight the differences. Hopefully this post will answer lots of the frequently asked questions I’ve seen being asked by Pi fans on web forums and social media channels.
Changes to the layout and connectors on the Raspberry Pi B+ may leave you wondering about the range of existing add-ons out there and whether they still work. Below you’ll find a table listing the add-on boards I either own or have seen other people using. The table lists the board and whether it works with the standard Model B and the Model B+. Hopefully this will of interest to the owners of the existing 3 million Raspberry Pis out there. It will also help people continue to buy add-on boards without worrying that won’t work with their B+.
One of the most significant changes to the Raspberry Pi Model B+ is the 40-pin header (J8). This offers and increase of 14 pins over the 26-pin header on the original Raspberry Pi. This page aims to provide a set of information that should prove useful to anyone interfacing to these pins in their projects. It also includes a link to a printable PDF worksheet that is useful for making notes as you connect items to your header.
Today news of a new Raspberry Pi model has been confirmed by the Raspberry Pi Foundation. It was revealed last night by various social media channels, blogs, and RS Components sites. These included Hackaday.com and the German RS Components site. According the Hackaday someone was sent a “Model B+” by Element14 before the official launch date and this resulted in leaked photos. The new device is called the “Raspberry Pi Model B+” and includes a number of different updates. The CPU/GPU and 512B RAM remains unchanged.
After my “Building A Castle In Minecraft With Python” article I wanted to create a Minecraft game that was a bit more interactive. The “find a diamond” type game had already been done so I decided to do a slightly different version with a time limit. “Operation Counterstrike” was born.
Yes you read it correctly : A USB powered soldering iron. When I first saw this device on sale on my initial thoughts were that it couldn’t possibly work and a USB port was never going to provide enough power. Farnell offered me one to review and I gladly took the opportunity.