I've been sent a 3D camera addon to review - the Svpro SV-2560X3D-001 is a £65 stereo camera designed for Android. It will also work with a Raspberry Pi! It looks a little like a Microsoft Kinect - a single bar with two embedded cameras. The camera resolution is 720p on each lens. You can buy the camera from Amazon UK. It clips on easily to a phone via a padded screw clamp. You need to install a dedicate 3D camera app in order to make it work. In the box you get the camera, two USB-OTG …
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Even in the depths of British winter my solar panels'll still happily convert what little sunlight we get into delicious, free-range, organic electrons. Nice! Most of our domestic energy use is in the evening. So, when I'm out at work I can schedule the tumble dryer, robot vacuum cleaner, and WiFi rice-cooker to consume energy when the sun is shining. The rest is sold back into the grid for my neighbours to use. Wouldn't it be great to capture that energy and use it to power my lights and…
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I've got three Raspberry Pis around my house. Well... at least... I think I do. I can certainly ping three of them. I know the physical location of two of them... It's a testament to the success of the Raspberry Pi. Anyone with £30 to spare can pick one up and start hacking. Want to build an IoT fishtank? Start with a Pi. Need to monitor air pollution? Start with a Pi. Have a vague idea...? You get the picture. The only problem with the Pi is the age-old complaint about just how …
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I like to tinker. My wife picked me up the new Raspberry Pi Zero. It's an ultra small and ridiculously cheap computer. How small and cheap? They give it away free on the cover of magazines... Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentIf you hurry down to WHSmith in Oxford, there are still a few @TheMagP1 copies left.❤️ 3💬 0🔁 208:10 - Fri 27 November 2015Terence Eden is on Mastodon@edentReplying to @edentIn related news, @summerbeth is the best wife of them all! #PiZero pic.x.com/utsf2m13jo❤️ 11💬 1🔁 00…
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The idiot in question being... me! It's been ages since I did any real electronics. Most of my work involves software and pre-assembled bits of kit. I thought that it was time I reacquainted myself with the joys of electricity :-) Because I'm fundamentally lazy, I purchased the all-in-one Raspberry Pi 2 kit from Vilros. Lots of LEDs, some buttons, a nice case, all the cables, resistors, and all sorts of bits and bobs. Including a breadboard! What's A Breadboard? I remember - from…
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I recently got a MakeyMakey. It's a sort of ersatz USB keyboard that can be plugged into anything electrically conductive. So, I plugged it into my Raspberry Pi, loaded up the Scratch programming environment, and created a fruit and veg interface. See for yourself! The scripts themselves are very simple. The MakeyMakey in its default state, acts like a USB keyboard - so it will send up, down, left, right, and the space key. So, it's really easy to use with Scratch's "Key ___ Pressed"…
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There's a cyclic nature to technology development. What starts small and personal, becomes big until - inevitably - it becomes small again. Then the cycle repeats. All this has happened before... We started with mainframes on which we had to time-slice. Then we got powerful personal computers. Now we're back to spooling up instances of cloud computers. ...and all this will happen again We used to have individual websites. Upon which we ran whatever services we wanted - mail, FTP,…
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As mentioned earlier, I've been inspired by the Byte Brothers to create a mystery story which kids have to solve using their l33t h4x0r skillz in Python. This is loosely based on The Byte Brothers Go to a Getaway, by Lois and Floyd McCoy. My well-thumbed copy was printed in 1984. I'm not sure when I got it, but I remember being around 8 or 9 when I first started writing programs in BASIC. Sadly, BASIC is as outdated as the Lascaux Cave Paintings, so I've written this in more friendly…
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This is a bit of a brain dump of how I got a 3G USB dongle working on the Raspberry Pi. Following on from getting the Raspberry Pi to send SMS. That's The Power Of Love The first thing to say is use a powered USB hub! I had lots of problems getting the modem working when it was plugged directly into the Pi. A 3G signal takes more power than the Pi's USB sockets can supply. In the above image, you can see that the Raspbery Pi is plugged into the mains - via a 1.8A plug. The USB cable has …
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This is a bit of a brain dump / diary of what I've discovered about using 3G dongles to send SMS using Python on the Raspberry Pi. Here is how to use Python to send an SMS from the Raspberry Pi via a 3G USB dongle. In order to talk to the dongle, we need to install pyserial wget http://pypi.python.org/packages/source/p/pyserial/pyserial-2.6.tar.gz gunzip pyserial-2.6.tar.gz tar -xvf pyserial-2.6.tar cd pyserial-2.6 sudo python setup.py install Save this file as sms.py - make sure you change …
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Cracking on with my Raspberry Pi, I've written my first program in Python. The aim - to be able to send an SMS via a 3G USB dongle. The problem - the way SMS needs to be encoded is hideously complicated. For example, suppose you want to send "This is a very simple message :-)" to the phone number +447700900123. This is the command that you need to send to your dongle: AT+CMGS=42 079144872000626001000C9144770009103200112154747A0E4ACF416190BD2CCF83E6E9369C5D06B5CBF379F85C06E95A29 WHAT? THE? …
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(I think I'm the first person to try this - so I decided to document the process.) A few weeks ago, I won a Raspberry Pi at the #OTA12 hackday. It arrived on Friday, so I thought I would turn it into an SMS server using the incredible FrontlineSMS. 0. Setting up the Pi This is the easy part. Follow the excellent guide on the eLinux wiki. Essentially, download the Debian image, extract, and dd it onto an SD card. The hardest part was finding a full sized SD! In the end, I found an old…
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