hardware | Raspberry Pi

Raspberry Pi for Dummies

The name Mike Cook echoes around the corridors of Pi Towers every now and then when we make awed conversation about our hardware heroes. Mike used to write a column called Body Building for Micro User magazine back in the days of the BBC Micro, in which he’d create hardware projects that made kids like me swoon at the sheer potential of those GPIO pins at the back of the Beeb’s casing. (The Beeb’s exposed GPIO was a big influence in the design of the Raspberry Pi.) Mike was an early adopter of the Pi, and you’ll have seen several posts here featuring his otherworldly Pi hardware hacks. (The solonoid glockenspiel and the first persistence of vision project we ever saw for the Pi were both Mike’s – see this tag for all the posts on this blog featuring Mikestuff.)

I thought Mike had been quiet for a bit. We hadn’t heard much from him in the last few months: turns out that this was because he was busy with the whizz-bang hardware section of Raspberry Pi for Dummies, the rest of which was written by Sean McManus. If you are even slightly interested in learning about hardware (and having fun with it), you should run to your nearest bookshop right now. Here are some videos to give you a taster of the sort of hardware projects you’ll be able to make with the book:

This second video is only the start of the potentiometer fun – you’ll end up making something that looks an awful lot like an Etch-a-Sketch.

Sean McManus, by the way, who wrote all the non-hardware bits of the book, is also someone I’ve chatted with by email in the past about Pi – and he’s someone to whom I owe a vote of thanks for another excellent book he wrote, this time in the Older & Wiser series. His iPad for the Older & Wiser has saved me many, many hours of shouting “No! Touch the blue thing that looks like an A!” down the phone at my Dad, clearing time to have lovely fatherly/daughterly conversation instead, for which we are all grateful. Sean’s own page on Raspberry Pi for Dummies is well worth a look; he’s posting additional guides and content there on an ongoing basis, and is available there to answer your questions.

So if you’re looking for an addition to your Raspberry Pi library, Raspberry Pi for Dummies comes highly recommended. Thanks to Sean, Mike and all at Wiley for your work on the Pi – we really appreciate it!

Matt Richardson and the world’s smartest bike light

Our friend Matt from Make (whom I totally failed to hook up with for drinks when we were in NYC last month – sorry Matt! We’ll see you at Maker Faire San Mateo) has been busy. This demo is absolutely superb. He’s rigged up a light on the front of his bike that works as a headlight and as a projector to show what speed the bike’s travelling at – Matt has plans to add some more features and make the whole thing rather more beautiful, and we’ll be putting video of the finished article up here as soon as he’s ready.

Matt’s book, Getting Started with Raspberry Pi is published by Make – check it out!

Meltwater’s RGB LED libraries lesson

Meltwater (of MagPi fame) has been working on some affordable teaching add-ons for the Pi. He’s demonstrating what you can do with one of his little kits with this natty tutorial where you’ll be creating your own Python library, and using it to do some low-level control of the GPIO. You’ll need one of his RGB LED kits if you want to be able to use your brand new library to play with making disco rainbows (Meltwater’s selling them for a very reasonable £14.49, and they’re a superb teaching tool) – but if you don’t have the kit you can still use the tutorial, with a little adaptation, for your own GPIO projects. And everybody should know about Python libraries, so if you don’t, get to it.

RGB LED teaching kit, with a rev1 Pi. Click to enlarge.

When you’ve worked through the tutorial, you’ll have learned how to use Python libraries, and you’ll be able to make (tiny) blinky disco lights in many colours. But Meltwater’s not doing all the work for you: there are further tasks in there for extra credit and a (pretend) gold star. For extra credit, you’ll be working out on your own how to make the LEDS output the first five colours of the rainbow, which, as any fule kno, are red and yellow and pink and green, orange…

These little teaching kits come with a useful manual too. Fancy sending us one for the demo table, Meltwater?

Little Box of Geek from Geek Gurl Diaries

The magnificent Miss Philbin from Geek Gurl Diaries has been having fun with a Raspberry Pi, a thermal printer (the sort that till receipts are printed out on) and a big shiny button. She’s made a little Python fortune-telling box, which prints off geek pronouncements when the button’s pressed.

Miss Philbin is the sort of teacher you always wanted. She has some video which will take you step-by-step through setting up the printer, connecting it to the Pi’s GPIO, sorting out the serial port on your Pi, pulling thermal printer Python libraries off Github and getting the thing printing. That sort of thing might sound intimidating to beginners, but Carrie Anne is so good at explaining what’s going on that even those who have never picked up a Pi or used Linux before will be able to follow the tutorial. It’s a really good project if you’re somebody who wants to dive straight in to electronics engineering from a standing start. You’ll learn something, you’ll have made something fun, and you’ll never be afraid of wire strippers again.

There’s a full and very detailed blog post to accompany this video at Geek Gurl Diaries. You’ll find part two of the tutorial at Geek Gurl Diaries too (part two is, if anything, even more fun) along with more video. Get to it – and let us know if you give it a whirl!

Thanks Carrie Anne!

Manuel, the talking moose

I notice a certain silliness – not to say outright frivolity – surrounding some of your Christmas projects. I’d like to introduce Manuel. He’s a talking moose with a Raspberry Pi for brains, who will repeat your tweets in a Scottish accent, live on video. Manuel is a Christmas installation in the office at Torchbox – head over and make him intone your festive messages.

Manuel undergoes mandibular surgery

Manuel (who, if the above photographs are anything to go by, may well be an antlered donkey rather than a moose) has been hacked about, has had new brains (including a profanity filter) inserted, and has been elegantly mounted on the office wall, the better to intone your tweets. I hope he doesn’t end up in a cupboard after Christmas.

BeetBox – music employing capacitive touch, root veg and a Pi

This has to win Liz’s Project of the Year Award (there is no prize).

Regular readers will know that I go all wibbly over music projects that use the Raspberry Pi. And that I’m a very keen cook. What festive joy, then, to find a link to BeetBox in my Twitter stream. This project, from Scott Garner, wires up some root vegetables to a Pi (hidden, alongside an amp and speakers, in what I am going to call the beetroot mount – a lovely thing handmade from poplar wood) and seduces you into…touching them, to make sweet, sweet music.

BeetBox Demo from Scott Garner on Vimeo.

Seriously – is this not the best thing ever? You can read more about it on Scott’s website, where there’s more video; and you can find code to bring joy into the contents of your own fridge’s crisper drawer at Github.

Come on, folks. Next, we want to see a carrot piano.

Wired opinion piece from Pete Lomas

This is so good I’d kick myself if any of you missed it – head straight to Wired and read what Pete has to say about the manufacturing process and design decisions we’ve been dealing with up until now. It’s a great piece.

Showing service states on a traffic light

When I was about fifteen, I was an inveterate thief of temporary street furniture – no, I have no idea why. Hormones are funny things. Just in case anyone from Mid Beds County Council happens to be reading, I am very, very sorry. There were several bollards in my bedroom, a cat’s eye which my uncle (possibly while under the influence) had liberated from a street in the dead of night, and a no parking sign on the wardrobe door.

I never had a traffic light.

Raspberry Pi hooked up to a traffic light

♪ ♫ I like traffic lights, although my name’s not Bamber.

Magnus Lubeck has a traffic light (which he acquired through legal means), and he’s been using it – powered by a Raspberry Pi, of course – in place of a big display screen in his office for monitoring service states using Nagios/op5. Here’s some video.

There’s much more on Magnus’s blog, along with circuit diagrams and code, which you can use yourself if you happen to somehow come into possession of your own traffic light. He mentions the first application like this he ever saw, where a pub toilet lock was hooked up to a traffic light so you didn’t have to check whether there was someone in there or not. I’ve been thinking of ideas for this application from visual kitchen timers, to free parking space detectors, to instant message notifiers; although I feel it’s probably best not to get into the habit of using street furniture as interior decoration again. Add your own ideas below!

The Dark Pi Rises

I’m getting a real kick out of some of the fan movies that have been appearing on YouTube. Algorhythmic from Aon² has been featured here before with his robot arm. Now he’s got a night-vision robot that wants to be Christian Bale. Is there anything you guys can’t do?

Retro games and a retro joystick

A lot of people of a certain age (cough – that’d be me) have been using their Raspberry Pis to play the games that we ~~wasted~~ spent endless 10p coins on down at the arcade when we were kids. MAME (the Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator) is a really popular download for the Raspberry Pi, and you can run an increasing number of games on your Pi as developers in the community work on recompiling for Raspbian. Below, for example, is the most excellent Metal Slug 3. (If you want a MAME download for your own Raspberry Pi, Shea Silverman has a handy little tutorial on his site along with the relevant binaries.)

I don’t know about you, but I find that what controller you use has a massive impact on the satisfaction you get from a game. Sure, you can use keyboard commands, but a joystick built for the game is a tremendously cheering thing. And sure, you can use a modern USB joystick – but where’s the fun in that?

Chris Swan thinks so too, and has hacked a lovely 1980s Competition Pro 5000 (hurrah for eBay) to work with the GPIO pins on his Raspberry Pi.

The Competition Pro 5000 - back in the day, the Amiga user's joystick of choice. I'm looking at my DualShock3 PS3 controller and experiencing feelings of vertigo.

If you want to adapt your own retro joystick, there are hardware instructions and Python script to get everything working on his site. Frankly, the whole thing has me feeling like a 9-year-old with a bad haircut and twitchy thumbs again. Thanks Chris!