A few days ago, I featured Pimoroni’s PiGlow as a product to watch out for. This little £9 board gives you 18 independently-controlled LEDs and can fit inside a Pibow case. Pre-launch boards have now been sent out and Gordon Henderson (of WiringPi fame) has done a video of some demonstration scripts.
Run the #RaspberryPi from an external hard drive
Ted Hale has looked at the work done by Foundation Forum member Rattus to “boot” the Pi from a hard drive and done an in-depth step-by-step tutorial on how to do it. Running from a hard drive, rather than the SD card, will significantly improve the speed of your Pi and the lifespan of your SD card. Read the tutorial here
Run the #RaspberryPi on 3.3V of power
Dave Akerman knows all about power, and how to use as little as possible to power the Pi. He has written a tutorial into how to do this. Now, please note that this will void your warranty and possibly your Pi, if you do it wrong, so be really sure you want to do this before you do it! Read the tutorial here
Tweeting coffee machine using #RaspberryPi
Martin Harizanov wanted his Raspberry Pi to tweet whenever his coffee machine was ready to be used. So, he decided to use a light-dependent resistor to monitor the ‘ready’ LED on the coffee machine. It’s a bit low-tech in that it doesn’t rely on hacking the coffee machine, but that also means that it’s easy to extract from the machine if necessary. Read how he did it
New distro based on Wheezy for the #RaspberryPi – pipaOS
It’s been a bit quiet on the distro front recently, but here’s news of a brand new distro based on Debian Wheezy. It’s called pipaOS and features the following (the most impressive of which is the 10-second boot-time!):
- Fully functional Linux system based on latest Debian Wheezy
- Runs the official Raspberry PI kernel version 3.6.11
- Compact size fits in 1GB card, Root file system occupies 190MB, 225MB free disk space
- Built-in support for most popular wireless usb dongles
- Fast: login screen in 10 seconds, online wireless association in 20 seconds
- Network time synchronization built-in using public NTP servers
- System customization support: Just plug the SD-card and edit a text configuration file.
- System administrators can chroot into the card from a Linux Intel system, QEMU emulator is included
- Power failure tolerant: Uses ext2 file system, all regular system write operations in compact ramdisk
- Support for FM radio transmission built-in with text-to-speech information messages
- Empty expandable 512MB data partition separate from the OS, located at the end of the disk
- Automatic open wireless association builtin: just plug in a usb dongle and get connected
- Secure shell server ready, sysop user with root privileves available to login with password or RSA key
- USB tethering ready: Connect the Android/iPhone phone and get pipaOS networked
Sounds like an interesting one! It’s maintained by Albert Casals. Visit the pipaOS homepage.
Getting started with WiringPi2 for #RaspberryPi with RasPi.TV
Alex has been using Gordon Henderson’s WiringPi2 library for Python. This is the start of a short series looking at this library, how to use it and the advantages it has over the RPi.GPIO library.