Apr 152016
 
Central Heating Furnace Monitoring and Control with RasPiO Duino and Raspberry Pi

We went to Poland for the Easter holiday. When we got there the house was really cold (6°C), having been vacant for several months. We’ve got a fairly substantial solid-fuel furnace in the basement and a large room full of coal to burn. We have a gas boiler too, but we want to get rid of the coal to repurpose the space it occupies. Burning it is the most logical solution, but it involves some work. But I’ve tried to make it a bit more fun. The furnace is an interesting beast. It’s taken me […more…]

Oct 292015
 
RasPiO Duino Videos Complete

Last Thursday I decided I needed to do the “Analog Inputs Video” for RasPiO® Duino. All the other basic functionality was well covered in the previous assembly/setup/tutorial videos. There’s also the 47 page user guide (FREE Download – good intro to Arduino programming) and a GitHub repository with the example sketches in. But I wanted to complete the basic set of videos, so at midday I started planning. I filmed in the afternoon and cut the video in the evening. At about 2230 I was done, so I started uploading it to YouTube (~2.4 Gigabytes […more…]

Jun 062015
 
RasPiO Duino Goes On General Sale With Free Arduino Programming eBook

Having completed the KickStarter fulfilment a long way ahead of schedule, we’re now ready to launch RasPiO® Duino on general sale. We thought it would be nice to launch it officially today at the Cambridge Jam. What Is A RasPiO® Duino? RasPiO® Duino is a small plug-on board for Raspberry Pi. It has similar functionality to an Arduino Uno, but is fully programmable from the Raspberry Pi. Once programmed, it can be removed from the Pi and used on its own. If you’re interested in the full product description you can find that here. Free […more…]

Apr 212015
 
RasPi.TV, RasPiO Duino and HDMIPi on the Gadget Show

A few weeks ago I was approached by the production company that makes the Gadget Show. They wanted some shots of things people have done with their Raspberry Pi. So I invited them to browse the RasPi.TV YouTube channel and see if there was anything suitable. In the end they selected clips from four of my videos, I gave them permission to use them, and last night the show was aired. The videos used were part of a ‘Raspberry Pi hack’ slot involving making an internet radio. You can find the whole show here Here […more…]

Mar 292015
 
RasPiO Duino as a Lipo Monitor

I’ve been using lithium polymer (lipo) batteries since 2006, when I nervously shelled out £30 for a 3 cell 1600 mAh 10C HiModel lipo to power my EasyStar RC plane. I also spent about the same on a charger and balancer for it. Thankfully, all these things have come down a lot in price since then. I don’t think I’d expect to pay much more than £10 for an equivalent battery now. Typical lipo batteries for large devices have multiple cells. A lipo cell has a no-load resting voltage of 4.2 V when fully charged […more…]

Feb 252015
 

Mainly video today. A little video showing a few simple examples of the sort of things you can do with the RasPiO Duino. Obviously you can do much more sophisticated things too. My next step will be to control the speed of the LEDs using the light sensor and the analog inputs. Endless fun, and useful too, when you think that an LED could represent any device you wanted to control… Don’t forget to check out the RasPiO Duino KickStarter, which finishes in a few days,

Feb 192015
 
Interactive Graphing for the Web on Raspberry Pi using Plot.ly

I’d never done graphing on the Pi or in Python before, but for my KickStarter tracker I wanted something that… was web based would work in Python had decent instructions I could get going with fairly quickly I’d seen Rachel Rayns tweet about using plot.ly for graphing the temperature output of her Chef’s HAT sous vide cooker. I know Rachel loves “human readable instructions”, as do I. So I thought there was a good chance the plotly documentation was good. I decided to give them a shot. Sign Up For An Account The first thing […more…]

Feb 102015
 
Have a go at Arduino Programming on your Raspberry Pi

Today marks a rather special day. I’ve just launched a KickStarter campaign for a brand new Raspberry Pi add-on board called the RasPiO Duino. “Why is that special?” I hear you ask. Well it’s special for us because it’s our first fully solo venture in hardware. Also, my wife Malgosia is coming on-board to help with the kitting, shipping and admin. So it’s the start of a new family enterprise as well, which is all very exciting. It’s been in the works for a long time, but certain other things had to line up before […more…]

Jun 202014
 
Temperature Control with RasPiO duino - or, How to protect your pipes

I’ve recently been working on a new board called the RasPiO® duino. You might guess from the name that it’s a bit Arduino-like, and it is. I’m currently on iteration 5 and there’s going to be at least one more before production. All iterations have worked, but I keep getting ideas and suggestions from my beta testers (and myself) that I want to include. But the board is not really what today’s post is about. I want a way of preventing the water inlet pipe freezing in the basement of our house in Poland. In […more…]