Three ideas for your MyPiFi LCD Board

Three ideas I have made with LCDs and a raspberry pi, just to get you going with your MyPiFi LCD Support Board kit for the pi on kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1059145052/mypifi-lcd-board-support

1.  The Cacheberry pi geocaching device.  You can also use this as a petrol station locator, speed camera locator or even just have it to only show speed/time/date http://smstextblog.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/cacheberry-pi-in-detail.html

2.  Weather forecaster/news/football scores.  This one involves using RSS feeds to display the latest news/forecast/result or to whatever you want to show.  Don't dorget you could program it with a Twitter api to show your tweets or follow a hashtag http://smstextblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/12/raspberry-pi-lcd-weather-station.html

3.  Radio display, whilst this project uses an adafruit lcd plate, you could use the Mypifi lcd board add a couple of buttons and speaker and use the mypifi kit to play radio and view station info.  http://smstextblog.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/wipi-radio.html

If you have any great lcd projects feel free to post them all below, don't forget to take a look at our kickstarter https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1059145052/mypifi-lcd-board-support

Piduino

Recently I received one of these beauties. It's like a raspberry pi but runs arduino boards and arduino IDE on it.

So firstly was to go to the pcduino site and download the zip file, unzip it and copy to a sd card (an .img and .sh file) don't use win image or anything like that, straight forward drop and go.

Next plug the card in and turn on the device which welcomes you with the pcduino page before it copies the contents to the onboard chip and whalla the board now has Ubuntu on it with all the essential programs and if anything is a great cheap computer just for that but there's more.

The board also comes with extra connections like Ethernet, wifi, usb and IR on this 1ghz board.

So far I've been very impressed with it and like the all in one feel for using a small computer and arduino together and  for £55 quid certainly worth it.  If after a while you have enough then I'm sure it could be a great XBMC device.

Here are the specs.

Items	Details
CPU	AllWinner A20 SoC, 1GHz ARM Cortex A7 Dual Core
GPU	OpenGL ES2.0, OpenVG 1.1, Mali 400 Dual Core
DRAM	1GB
Onboard Storage	4GB Flash, microSD card (TF) slot for up to 32GB
Video Output	HDMI 1.4 with HDCP support
OS	Ubuntu 12.04 Android 4.2
Arduino extension interface	Arduino sockets, same as Arduino UNO 14xGPIO, 2xPWM, 6xADC, 1xUART, 1xSPI, 1xI2C
Network interface	Built-in WiFi Ethernet 10M/100Mbps
Audio out	3.5mm analog audio interface I2S stereo digital audio interface
LCD	LVDS
IR	IR receiver
SATA	SATA Host socket
Camera	MIPI
Battery	Li-Poly Battery Interface
USB	1 x USB host, 1xUSB OTG
Power	5V, 2000mA
Overall Size	121mm x 65mm

 Software Specifications

Items	Description
OS	Ubuntu 12.04 Android 4.2
Language	English
API	All the arduino shield pins are accessible with the provided API It consists of API to access the following interfaces: UART ADC PWM GPIO I2C SPI
Programming language support	C, C++ with GNU tool chain Java with standard Android SDK Python

CamJam edukit

Recently I Recieved one of these smart little pocket money kits which would also make a great stocking filler this Christmas.

It's a five quid tin of tricks that contains a breadboard to work on, button, buzzer, leds and resistors and best of all there is worksheets available that you or your child can follow to teach them coding.

You can also buy extras to build the kit up too or when you have had enough of what's in the box buy your own compenments to mess around with on the breadboard or use the tin for your raspberry pi.

Worksheets are available at http://camjam.me/edukit

Mypifi LCD support board works on all models

My current project on kickstarter for the LCD support board works on all raspberry pi s and fits the model b+ well

In the picture the b+ is housed in a coupe case which protects the pi but doesn't interfere with the gpio pins, in fact it actually supports all boards well which will also in the long term protect the pins.

There's currently less than three weeks to go on kickstarter and already 45% funded for a £6 board, so certainly pocket money stuff.

The link for the project is https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1059145052/mypifi-lcd-board-support

Adding the latest browser to your raspberry pi

You can now add the latest browser to your pi which allows you to view html5 and flash by doing the following commands:

sudo apt-get update 

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade 

sudo apt-get install epiphany-browser