raspberry pi news ticker

Ive been trying to do more with the max7219 for a while. Whilst playing with an 8x8 square can get you started a 16x8 gets fun but addictive.

Last week i got a 32x8 board through which is basically 4x 8x8 matrixes still not happy i ordered another that arrived today and soldered the two together so i have 8x 8x8 matrixes and with editing led.matrix() from 4 to 8 it worked.

The wiring was a case of wiring vcc to 3.3v. ground to ground. Din to pi pin 19. Cs to pin 24 and the last one clk to 23.

With the help my last post and rmhull s github code for the 7219 chip i was soon running various code.  Next was to get a news ticker working and after a search i found feedparser a python module which can be installed with apt-get python-feedparser.

Running into a bit of difficulty i turned to twitter with what i had coded so far and help from @rgee0 aka richard gee we got there in getting a news ticker on screen.

Next was to merge the two codes and bingo worked on first attempt

Here is my newsticker in action.

There we go feel free to add and change the code and comment below.

Keyes 16x8 led matrix add on board

I bought one of these keys 16x8 led boards a while back but couldnt get it working. Well a lie i couldnt get both screens working.

So tonight whilst looking for something different I found this board and decided to give it another try. On googling i kept finding arduino set ups which wasnt what i wanted and after using git clone https://github.com/rm-hull/max7219.git i searched for projects which used mr hulls code and came across one which pointed me to another github repo.

So here we go:

First enable SPI in sudo raspi-config (look in advanced menu)

next type:

sudo git clone https://github.com/leon-anavi/raspberrypi-matrix-led-max7219

cd raspberrypi-matrix-led-max7219

sudo python setup.py install

There we go. Some good example codes there and after some playing around i managed to get it to display the time.

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Reintroduction to caching

After the passing of my beloved dog Frodo a couple of weeks ago I decided to brush the cobwebs off my basic looking mountain bike that I had been given a while back and decided to take it for a ride and do a few geocaches as a carrot to the donkey to ensure i didnt give up to quick.  First thing i noticed was I lost my pen. after trying to sign in with a dirty stick I managed to find a waxy crayon in the puncture repair kit and decided this was my pen for the day.

It was nice to get back into the countryside and felt weird as this was where me and Frodo had come many times, but in recent years we had gone from unlimited miles per walk, to 10, then 6, down to 3 then less than a mile.

I was disappointed to the fact there were not any traditional size caches just tiny boring micros.

I had been for a while playing Ingress another location game but after being caught up in a widespread ban for allegedly breaking TOS which to this date I still dont have a clue but it be something to do with travelling to fast between locations or something stupid to which i have lodged a appeal as reaching level 14 without cheating and playing within the rules feels like an insult.  The other option would be to start all over again and work my way back up and with what i know these days it would take long, but still why should I after the way they have treated me in this mass world wide ban sweep that took place last week.  Ive heard that those that appeal have a very low chance of having their accounts reinstated so who knows I should hopefully be one of those.

But on a huge positive I thought about my raspberry pi geocaching device. It was made with a pi model b. now thinking about it I could remake it as a wrist band device with a pi zero and a long lead to a battery pack in my bike bag and have a new gps system. maybe i will work on this idea next.