Amazon Dash Button Cheerlight Controller

I needed a way to control the cheerlights that could be useful for friends who didnt have or understand twitter.  Whilst to most of us sending the colour or a sentence with a colour included along with the hashtag cheerlights was the norm, I needed to simplify the process.

Firstly obtain an Amazon Dash Button, they are a fiver in uk money, but order the product that the button is for e.g. duracell order batteries, then you get your fiver back making it free.

next was to follow the instructions that come with the dash button, order those batteries (or whatever you chose the dash button to be) then delete the button before re installing it.  when you get to the point of choosing your product again just exit and turn off dash button notification as you dont want to be ordering more product everytime the button is pressed.

next was to write the code, I needed (and failed quite a few times to begin with) code that could look for the mac address of the amazon dash button on my network, after several tries and googling each bit of code that gave me errors I found and edited some lines and bingo the hello world message I had been looking for telling me the button had been pressed and the ip address of the router.

I then tried to incorporate a way that this could be tweeted and colour and went for a random message option where I had a dozen ready made sentences with a different colour mentioned in each followed by the hashtag.  I ended up using tweepy which is easily installed with a apt-get install python-tweepy and went to an old blog I had about a twitter camera I built for my wedding and hacked away at the code taking all the bits i needed and writing it to just tweet once when code was run and it worked.

Next was to merge both scripts into one and run it, bingo it worked and didnt send tons of messages either which was a main worry. 

Future work on this code will be to introduce a way to detect you are not tweeting the colour already in use and also not to tweet a previous colour as twitter doesnt like this.

My code can be found on git hub at github.com/smstext/dashbuttoncheerlights

Getting the best with Seat Ecotrainer

This has been something that's interested me for about ten years now after being placed on a fuel efficient driving course.  Before the course I was lucky to get anywhere near 400 miles on a full tank of petrol, but afterwards I could easily get more plus more with 10-30%

Now on Seat cars we have the Ecotrainer which displays your fuel efficiency as you drive.

So how do I get the most out of it and score high? Well I'm running a TSI although my last car was diesel which could reach between 60-70 mpg, this one i can get nearly 60 mpg but 50-55mpg is normal, let's look at how we can achieve great mpg and 97-99% eco points.

Firstly is the accelerator pedal, 60% of fuel is wasted accelerating, we want to pull away lightly pressing the accelerator. We also want to change gear around 2,000 rpm for petrol and 2,500 rpm for diesel. Once we are in top gear keeping revs around 2-2.5k and speed around 45-50mph any faster we loose fuel consumption to wind resistance.

We also want to plan in advance, breaking hard means we are wasting fuel, instead letting off the accelerator and using engine speed to naturally slow down instead.

Splitting the road into thirds, getting up speed in first third, maintaining speed in second third and naturally slowing in last third.

Keeping the journey smooth, you will loose points if you don't keep the car in the blue segment and importantly on the left of the screen it will warn you if anything is effecting your fuel economy like wrong gear, too fast or harsh breaking.

Also make sure you don't have unnecessary belongings in the car, a full boot etc can reduce your fuel consumption by 10% also under inflated tyres as this causes resistance and again will affect your mpg.

Roof racks and damaged body work reduces aerodynamics too, along with an unmaintained car, so keep up your services.

Now to the inside of the car again we have air con which uses around a litre an hour and running window heaters will draw on the battery and in turn the engine will work a bit harder to charge the battery, the car radio however doesn't use much.

Lastly don't leave the engine idling, move off straight away, avoid stop start in traffic instead try keeping the vehicle moving slowly, less fuel will be used as the momentum is already there. If you have to stop then ensure you have stop/start enabled as any stops of over 30 seconds will save you fuel and keep your mpg higher.

Making my own BAD USB

I've seen many different tutorials over time, usually you have to buy a certain type of usb stick and then use specific programs to burn a new firmware on it and before you know it spent £20+ on it.

Next I've seen a Raspberry Pi Zero with Poison Tap placed on it, again very obvious plugging in a small computer with various leads which then look very suspicious.

However I soon came across a USB Beetle which is a very tiny computer and can be purchased within a USB case for around £5 including postage off well known auction sites.

The USB Beetle is a tiny USB ATmega32u4, running at 16 MHz with 32kb of memory and can be programmed with Arduino IDE programmer available from the arduino.cc site.

Next download this simple program called rubberduino from https://github.com/zatarra/rubberduino this program translates rubber ducky scripts into Arduino so it can run from the usb beetle and is very easy to set up thanks to a great README.md file.

Now visit usbrubberducky.com and choose the scripts for ideas or write your own. Ducktoolkit.com is another really useful site and certainly worth a look too.

So how does this work? Surely anti virus scanners or blocking programs running from usb should halt this? Well actually no.  If you have looked at the code once ready to transfer from Arduino IDE to this device you would have notice mention of keyboard.h and this is the secret.

The device acts as a keyboard and because of this the computer doesn't see it as a threat. The USB device then types out the commands from the scripts uploaded to the USB device and can do this up to 200 times faster then you or I typing it.  A good example is the rickroll script that opens up a hidden window and plays Rick Astley Never gonna give you up.  It also stops the volume from being turned down leaving the user no other option but to pull the power lead and reboot, however more sinister things can be done like create a reverse shell or add malicious code to the computer.

So no matter how locked down the PC is against usbs/removable drives, a USB that looks like a usb but acts like a keyboard will defeat it.  Next time you see someone plugging in a usb think this, is it a usb or is it a bad USB device.

Laser Cat Laser Cat nothing like a Laser Cat

After sorting out my Raspberry Pi stuff I found an old arduino uno lying around.  This was soon followed by a metal tin from one of my Pimoroni.com orders.  I remembered there was a recent article on building a laser device for cats and as squatter cat has moved in (now named puss) and she loves chasing things I thought I better have a go.

So purchased a pan/tilt kit and a 3 pin laser which later turned out I had both in my bits box.  I then used my Dremel to cut several holes into the tin for wires and power and tried to fix the pan and tilt with glue but just wouldn't stay, so drilled a tiny hole and screwed the motor to the tin, this was the easy part.

Next up was the coding, not had the best of luck with arduinos but found code written by  La Fabrique DIY on his github page at https://github.com/LucasBerbesson/Laser-cat and uploaded it and bingo it works.

NHS hit by ransomware

Been watching this on Twitter this evening and have been intrigued with this so called sophistic attack, lets delve deeper.

The attack is actually using the EternalBlue vulnerability (patched at beginning of March) released over the Easter Weekend among many other vulnerabilities called zero days (as Microsoft had not been made aware of them up to this point) and looked like they had been created by Equation Group for the NSA.  Shadow Brokers managed to obtain these vulnerabilities, possibly by hacking the NSA and then tried to sell them to the highest bidder after originally trying to sell them off for around $1M but paid for in bitcoins, this carried on dropping and dropping till they eventually released the 300mb file on the Easter Weekend.

On closer inspection the exploit ETERNALBLUE works by remotely connecting via SMB & NBT (Windows XP to Windows 2012) and basically hits any windows machine older than Windows 10, hense bring on the ransomware using this exploit plus some FUZZBUNCH exploits and you have WannaCry or WCry 2.0 .

Its been written in C++ and the code is easily viewable as no attempt has been made to hide the code and encrypts the files and adds a .WNCRY extension before asking for a $300-$600 bitcoin ransom.

So does that mean Im vulnerable? providing you have applied all Microsoft security patches including MS17-010 released in March then no you should be safe. also stopping the SMB V1 service which this ransomware/malware uses.

So far it looks like if you can crash Wcrypt it will reset, however if it does infect your machine it will also add the DOUBLEPULSAR backdoor.  Also if www.iuqerfsodp9ifjaposdfjhgosurijfaewrwergwea.com is up the virus exits instead of infecting the host.

This also only affect Microsoft products so linux users you are safe, but again dont open those attachments you were not expecting, use a good anti virus and back up your files on a external device as well as saving very important work to usb sticks.

So far over 70k machines have been infected and thats not just NHS machines; FedEx, Telefonica, Shaheen Airlines are to name a few.

Have these pesky kids got away with it? well the bitcoins can be traced to an extent so they will need to clean the coins by passing them through bitcoin launderers, other people, a few anonymous throwaway bitcoin accounts before finally transfering the money into their own account for each $300 I can see them being left with $100 per ransom or less as this will have to go on and on for months.  Already the ransonware has been dissected and those who know their stuff in bitcoins have already started to track the bitcoins about.

nb: binary blob in pe crypted with password "WNcry@20l7" 

The Annoying Pi

Are practical jokes your forte ? Then this will be right up your street and can be built for around £20 of which probably be a lot less as you will no doubt have these bits already lying around.

So lets get started this is what you need:

Pizero w
Speakerphat
Usb powerbank to power it.

After following the instructions on Pimoroni the makers of speakerphat and the installation of the phat to the pi you will need to do a few things. First is to log on to wifi, there is enough tutorials should you need to ask how to do that.  Next is to search for "annoying .wav" you should find quite a few sites and from here download the files.  I found that renaming the files to something shorter like buzz.wav or scream.wav will make things easier later on.

Next open a command line and go to raspi-config and enable ssh.  It will also be a good time to change any default password so no one else can ssh into your pi.

Once done shutdown the pi, attach battery pack to pi and hide somewhere like under the bed or even back of a cupboard.

Now fire up another pi or computer and start up terminal.

Here we can use nmap to search for all connected devices on our network and get the ip address of the annoying pi or if before you shutdown the pi you do an ifconfig and write down the ip address on the wlan0 line.

Next we need to ssh in and the command will be like this:

sudo ssh pi@192.168.1.5

Pi will be the user name and 192.168.1.5 (will be whatever your device has allocated to it) the ip address.

Next it will ask for password and if correct will go on to ask you further questions of which just reply yes.

Now we are logged in to the pi we can have some fun. Start by logging into the folder the .Wav files are stored in and most likely be Downloads with cd Downloads command.  Here with the ls command we can see all the files.  Next is to launch the files, you could write a random playing script with python but i dont think you will get the element of surprise to what we want.

The next task is to start the sounds, this will be done with the following command with my scream.wav file.

Sudo aplay scream.wav

Now if all has gone well you should be hearing the file being played.  When you have done this with a few files you will be able to choose the files quicker at the command line by pressing the up arrow to go through previous commands and choose the file if previously played quicker.


Have fun and feel free to post any extra tips below.

Raspberry Pi Wedding Twitter selfie camera

I wanted to do something for my wedding to my wonderful wife that was different.  We had already planned a non traditional wedding with lots of different things, but I also wanted something that would be seen as trendy amongst the cool kids.

My daughter told me about a photo booth company but with such a small budget we couldnt afford one then I remembered something similar had been done and after a few googles I found tons of similar ideas but all seem to use Twython and from what I read parts had been depreciated yet I couldnt find the right commands to actually make it work.

So with the latest Raspberry PiZeroW and offical case, old pi camera from another project I began my project.  I had to enable ssh and vnc, personally I prefer sshing in to deal with issues but vnc can be better for trouble shooting.

I then had to make a twitter account (@angelapawedding) and set up the api so i could get the access and consumer tokens and set to read write and got to work, even soldering two pins on the back to 3rd and 4th pin in on the top row to attach a two wire pc wire/button reset switch to.  I figured this way if kids dropped or pulled it at least it could be reconnected with ease.

here is the code:
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

#mypifi feel free to use
#!/usr/bin/env python2.7
import tweepy
import sys
from picamera import PiCamera
from time import sleep
from datetime import datetime
from gpiozero import Button

consumer_key        = 'goes here'
consumer_secret     = 'goes here'
access_token        = 'access token code goes here'
access_token_secret = 'access secret goes here'
button = Button(14)
camera = PiCamera()
auth = tweepy.OAuthHandler(consumer_key, consumer_secret)
auth.set_access_token(access_token, access_token_secret)
api = tweepy.API(auth)

while True:
    button.wait_for_press()
    status = "#LobsterWedding"
    timestamp = datetime.now().isoformat()
    photo_path = '/home/pi/wedding/photo/%s.jpg' % timestamp
    sleep(3)
    camera.capture(photo_path)

    with open(photo_path, 'rb') as photo:
        api.update_with_media(photo_path, status=status)


-------------------------------------------------------------------

The status part of the code is what text you want to display with the picture I used a hashtag so it be easy for people to find pictures or even add theirs for the wedding.  If you are interested, lobsters are supposedly meant to mate and be loyal to the same partner for life.

photo_path is where the picture is stored in my case its stored in folder called wedding in another folder within called photo.  each file saved here is given a unique filename and the program then tweets the latest picture using the twitter api via tweepy.

I saved the file as camera.py and chmod +x the file.  Once in place I vnc'd into it opened up a terminal and ran camera.py and then left it.

So throughout the evening guests (and especially the younger ones) had something to do and even my selfie obsessed daughter had a go as you will see below.  Guests could look up what had been tweeted by the camera at @angelapawedding or by searching the hashtag #lobsterwedding.

Sure the code could be cleaned up a bit more and more could be done with it, but for a quick project between finalising the final parts of the wedding I thought it was pretty good and was also a good talking point to guests.

If you do find a way of tidying up code then feel free to comment below and I will add it to the blog.

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.

.

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.

Lightshowpi

This is another project ive been preparing for christmas.  Ive started small to see how i get on with 2x 20 led 3v lights from the local pound shop and a 3v EL wire again cheap so if it doesnt work ive not lost.

After putting jessie raspbian onto the card and set up the configs i downloaded the lightshowpi software before wiring up the lights to a relay board. I didnt run into any problems as the lightshowpi site is well written.  The only problem i did notice was my relay board being noisy but im hoping by getting a solid state relay board this will solve it.

Here is a link to the youtube video i made.

https://youtu.be/nl5m43lxC2g

MyPiFi Cheerlight Christmas Decor

I decided a while back that after doing my Christmas tree last year in NeoPixel lights http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uoGk0M8YdMA and using Penguin Tutors excellent DJ lights program https://github.com/penguintutor/neopixel-gui that this year I wanted a Cheerlight item (cheerlights.com) like I had run on the Unicorn Hat by ForToffee https://github.com/ForToffee/UnicornHAT Cheerlights is an internet of things where people use twitter and the hashtag #cheerlights and a colour and all items running cheerlights around the world will change colour to the current tweeted colour.

So the hunt was on for something I could use and low and behold I came across this laser cut house that had a battery pack running some plain leds inside.  Once it arrived it was time to strip out the lights and add 13 neopixels inside on a long strip, but to be able to get inside i needed to use a craft knife to carefully remove the roofs and one building.

I originally tried neopixel buttons but everytime i had these in place a wire would snap so from 5 buttons the amount of pixels would go up.

Once in place I soldered the pixels to a MyPiFi neopixel controller board and attached to one of my pi's http://smstextblog.blogspot.com/2015/03/afirstly-thank-you-for-purchasing-this.html .  I then glued everything back together and then followed Tonys great NeoPixel how to guide off of adafruit https://learn.adafruit.com/neopixels-on-raspberry-pi/overview Once all the software was in place I ran the first test and all seemed fine it worked.  However when I tried to run the Cheerlight code from David Bradway https://github.com/davidbradway/cheerlights I just couldnt get it to work.  I asked about and was told two different things to try so tried both at the same time, the first was to use an old pi with 26 pin header and second was to use Raspbian Wheezy and not Jessie which I tried and bingo, it worked I couldnt believe it.

I have since glued the Pi and the display to some thin mdf word to keep it all together and stop the wires being pulled and this is the finished result.

There is still some coding bits to fiddle around with but apart from that this is now ready for the christmas festivities and perhaps after christmas i could remove the christmasy figures off the front and just have this as an everyday cheerlight display for my desk.

Thank you for reading and please share.

ingress the new geocaching game?

As many of you know I use to be a avid cacher, hitting the top 50 finders at one point, first to find 100 5/5 extreme caches and always one looking for quality over quantity. However after a run in with a local reviewer over a number of things that I personally still stand for and the politics that came about, I like many just gave up.  I've not renewed my membership, i rarely look for caches andvi believe I still have caches found on my GPS that I can't be bothered to log yet, so why?

Well its why everyone is moving over to ingress, no more travelling hundreds of miles to get a smiley, getting ivy rash from searching through ivy for a micro or searching through rubbish in a layby for a watersoaked logbook that's seen better days.

I tried munzees in the summer and was bored rather quickly, scanning barcodes and quite often some that were rather weathered and wouldn't scan I needed something better, remembering that a friend had shown me an app last year but was only available for android at the time (now on iPhone too) I decided to give this new game ago.

Its called ingress, its about battling blue team (the best) versus greens (the enemy), you pick a side and that becomes your fraction.  The idea is to take over portals which are places of interest and of which scores you points and linking them to other portals which can be captured and recaptured many times a day in busy spots. Portals are normally submitted to show places a visitor might not go, a work of art, sculpture, area of interest or historic value.  I for one have discovered new things locally as well as visited things I've forgotten and so far other players have been great with advice and support and best of all its free.

So it looks like I've discovered a new way to pass my time and enjoy what's around me without spending loads on petrol travelling to my nearest cache. Take a look and let me know what you think.

Neopixel assembly guide and links

Firstly thank you for purchasing this board, if you have children assembling this then adult supervision will be required along with an explanation of the dangers of electrical voltage.

While I recommend a 5v 4amp power supply from CPC.co.UK you can use an outdoor lights 5v 4amp supply.

Here is what you should have to start with:

1x gpio header
1x PCB board with chip already on board
3x terminal screws

The chip should already be on the board as it was the best way for posting them, they haven't been soldered but can be although it should work how it is, please ensure the dimple is at bottom as per pic.

Using any method you have to hold board in place start by soldering the gpio header being careful not to melt the chip.

Next solder on the screw terminals ensuring they are the correct way as per picture.

When finished the board should look like this.

 Next use either the power supply from my original Xmas neopixel post or the recommended 5v 4amp one from CPC.co.UK

Cutting the end off use a multimeter to figure out the wires, on mine the wire with the line down it was positive and the plain black was negative. Strip the ends just enough to screw into the plus and negative connection on the board and place some electrical tape around each wire so if they get pulled to hard or come out they won't short or be exposed. It can be a tight fit so cutting some of the bare wire off might be needed. If attaching a outside light power supply then two good bits of wire will do after you have checked the output and adjusted it with the pot terminal on the unit and a multimeter.

Once done screw the neopixel power to the positive and negative on the board screw terminal called neo. Next screw in the data lead to the screw terminal called data. The NC stands for not connected and does nothing.

Now you are ready to program it. Please look at my Xmas neo lights blog link for more details on coding and demo code.

Or alternatively visit Tony Dicolas excellent write up and code on Adafruit

As usual info and links can be found on my kickstarter 

Energenie infrared remote controlled socket

I got one of these the other week and have been testing it.

It's a kit of an infra red add on board and infra red socket. The socket can be programmed to be turned on or off with any remote control and was so easy that my elderly anti technology mother was able to work it and ideal for her to turn on/off her heater or whatever else you want to use the socket for.  Also with the long lead the socket can be placed out of reach, but the infra red part can be stuck with the enclosed sticky pad somewhere in sight of the remote control.

Although I'm struggling to get my infra red add on board to work, I did try the demo one at a recent show at betts 2015 and was spot on. Would I get one erm ok, but if can I pick my automation gear I would go for the radio sockets as they can be hidden but only controlled with the supplied remote or add on board where as this any remote control or this add on board.

Rav Power 6 in one WD02

I got a Ravpower filehub through this week, an RP WD02 model and thought I would run it through its paces.

Now normally when I attend Raspberry Jams I have to take an extension lead and battle for a power socket or take an external battery pack, then so I can connect to the pi either a big laptop or my phone plus the tp link access point plus lead to power it off the external battery.

Not with this, its a six in one device. It has a wireless router that you can use as an access point or link to your mobile or plug into a hotel internet socket for internet. You also have a micro sd card slot that can be used as a card reader or a nas file server, I'm guessing it can only take up to 64gb like what I'm using but couldn't find details anywhere so enough for 15 good quality films, over 10k 3 minute music tracks or just use it for your backup images.

Next was the battery which from flat took me 4 hours to charge with the official Raspberry Pi power adapter and best of all, with one of my add on boards flashing leds last for over the length of an average pi jam to an incredible 12 hours, 14 hours with my seven segment clock display making this more than brilliant for travelling as now I don't need all these extra things just the pi, this with its included lead will also fits from the hub to the pi power socket, wifi dongle and my smartphone (plus the add on board I'm showing) simples.

So do I recommend it? well I love the tp link travel router/access point, but this was so much easier in my opinion to set up and price wise considering how many items are built into this is good value, so yes, now it means I can attend jams again without having to lunge around lots of boxes of kit.

Review: RAVPower® Deluxe 14000mAh USB External Battery Portable Power Bank Charger Pack

I bought this as a whim back in October last year.  Reason being I attend lots of Raspberry Jams, yet power points can often be an issue.

Whilst I have over a dozen power packs now running various projects, very few feel well built, in fact this one feels like if it's dropped it won't spill its load, it also feels strong and sturdy and also looks great.

It comes with a nice travel bag to keep all the leads together, has a built in torch and two usb sockets with one at 1amp the other at 2 amps meaning you can run  two Raspberry Pi s together or run the HDMIPi screen with no problems.

I've tested both ports with a multimeter and can confirm it kicks out a healthy 5.25v and the ampage is what it claims. Many companies will claim that there's can run at the packaged volts and amps but very few do and this is the only one that can run the HDMIPI.

So running time, my wildlife pi camera lasted the entire night with plenty of charge left on it and when running off one  of these at events I can safely say I know will never run out of juice too.  I believe I can get nearly two full days out of it which would be plenty for the wildlife cam.

Yes this is also weighty and takes longer to charge, but if this is an issue go for a smaller device as this is big and heavy due to the amount of juice it holds.

So do I recommend one? Would I buy another? The answer is yes and as my other power packs pack up I will be replacing them with more of these.  They also come with a good warranty if you register on their site and good customer services so you know that if there was a problem which I doubt you will have, that it will be sorted fast.

Raspberry pi robot and camera

I had bought the parts a while back which consisted of a makeblock starter kit and a few extra bits n pieces from the little British robot company and also a control board from Dawn Robotics plus their pan/tilt camera kit.  Dawn robotics also do a raspberry pi image for free or for a small fee the image already on a  sd card.

So after many months of screwing and unscrewing, adding and unadding I got to the stage I could actually test it tonight.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lBs85aJMST0

It's very simple to set up and I'm still yet to add infra red light to work in conjunction with the camera. I currently have a pi supply bright light kit but need to figure out the wiring so I can get it working.

4 boards for the Raspberry Pi

Whilst stocks last there is an offer for all four MyPiFi boards on eBay £18 delivered (uk) or plus delivery (row) they are for the LED board, LCD add on module, 10 LED board and the I/O port expander board giving your Pi more inputs and outputs.

Available on eBay for a short time when they have gone they won't be re added

http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&alt=web&id=181629776059 

Assembly guides and demo codes can be found on www.mypifi.net

32x32 rgb display with a raspberry Pi

Never really got that far with a 32x32 display, ok I followed Raspberrypi-spy s guide and got it to display things but wanted to try more out like Peter Onions excellent RGB demo.

So after running into difficulties compiling the c code from peteronion.org.uk/PiProgs I emailed Peter, I needed to add -lm to the end of the line and bingo worked straight away.  The demos that Peter has included include Tetris, Clock, game of life, Squares and kaleidoscope and shows how a simple screen can be made to do literally anything.

I've since seen pictures over the tinternet showing the same displays being used to show pictures and framed in a frame too.

Many ideas and possibilities for this great rgb device.

MyPiFi add on boards for Raspberry Pi http://pages.ebay.com/link/?nav=item.view&alt=web&id=181629776059