Busy raspberry pi weekend

Busy weekend, started building a piduino and weather lcd display on some humble pi k001 boards. Still got some work to do on them.

Next up was a pn532 board, although it couldn't read my works ID card it could read my credit cards rfid. Just need to get my other two rfid boards running then  I could have a cloner/emulator.

Then was the 8x8 led board which following raspi.tv video got it working, so have now ordered a second one.

Lastly was my 2.8" TFT touchscreen I bought off eBay from texy in thatcham. Never got this working before but after a few hours tonight it was soon working but found once it powered down I would lose the screen again so hopefully I will get that sorted soon, although I followed the instructions, something must be missing somewhere, oh well.

One more thing was the ledborg on my server pi can now change the light by ssh so can light up my hallway in the colour I feel like.

Bourton wander

Today we went for a walk near Swindon, place called bourton. Weather was fine till we got there then a very fine drizzle for a while which was nice in the 20c heat.

All caches were easy to find covering just under five miles in an hour and half.  The puzzle cache with padlock had been broken which was a shame, so I tried to repair it the best I could. On the way to the next one we disturbed a deer in the field which bounded off.  Later on we had trouble at shiny getting the logbook out which someone had jammed in and was unretrievable so marked the logbook with my green pen and let the owners know.

A lot of the footpaths around this bit were unmarked and guess work was required, but all in all a nice series for me and frodo  and signed in as team text tftc

Raspberry pi stuff

So with a weekend looking poor, between sleeping I decided to mess around with my raspberry pi s.

First project was the rfid module, although it detected my work ID and showed this through the blinking led I soldered to it as an unoffical mod that was as far as I got.

Next up I got my raspberry usb power supply up and running 4 usb sockets with one at 1.1amp for the pi. The power supply is 5v 3amp so copes well like my other usb power supply and this takes less than 3 watts of power according to the lcd electric monitor we have in the kitchen equating to about a penny an hour dead cheap compared to my huge psu to run loads of pi a running in at 20 watts.

Next up was piglow and now I have it working, after looking at various scripts and playing with them all I eventually made an emergency flashing blue/red strobe.

Lastly out came the old ledborg which I have since ordered a second and this sits on my piserver to show CPU usage.

If anyone can help me with the rfid 630 that would be grateful especially if in python.

Marcham series

Out to finish the second half with frodo today although I got many ftf s on the first half. The series took us past many caches we had done in the past bringing back many memories there was even a cache named after me which I got ftf on.

Although we did these mid morning it was already mid 20 s and very hot. Maybe the cache owners will expand and make this series the Marcham 200 series TFTc s a great series.

My new cache lockinge

Out today with Footloose&frodo looking at a location we thought could do with another cache and bingo my cache fits perfectly, now the listing is rated 1 higher on difficulty but that's because I won't divulge on where it is or any hints, just that its a ammo can so shouldn't be hard.

We also took a walk around the millenium planetary at lockinge which footloose enjoyed as normally its only me and frodo.

So go and enjoy, this is a heads up that its been placed for the ftf sharks and picture below.

lets increase quality even if it means cut back on quantity.

I have spoken to many other cachers and the view seems to be the same, to many micros or crap containers placed on the backs of signs on housing estates to the soggy film canister chucked aimlesly into holly that could easily take a bigger cache.

now im sure some of you will remember back to getting 20 in a day was a challenge and all these were a good sandwich box to ammo box in size and the odd few even bigger than that.

Im sure you will also remember opening them first few caches that had loads of decent swag inside to swap, the geocoins and tb's that you cant fit into micros or filmpots but went well into these bigger caches. 

The way many are seeing it is that it be harder to encourage families to take up this hobby if poor quality gets placed out, lets improve the quality and make this game go back to the standards that we all remember but doesnt seem to be about these days. 

Feel free to cut and paste this to regional boards and see if we can get the quality back up by the end of the year.

happy caching all.

Placing a geocache and not geotrash

Have you found a nice location that others will enjoy? Then why not place a cache there. Don't be fooled by the many micro film pots out there a proper decent cache should be a Tupperware container about the size of a lunchbox with swappables inside, a logbook, pencil and room for trackables to be dropped off.

Like the picture above, something for everyone and no doubt will gain you favourite points. 

You will have to go out and check on it once in a while, but at least you will get more satisfaction with a well stocked container and know that if a newbie starts caching and finds it as one of their first few caches that it will hook then and might encourage them to place a similar size and quality cache, after all its about quality not quantity.

The Hubsan X4 with camera

After losing one yesterday i had to order a new one today, £25 a pop is cheap for these things but not a cheap hobby if you have to keep replacing them. Anyhow I got an old keyring camera, took off the mic and took it out of its keyfob case before strapping it to the hubsan with electrical tape. Considering it ways a bit considering the weight of the hubsan it lasted on its two minute flight with battery left. Next thing i need to do is change the camera angle as it was positioned at a 45 degree angle and found it didnt get as much as i wanted, around 2min 10 sec you will see what i wanted to get, but then this a learning curve and something to do next time. http://youtu.be/HVlKU4DvGyc

Onion pi ap anonymity

Decided to last night try this project.

Firstly I downloaded a fresh raspbian image before following adafruits how to make an access point with pi. Once this was done I could move onto the OnionPi project. Followed the guide on adafruit site and bingo.

Finally using ipchicken.com to check my IP address is different.

Just a word of warning, this can spark off auto lock of your google mail as I found last night as you will be getting new ip addresses from around the world. According to google my account had been opened in the USA, Japan and France in a space of a few minutes but as I knew I had been accessing it there wasn't a problem. 

So there we go stop prism following you and take this ap with you to plug into your mates router so you can connect anonymously there too (no need for their wifi password).

A cure for cache saturation ???

Something I've been thinking of for a while, sooner or later many places will be so full of caches that no new ones will be allowed, but many of them crappy micros thrown down in crap locations just for the sake of it.

Now after talking to a few cachers today of which a couple have already reviewed their caches archiving a few which they felt were crap and no benefit I thought I would say what came of it.

Everyone I spoke to agreed that if you find a place a regular cache could fit within 500 ft of a micro that the bigger container takes prescient and is allowed with the owner of the micro given time to get the old cache back or allow the new cache owner to collect the old one.

This would also work in the event of a regular cache being upstaged by an extra large cache.

After all how we supposed to get new people interested when most of the caches out there are micro film pots often with mouldy paper within? If I had found one as my first I don't think I would be caching now, however my first cache was pooky Luke's a regular size ammo box with lots of swag inside.

Lets get the quality back up, nice location and a good size cache, banish the crappy micro.

So what do you reckon ?