Swinging the Picaxe on Linux

One of the more unusual gifts from Santa this year was a plastic bag containing a pcb, a USB cable and a small selection of components.

It must be 15 years since I found myself working in a development team alongside a crazy Picaxe fanatic ("hi Ian G").

I promised at the time that I would get familiar with these little critters one day. So I guess that day has finally arrived.

BirdBoxPi2015: Using RaspberryPi model A+

I'm running way behind this year, but I've now started building a RaspberryPi powered nest box for the 2015 season.

The 2014 system will be re-assembled, bolted to the side of a tit box and used again without any real changes.

But the 2015 controller version will be much smaller, and hopefully will fit inside a bird box without the need for its own enclosure.

DHT22 Temperature/RH Sensor on the RaspberryPi

The DHT22 is a low cost, single wire sensor which measures temperature and relative humidity.

I started out just playing around with this thing, just wiring it to a Pi to see it working.

But I got sucked in much deeper into thinking about how it worked and assessing its limitations.

The RaspberryPi model A+

Following on from an earlier post about the B+, I'm now the proud owner of an A+.

As I'd previously produced a simple table showing relative current consumption, I feel obliged to update this by including the new Pi.

The new A+ is smaller and cheaper than the A/B/B+ models, making it an ideal candidate for many projects including media players and headless, wifi monitors.

RaspberryPi + wiringPi + Gambas + 16x2LCD module

There are plenty of 16 character, 2 line LCD modules available for home projects using controllers like PICs or Arduino.

In this post I'm using a RaspberryPi with Gambas, while relying on Gordon's wiringPi api to do the heavy lifting.

It turned out to be a bit tricky using the existing wiringPi libraries, but I think I've found a usable work-around.