BirdBoxPiCam 2014; #2a Activity Based Power Control Details

Following on from an earlier post, I now have a prototype circuit undergoing testing.

This seems to be behaving as expected, and draws very little current when in standby.

Just to recap, this circuit will power-up my RaspberryPi when activity is detected at the entrance to a bird box (e.g. a bird or an insect breaking the beam between an infrared source and a detector).

What is the difference between a Mapped drive and a simple network share?

The popular internet answer appears to be "very little".

 

But if you are trying to install crappy educational software on a Windows network, you may need to create a mapped drive on any local computers to get it to work.

As I discovered this week, some Windows applications appear to be written such that they expect a mapped drive, rather than simply allowing a user to use a straightforward path to a server shared folder.

Maplin's RaspberryPi GPIO Breakout Board

Just bought one of these little kits to connect my RaspberryPi to a breadboard.

Well, it was cheap...only £3.39.

I was actually looking for a set of jumper leads, and wondering whether I needed male-female, female-female or some other sexual combination, when I spotted this kit from Maplin.

RaspberryPi Case; add a GPIO slot

Our Computer Science students have just started hanging components on the RaspberryPi GPIO.

However, the nice cases that protect the RaspberryPi also make it difficult to connect wires to the P1 connector.

Rather than removing the lid from all boxes completely, I decided to cut a slot in the top, just large enough for nimble young fingers to connect insulated jumper wires.

Class Notes; #2 Using Breadboard for the Flashing LED Circuit

Teachers having to train themselves for the new English Computer Science syllabus, have a lot to learn in a short time.

 

Many have no experience of handling and working with electronic components, as I recently discovered.

So this post expands upon my earlier post: How To Drive LEDs From A RaspberryPi, and is taken directly from my class notes produced for young Computer Science students.

RaspberryPi GPIO; Using Gambas

The digital IO on the RaspberryPi is very useful for reading switches and turning on relays, lights and driving small motors....

...and controlling the digital IO with Gambas turns out to be really easy.

Here is a very basic example which makes use of the wiringPi library written by Gordon Henderson.

Class notes; How To Drive LEDs From A RaspberryPi

I was asked recently to help with a RaspberryPi training session for a group of young Computer Science pupils.

 

So this post is simply the hand-outs from this session.

BirdBoxPiCam 2014; #2 Activity Based Power-up & Power-down

Although the power drawn by the RaspberryPi is very low for a computer, its still significant for battery powered equipment such as my bird box monitor.

So here is an idea to reduce power consumption during periods of inactivity.

During the early weeks of the nesting season, visits by birds to garden nest boxes may be infrequent. Typically here in southern England, garden birds may start checking out nest sites during February, with more activity running into April, when nest building typically gets under way.

RaspberryPi: keeping time without the internet

The RaspberryPi does not have a real time clock (rtc) so normally requires an internet connection to reset the time and date from a time server.

 

For my BirdBox 2014 project I need to be able to time-stamp files & data, but it would not matter if the system time was a few minutes out either way, so I have been considering the options.

One popular solution is to connect a small rtc board to the RaspberryPi. These boards are small, low cost, and include a lithium backup battery.