Category: Linux board projects

No comments

Compact Raspberry Pi camera

  By

There are several Raspberry Pi based camera projects. PiJuice decided to build something even smaller, so he came up with compact camera project. He’s chosen Raspberry Pi A+ which is smallest Rasberry Pi. Next thing he had to deal with was power supply. He used PiJuice module which takes care of charging battery and generating necessary voltage for Raspberry Pi. There is one obvious choice for camera module so nothing to add here. On a back side of camera he attached Adafruit 2.2” TFT screen which comes with four navigation buttons. He also laser cut basic enclosure to make it look like real camera that can be taken anywhere for capturing photos and videos. Continue reading

No comments

E-ink display for Raspberry Pi

  By

Raspberry Pi is a powerful but small Linux based computer board that gained its popularity in the hobby world. It has everything you need to build a computer except display. Since there are no DSI based display modules available, people try to solve this problem in several ways. They use HDMI based displays, composite video, serial monitors. Probably most of small projects rely on GPIO where they plug in their custom boards with various types of LCDs. This seems to be OK, but running such displays usually require additional driver/software to run and it occupies I/O pins, that can be used for other purposes. While we are waiting for official Raspberry Pi DSI display we have to deal with those workarounds. The choice is really big. You can find may… Continue reading

No comments

3 Weird and Wonderful Raspberry Pi Innovations

  By

The Raspberry Pi is one of the most acclaimed inventions of our days – a credit card sized computer with the potential to improve our lives in an incredible variety of ways, and educate a whole new generation of hardware and software engineers. In honor of the recent Pi Day (March 14th, or 3/14) and the recent launch of Raspberry Pi 2, here are five of the most interesting (and sometimes weird) innovations we could find that were built using the microcomputer of the future. 1. Picrowave by Nathan Broadbent According to his website, Made by Nathan, the web and mobile developer Nathan Broadbent first thought of a smarter microwave after reading a post on Reddit about how food should come with QR codes that tells the microwave what to… Continue reading

No comments

Comparing GPIO speed between Raspberry Pi 1 and 2

  By

Raspberry Pi version 2 has changed playing rules between Linux boards. With raspberry Pi 2 here came faster CPU with four cores, RAM jumped to 1GB, so naturally we would expect faster speeds everywhere including GPIO. Joonas have ran several benchmarks to show the increase in numerical values, so we could make conclusions. He run several common tests with available software libraries and GPIO access methods. Results actually look very promising as for almost all methods speed increased twice and more. For instance Python Rpi.GPIO based raw speed increased from 70kHz to 243kHz. Shell command driven IO became also 2.5 times faster. So this is great news for everyone who was struggling to the limits. For more info and benchmark tests go to GitHub. Continue reading

No comments

Another successful implementation of Raspberry Pi cellular phone

  By

There are many implementations of DIY cell phones based on Arduino and Raspberry Pi, so if you want something different than market can offer, you can start working on tour own version. Tyler lately introduced pretty slim version of RasPi phone called tyfone. Here raspberry Pi interfaces FONA – cellular module and 3.5” touch LCD display. Feature list extends with RTC and 5MP camera which enables taking HD photos. Raspberry Pi interfaces LCD module via SPI interface so, there are plenty of GPIO left for other periphery. FONA talks to Raspberry Pi via UART. Since Pi is a Linux driven board it easily houses other standard interfaces like WiFi. By default it comes with USB, and other RasPi interfaces. Typhone is powered with 1200mah LiPo battery which can be charged… Continue reading