While waiting for my new Raspberry Pi 3 board to arrive so I can blog about it – I thought I’d jot down some thoughts following a conversation with a pal of mine in Canada. Today, a new Raspbian release came out supporting the 64-bit Raspberry Pi 3. Hopefully it…
Month: February 2016
Raspberry Pi 3
So firstly, in case you’ve been on a desert island, what is a Raspberry Pi 3 and why do you need one right now? The Raspberry Pi is a general purpose tiny computer with USB, Ethernet, audio, HDMI etc and this works using an SD card to store the operating…
The Saturday Update
For those interested – I’ve been quiet the last couple of days as we’re ploughing ahead getting the new office up and running – got walls up and ceiling almost done – got power and Ethernet in last last night and today we’re off to get wall sockets and worktops.…
Nextion Progress
Things have come quite a way since my first stab at using the Itead Nextion displays with an ESP8266. I now have a fully working thermostat display running on MQTT – but I’m beginning to wonder if 56KBaud is pushing it a bit for the software UART. Now that I’m…
SUDO without Password
Sometime I wonder… So we have the SUDO command to keep everyone happy in Linux (Debian in this case) by not using ROOT – and on the Raspberry Pi that’s just fine – but every other board I’ve tested you seem to spend more time putting in the password. Then…
From Zero to Star Trek
Or controlling your IOT by voice. 2 days ago I was no-where with this – and today I “stand on the cusp” of having full voice control with just one minor issue bugging me – and as this subject has received so much attention I thought I’d better try to…
Coding the Nextion
At the risk of repeating myself (apologies to regular readers for this first para) the Nextion display is in fact a range of touch-LCD displays from small to large. The thing they all have in common is a a complete programming environment where, by downloading a desktop graphical tool, you…
Node Red Grandfather Clock
So I was thinking about all those wasted cycles on my Pi – which is speech and MP3 equipped, As I sat quietly coding (my wife Maureen is in the USA right now) listening to the hard disk on the Sky box chunking away (well, when they said you could…
Free Dials and Buttons
I wonder if we can all do each other favour here. Every time I go looking for buttons, slide switches, gauges etc for my projects – like the Nextion – at least 90% of the so called FREE ICONs and PNGs – by the time you get to it –…
IOT Speech recognition
Here’s a thought – now this might be available – but I can’t find it.. Most of us have phones – some Android, some Apple, few Microsoft. So sticking with Android for now – the latest Android phones (I have the HTC One M8 with Android 6.0 which is marvellous)…
Enter the Pixie Pro
This morning I went off to the post office to pick my new new Pixie Pro – making sure that the tax man got his share and that the post office got their rip-off “handling fee” of £8 – yes that’s £8 pounds not dollars. Not that you have any…
Cheap Raspberry Pi
Now before you say anything – they don’t even know I’m writing this!! Remember when I was in Chicago a while back (well, you’ll only remember if you’re a regular reader)… I bought a Pi Zero and a Raspberry Pi dirt cheap at somewhere called MicroCenter in Chicago. Well they’re…