Success with the camera = Happy Raspberry Pi Time!

From the success of yesterday and how much my son enjoyed it all I felt motivated to get on and do some more. After popping into school to pick up a different camera module and a bigger SD card I thought that I would give the camera one last chance. 

I set up a new SD card and plugged in the camera module, and ran the raspistill, then held my breath expecting the camera to hang again, instead I got a great image of the fish tank at a wonky angle! But success, so it is either the new SD card or the camera module, I have not been back to visit the old stuff yet to find out which one it is as I thought "It's working! Let's get something done!"

From this success I went on to test it out with the python picamera test code and again it all worked, so I went on and put the button in to take an image. A less wonky image of the fish tank this time.

Next was to try out a bit of time-lapse work, after putting the Raspberry Pi and the camera together with a power supply and mount on a cup-a-soup box with some blue tack and a elastic band I was ready to try it all out. I decided to push the boat out and use putty to remote control the Raspberry Pi as I wanted to be able to position the camera in a better place than if it was attached to the lap-dock. I set up the putty to link the Raspberry Pi to it, did a quick search to find a simple way to create a time-lapse with the camera and then set it up. I liked the fact the I could use the raspistill to create the time-lapse as it made doing a quick test some much easier, in fact working out the milliseconds was the difficult part.

From this quick bit of time-lapse, I put it together into a very rough mp4, again using one line in the LX Terminal to put it together. Super stuff! Shame the content of the images is not as exciting as the actual creation of it!

Here is the video in all it's glory!?!

Rewind and Start Again - and introduce a 3 year old!

After getting a little frustrated with the Pi camera module, I decided to go back to basics with the electronics and refresh myself using the GPIO and so on. I had bought the Adventures in Raspberry Pi book and had the electronics to go with it so I thought it would be good to work through it so I can then use it in my lessons next year.

I also thought it would be a great way to show my son, Henry, some different stuff on a computer, as he usually gets to watch my husband play Hearthstone or use some apps on the iPad (puzzles and colouring mainly for Henry - and Daisy the Dinosaur is a firm favourite). So to get him involved I put together the LED and button, and to get a photo of it working I got Henry to press the button for me, and he is now hooked on what it can do.

After the success of the button, I went ahead and put the marshmallow button together, looked on by the new puppy - name today has been Bard. I say looked on, but supported quietly under the table.

Marshmallows were dug out of the cupboard, and after wrestling them off Henry I managed to get one plugged in and off we went destroying them as we squished them. Henry got involved by replacing the  marshmallows after they got too squashed to use anymore. We also changed the python code to get it to say hello to him.

From the frustration of the other day, to having so much fun with my son, playing with the simple parts of the GPIO - roll on trying out the Jukebox project!

Very Frustrating!

We have just got a new puppy and I thought it would be great to make a puppy cam to see what he is getting up to at night, and recording an image every minute or hour.

After getting my Pi Camera Module, plugging it in, enabling camera doing the updates and so on, no luck. I can get power to the camera but it just hangs and won't take an image. Any Python program I run just creates an image with no data in it. I have been to all the usual places and tried out the solutions but having no luck!

Will be looking at using a webcam to see if I can get it to work. If anyone has any ideas about why my camera module in not working please tell me, my husband can't take much more of my swearing!

Success, one working robot!

After a fruitless day of trying to get the robot and laptop talking to one another, I gave it up as a bad job and blamed the school Wi-Fi for causing all my problems and decided testing at home would be easier.

Checked out the IP address of the Raspberry Pi, and then put everything back together to test it out, one swift run of PuTTY, entered the IP address, closed my eyes and waited.......

Opened eyes, nope still nothing going on......waited a little longer and........hurrah, the prompt for login details and success.

Quickly ran the test programs to see if everything was working correctly and was more than pleased to see that it was. Just need to sit down and go through it all now, but that can wait for another day.