Robots...and Soldering

After receiving a HapPi robot for Christmas it was time to really think about getting a soldering iron, or at least finding someone who had one. I should have known that my Dad had one set up on his workbench in his "man room", so a good start once I checked it out, just needed the time to get the robot controller out to assemble. This is far tricker than it sounds with 2 children running around and 3 dogs also running around, but on New Year's Day I managed to get some time to myself to sneak off and do some soldering.

At this point it should be mentioned that I don't think that I have soldered anything since my GCSE Design and Technology course - lets not discuss how long ago that was! So after setting up my work area, which consisted of moving all the random stuff off my Dad's desk to another part of the room, and piling a load of tools into a corner I was ready. I cautiously turned on the soldering iron and set a middle temperature, no luck as it was not hot enough to melt the solder so once it was turned up I was off. I decided quickly that I both like and dislike soldering, I like trying to make it all neat and tidy but not trying to rectify any mistakes that you makes as that is tricky. I discovered this as I soldered a hole shut by accident, after trying unsuccessfully to sort it out another pair of hands were required.

I am pretty pleased with my soldering, it is quite tidy - according to my Dad. So now comes the task of putting the body together, but I shall save that for another day.

Having a Raspberry Pi and going to Picademy has made me try lots of different things that I won't have come across. The students at school love having a go at Minecraft Pi and using Python to code different things - generally arming TNT and so on, trying out networking the Pis together and lots of other practical computing they otherwise would not have tried out.

A soldering iron anyone....

I was given this the other day. Will have to go and root out a soldering iron though, the kids will love it once I have put it together.

I think I will try and add a button for the boys to play with it.

A bit late...

After wondering what to do for Open Evening, I decided on using the Raspberry Pis and demonstrating  Sonic Pi and using the Picamera with the GPIO pins to rig up a button. Great idea, but what about set up? Luckily I had my Sixth Form students last thing who helped me with putting the stations together, I had them try out Sonic Pi with the mini speakers and write a quick Python program to allow the cameras to take individual images all night and store them.

There was lots of interest in the Pis from both students and parents alike, with many asking about how to get one and what other things could be done on it. After the evening I had many positive comments of how impressed parents were with the use of the Pis. Roll on buying the next set so we can run full Raspberry Pi classes!

Raspberry Pi in School

A bit late on posting this but better than never. As the Sixth Form have to look into networking I decided to get out the Pis to get the students to have a go at setting a static IP address and then using the chat program to send messages to each other. A nice intro into how networking works, well we had some fun getting it all to work correctly and then playing with the code to make it do other things. It also brought up more questions about how to get more Pis to link together and how to share documents and so on.

The class then moved onto hooking up some buttons and LEDs, along with the buzzer! To look at the client and server working together, this caused far more entertainment with the changing of the code to make the hardware do a whole set of different things. Raspberry Pis have been a hit, every lesson they want to do something on them, and I am getting project ideas for their coursework based what they could do with the Pi.

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!