Categories Archives: Hardware

Raspberry PI controlling an Arduino via the pyfirmata protocol

The Raspberry PI is good for a lot of things from computer clusters to home automation but its missing a few things such as a real time clock, terminal/barrel power connector, or  Analog pins.  The Arduino has analog pins that can be read by the USB virtual serial port from the Raspberry PI. In MagPI issue 7, has a great article on [...]

Raspberry PI and the GPIO pins

This week I have been playing with the Rapberry PI, Python and the Python GPIO pins library. Software I started by formatting a SD Card with the Raspbian “wheezy” (2012-12-16) image from Raspberry PI’s website. I followed this tutorial on how to set up the Raspberry PI for the first time. I then enabled SSH so I don’t have to attache a monitor, keyboard [...]

RGB LED POV Globe – Research

I have decided to create a 64x RGB LED POV Globe for Maker faire and Buring man this year. This project is a factor more complex then any other project that I have attempted before, and quite a bit more expensive. My project will be similar to this project watch?v=4KN0xoHsUiI But my project has more LEDs, it will play almost [...]

Canon S90 CHDK How do you get to the record mode?

Canon S90 CHDK CHDK (Canon Hack Development Kit) is a community build open source alternative firmware for canon cameras. CHDK features are; RAW files, bracketing, full manual control over exposure, Zebra-Mode, Live histogram, Grids, and most important scripting. Upgrading to this custom firmware can be tricky but they have tried to make it as easy as possibly with the application CardTricks. I have installed this firmware on several [...]

Flickr’s camera trend data

When you take a snap shot with your digital camera your camera also saves some extra meta information to the file called Exif data. Different camaras save different information to the Exif portion of your picture most of the time it will contains information like Manufacturer, Model, Orientation, Software, Date and Time, YCbCr Positioning, Compression, [...]