Backups are good. If you don’t know why this is so, you should know that many people have had mental or nervous breakdowns because they didn’t backup their data before their computer crashed horribly.
Martin O’Hanlon over at Raspberry Pi Rehab has written an excellent guide and tutorial on how to backup your Raspberry Pi.
Eric over on trouch.com has written a review of this book which shows how to use a Raspberry Pi, an Arduino and a Cooking Hacks bridge shield to achieve home automation. Read the review here
Jeff Skinner has written an excellent article, with code examples, on creating a simple network connection between a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino using XBee devices.
So, if you ever wondered what the heck these XBee thingies are, go over to his site and read his article.
Bart has reported on a successful flight of a Raspberry Pi powered quadrocopter piloted by friend Matthew. Read more here or view the video below.
This is just a quick post to share with you an image taken with the camera module on ‘night’ exposure mode. Bear in mind this was taken just before 5.30am in the UK so the night sky was already lightening towards sunrise and I’m pointing not much off horizon level. It gives me hope that the next time we have a clear night (and I remember to do it, *cough cough, embarrassed glance*) I’ll be able to go to a darkened area and take a decent photograph straight up. I’m also going to experiment with pointing the camera at the moon and adding a 50x magnification eyepiece (focus will be a challenge).
Douglas Burke commented on my previous timelapse photography post about possibly uploading night sky pictures to Astrometry.net. This is an interesting service which creates astrometric meta-data for every astronomical images. In other words, you upload a photo and they identify the celestial bodies that are present in the picture. They also allow you to download the source code for the project. So, I’m going to add this to my list for my SpacePi astronomy project – a) upload to Astrometry b) compile the code on the Pi and see if I can get the celestial identification being done on the Pi itself.
In the meantime, here’s that image (click to enlarge to full 5 megapixel splendour)!
I am now saving a picture from the camera every minute. I’ve written some PHP and JQuery to create a timelapse of the images. They will update throughout the night and, with any luck, by the morning I’ll have a lovely timelapse of the breaking dawn. Unless I run out of disk space (which shouldn’t crash the Pi as I’m checking to make sure that I don’t take any more photos if I’ve used 95% of the space available).
Oh, the filename is shown below the timelapse so you can see what time the photo was taken.
This timelapse is updated automatically by (and is hosted on) the Raspberry Pi itself!
Interesting things start to happen after 5am (0500)
