Matt, over at Raspberry Pi Spy, has blogged about a way to improve the performance of the I2C bus on a Raspberry Pi. The bus, which is used for, among other things, sensor readings and outputting to OLED displays defaults to 100Kb/s but can be made to go as fast as 400Kb/s by changing a value in /boot/config.txt. This can improve performance for some applications. For the full details, head over to this page.
This coming weekend, 3rd-4th March, over 100 community-run Raspberry Jams will take place in 38 countries throughout the world. From Canada to Australia and Sweden to South Africa, it is a truly international celebration of all things Raspberry Pi. To find your nearest local Jam, head over to the special Big Birthday Weekend map.
Myself and fellow CamJam organiser Tim Richardson will be attending three Jams over the weekend. The first is on Saturday morning: Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam at the National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park. The next is our very own Jam: Potton Pi and Pints on Saturday afternoon – we’re on the Bedfordshire/Cambridgeshire border if you’d like to join us! On the Sunday, we’ll be attending the Southend Raspberry Jam taking our set of pi-topCEEDs with us for use at their drop-in workshop sessions.
The MagPi issue 67 is out and is a retro computing special covering:
There’s also plenty of features on cyber security and the usual mix of projects, news and reviews. Also included is a live-booting DVD of the current version of Raspbian Stretch with Desktop to use on your PC or Mac.
You can download it for free from The MagPi website or purchase from online retailers or see if you can find it in the shops.
Dave Johnson has written up a great walk-through of a streamlined, lightweight installation of Raspbian Lite. He takes you through installing the image, setting up things like wifi and keyboard settings and then installs Samba so you can talk to your Pi over a network. Take a look here.
Alex Eames recently bought a laser cutter to add to his workspace. After playing with the toolchain for a bit, he discovered a piece of software, called K40 Whisperer, which could be installed on Linux and was compatible with his cutter. So, he installed the software and reduced the number of hoops he needed to jump through to get a design from design software to actual cutting. You can read how he did it here.
Dexter Industries has just announced the launch of the new version of their DexterOS operating system. They use a Blockly-style programming language called Bloxter for the visual programming side and you can now make the move to Python more easily because they show the Python code side-by-side with the Bloxter code. They’ve also added the ability to download and upload code within the browser-based interface and log sensor data. I used DexterOS quite a bit recently when I reviewed Dexter’s GoPiGo 3 kit and I was very impressed. It’s well worth giving it a go! Read more about the new release here and download the latest version here.
