PighiXXX, who created the brilliant ABC (Arduino Basic Connections) cards have now created a comprehensive guide to the GPIO (and other pins) of the Pi.
Build a #RaspberryPi battery backup
I recently received a sample of the UPiS uninterruptible power supply. I’m going to review that in a few days time. However, if you’d like to do something similar yourself, George over at Repairhub has written a tutorial to help you create a battery backup for the Pi.
Create shapes in #RaspberryPi edition of Minecraft
Martin O’Hanlon continues his series on Minecraft by using his MinecraftDrawing object to create 3D geometric shapes in the virtual world.
Gertduino brings Arduino to #RaspberryPi… again
![GertDuino: Add-On Board for Raspberry Pi[1] | element14](/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/gertduino1.png)
Gert had told me back in July that he was working on this and I’m pleased to say that it’s finally found it’s way to market.
The Gertduino is a Raspberry-Pi add-on which offers the same functionality as an Arduino-Uno but with some extra features thrown in. The board features an Atmega328 microcontroller, runs of 5V, has the 16MHz oscillator and has connectors which are 100% Arduino-Uno compatible. It also contains the reset switch, 2 user push buttons, and 6 LEDs. The board also has a RS232 level converter which will convert the signals form a UART to the RS232 standard voltages (And invert them as per that same standard).
The Gertduino is £18.87 plus VAT and shipping which brings it out at £27.38.
Farnell are doing their usual sterling job of marketing it by a) keeping it quiet amongst the community and b) grouping it in with the Gertboard, even though it’s not, by calling it the Gertboard Gertduino.
Read more and you can also buy from Element 14/Farnell.
Raspberry PiPod blog reaches half a million page views
Exciting stuff. According to my WordPress stats, this blog has just passed 500,000 page views. In reality, I passed this milestone a few months ago but I’d previously lost a bunch of stats, but that’s life.
Some more statistics:
- I’m currently averaging just over 1,500 page views per day.
- My best ever day was 6,503 on Thursday, 7th March. This was the day I posted about my Picorder project and it was featured on the homepage of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.
- I’ve written 1,261 blog posts.
- My top three posts are:
- Stream the Raspberry Pi camera module through your browser (9,618 views)
- Catch up TV on RaspBMC (9,141 views)
- Repair a broken SD card “superblock” (7,878 views)
- I’ve received 1,525 comments (admittedly most of which are pingbacks, but I’ve also had some great contributions from other people).
- The Akismet plugin has stopped over 3,700 pieces of spam!
That’s all the dry statistics out the way. I’d just like to say a big Thank You to everyone who has visited the blog and made it such a success and, of course, to the Raspberry Pi Foundation for creating the Pi in the first place – you’ve made an enormous contribution to computing education and I hope that the successes you’ve had up to now are merely the tip of the iceberg!
Wolfram Language and Mathematica comes to the #RaspberryPi
The Raspberry Pi Foundation has announced a partnership with Wolfram Research to include Mathematica and the Wolfram language in future images of the Raspbian operating system. It’s intended that this will make the Pi a “first-class platform for teaching computer-based mathematics to children of all ages.”
Mathematica has applications in algebra, calculus, physical sciences, life sciences and even for creative artwork based on mathematical equations.
You can install both packages now by running:
sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install wolfram-engine
The Foundation has created a discussion forum for the software which you can access here.