Russell Barnes over at Raspi.today has conducted an interview with Daniel Stone, graphics lead at Collabora, about current progress on the X-windows replacement system, Wayland. There’s some technical detail in here and it’s a fascinating insight into the development process of what will be one of the biggest leaps forward in Raspberry Pi performance. Read it here. Don’t forget to listen to Russell’s podcasts!
The BBC are reporting that Prince Charles and the Duchess of Cornwall visited Pencoed yesterday and went inside the Sony factory where the Raspberry Pi is made. Read more here. Apologies for scary picture of HRH.
Jeff Highsmith, who created a Mission Control Desk for his kids earlier this year, has now unveiled his latest creation. It’s a command capsule that mimics the Apollo moon missions! Made out of wood, it has 38 switches of various types and 291 LEDs inside. An Arduino is used for inputs and outputs for the main instrument panel and a Raspberry Pi performs logic calculations and produces various sounds. Programming inside the Pi triggers simulations of both the Apollo 12 lightning strike and the Apollo 13 cryo tank disaster and there is even an iPhone dock for playing back mission videos. There’s also a mechanised payload bay door (with a camera and screen so you can see what’s going on as your payload bay is exposed to ‘space’). The whole thing is, of course, not practical (it doesn’t fly in space, obviously) but Jeff as designed the two pieces to be used as props for creative play. From the video you can tell his sons get a real kick out of using it! Read more here
EBuyer sent me one of these for free to review. There were no conditions attached, leaving me free to give (as always) an honest opinion of the product.
This Edimax wifi dongle is tiny. In fact, the packaging maintains that it’s the “World’s Smallest!” I don’t know about that, but it certainly is small. It runs at 150Mbps and is a 802.11 dongle that will run on class b, g and n networks. It is compatible with all modern wifi routers and you shouldn’t have any problems connecting it to your home or work network.
Inside the packaging is the dongle itself, a small manual and a mini CD containing drivers for XP, Vista and Windows 7.
Drivers for Windows 8 need to be downloaded. This could be tricky if you don’t have internet access, but we’ll let that one pass as what we’re really interested in is if it works with the Raspberry Pi.
First of all, in order to use this dongle (like 99% of the other dongles available), you either need to switch your Pi off before you plug it in or plug the dongle into a powered USB hub. Plugging it in whilst your Pi is running will cause it to reboot and potentially corrupt your SD card. Please take my word for it!
Having plugged the dongle in, I used lsusb to ensure that the dongle has been detected correctly (which it had) and it read:
Edimax Technology Co., Ltd EW-7811Un 802.11n Wireless Adapter [Realtek RTL8188CUS]
and then used usb-devices to check it’s power consumption.
T: Bus=01 Lev=02 Prnt=02 Port=01 Cnt=02 Dev#= 4 Spd=480 MxCh= 0 D: Ver= 2.00 Cls=00(>ifc ) Sub=00 Prot=00 MxPS=64 #Cfgs= 1 P: Vendor=7392 ProdID=7811 Rev=02.00 S: Manufacturer=Realtek S: Product=802.11n WLAN Adapter S: SerialNumber=00e04c000001 C: #Ifs= 1 Cfg#= 1 Atr=80 MxPwr=500mA I: If#= 0 Alt= 0 #EPs= 4 Cls=ff(vend.) Sub=ff Prot=ff Driver=rtl8192cu
As expected, the dongle will use a maximum of 500mA. I have seen a dongle that reserves less power than this, and I’m surprised (given the green credentials proudly displayed on the box) that they couldn’t have operated at a lower reserved current. Having said that, most wifi dongles reserve 500mA so it wasn’t unexpected. Apparently the actual power usage is closer to 70mA, which is very acceptable.
I booted the Pi into X windows and used the Wifi Config utility program to connect to my home network. There were no problems – the connection was made quickly and without any fuss. I used the dongle for about 2 hours without any problems during 2 separate sessions on an ‘n’ network without any problems whatsoever. The connection automatically picked up upon multiple reboots. I was able to get a good distance away from the wifi router with several walls in between. In fact, signal strength results were very similar to those from my work laptop which has a very good wifi card in it.
There’s not much more I can say. It does the job very nicely and, with its gold colour, looks good (if that makes any difference). The very small footprint makes it ideal for general Raspberry Pi use and for specialist applications such as robotics.
Overall rating: 9/10 (it loses a point for the rebooting behaviour).
You can buy the Edimax dongle from eBuyer for £7.49 currently (1st July 2014).
Launching today for pre-orders is Pi in the Sky, a new GPIO plugin board specifically designed for high-altitude ballooning. With Dave Akerman behind the board and the software, this is something to get excited about. Retailing for £100+VAT, the board has the following features:
A whole open-source software suite is also available from GitHub with the following features:
According to Dave’s blog, he is conducting test flights on 4th July and a Pi in the Sky launch on the 5th.
You can read more and pre-order your board from their website.
Here’s a nice write-up of what sounds like a very successful Raspberry Jam in Southend. Read it here. For information on the next Jam (on 16th August), visit this page.
