Accessories, Arduino, GPIO boards, Making, Programming, Software, Tutorials

New add-on for the RasPiO Duino launched for the Raspberry Pi

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Alex Eames did a Kickstarter a while ago for the RasPiO Duino, which is a GPIO add-on board for the Raspberry Pi that gives you an ATMega 328P-PU chip (which is the same as an Arduino Uno) as well as loads of broken-out pins and a small prototyping area.

He has now launched a new kit to accompany the Duino board. In the kit you get:

  • a 20×4 LCD with blue backlight and pre-soldered i2c backpack, pre-calibrated and fully tested
  • 2 x TMP-36 analog temperature sensors
  • 1 two-way female header
  • 1 four-way female header
  • 20 x 10cm M-F jumper wires

He has written a guide to go along with the kit (which is well-written and comprehensive as usual) as well as a sample sketch for the Duino that can be uploaded to the board to get it to read the temperature sensors and display the output on the screen.

I’ve used one of these types of screens before with the Picorder and 20×4 characters is a lot of space to work with.

It’s a tidy package that costs £20 plus shipping (£2). You can also get a Duino bundled in and that bundle will cost you £30 plus shipping.

Read more and get the kit exclusively from Alex here.

Networking, Operating systems, Software, Tutorials

Use WICD to set-up wifi on a Raspberry Pi with Raspbian Jessie Lite

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Daniel Bull, who created the excellent CamJam EduKit 3 3D printed chassis, wanted to set-up wifi on his Pi Zero. He downloaded Raspbian Jessie Lite (the cut-down version of Raspbian now offered by the Raspberry Pi Foundation) but found that WICD, his usual method of setting up wifi in a command-line environment, didn’t work. After 3 hours of messing around, he discovered that it conflicted with dhcpcd5. Removing this made WICD work again. He has posted about it on G+ but here are the instructions anyway:

To install WICD:

sudo apt-get install wicd-curses

To remove dhcpcd5:

sudo apt-get remove dhcpcd5

Once you’ve done those two commands, WICD will be up and running again.

Books, Robotics

Packt offering free Raspberry Pi robotics e-book today

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Packt Publishing have been offering a free e-book a day for a while now. Today is the turn of Richard Grimmett’s Raspberry Pi Robotics Projects.

Here is a contents listing direct from their web page:

1: GETTING STARTED WITH RASPBERRY PI
2: PROGRAMMING RASPBERRY PI
3: PROVIDING SPEECH INPUT AND OUTPUT
4: ADDING VISION TO RASPBERRY PI
5: CREATING MOBILE ROBOTS ON WHEELS
6: MAKING THE UNIT VERY MOBILE – CONTROLLING THE MOVEMENT OF A ROBOT WITH LEGS
7: AVOIDING OBSTACLES USING SENSORS
8: GOING TRULY MOBILE – THE REMOTE CONTROL OF YOUR ROBOT
9: USING A GPS RECEIVER TO LOCATE YOUR ROBOT
10: SYSTEM DYNAMICS
11: BY LAND, SEA, AND AIR
To claim your free e-book, you will need to visit this page and login to their site. Definitely worth keeping an eye on that page every day to see what is on offer!
Home automation, Making, Security

Controlling a garage door over the internet using a Raspberry Pi

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Don Howdeshell (who previously taught his daughter not to wake her parents up at an un-godly hour using a Pi) wanted to allow his wife to control the garage door from the Android tablet mounted in her car. So, he interfaced a Raspberry Pi with the mechanism and hey, presto, that is in fact what he managed to do. Read about the build on his blog.