RaspberryPi

After a bit of success implementing an Arduino 2.4GHz Transceiver , I was encouraged to explore a more familiar environment, something with Python and Linux in the mix. After a short period of research I landed on the circuitpython-nrf24l01 pypi project page, and quickly began digging through their examples . It wasn’t long after I had a working prototype that mirrored my Arduino code quite closely: Components CanaKit Raspberry Pi Zero W (Wireless) Complete Starter Kit - 16 GB Edition RF24L01+ 2.

Well it’s been a little over two week and the Raspberry Pi 3 Model B weather station has held up; figured now would be a good time to go a little deeper into the setup. Telegraf has been solid in ingesting my JSON documents periodically, lets have a look at it’s SensorTag configuration: # cat /etc/telegraf/telegraf.d/sensor_tag.conf [[inputs.exec]] command = "cat /sensor_tag.json" data_format = "json" name_suffix = "_sensor_tag" interval = "60s" This telegraf configuration inserts the output of /sensor_tag.

Got around to upgrading my Raspberry Pi 3 Model B weather station with a newer version of Grafana, the Debian packages for ARM are hosted on Grafana’s download page under ARMv7 . Moving from a 2.x word to a 5.x has been impressive, most notably the drag, drop, and resize functionality. I’m still using InfluxDB and Telegraf to store and populate my time data points. Latest Raspbian’s (stretch) comes with Influx 1.

Setup First thing I tackled was setting up the L293D H-Bridge on the Bread Board. I found myself referencing the following Diagram a couple times. Step one is connecting your chip down the center of your board: From here I connected the 3 power pins to my board’s power rail using a few Jumpers : A few more Jumpers connect each side of the chip to ground: Finally I use a couple Wires to connect both sides of my power and ground rails:

Many of you may remember playing with a Simon Electronic Memory Game when you were younger, you know something that looks like this: At it’s core the game is rather simple, the device lights up random colors, and you need to repeat the pattern. Of course it gets harder the longer you play. I thought it would be fun to build a Simon game using Raspberry Pi and a few electronic components:

While at the electronics store the other day, I noticed they had motion detectors on sale for only $4. I decided with my latest obsession of electronic tinkering, picking up a OSEEP Passive Infrared Sensor (PIR) Module might be fun. I guess I should have done a little more reading on the packaging; by the time I was home, I noticed this sensor reported in analog , not digital. This was an issue as the Raspberry Pi only reads digital input.

Now that I’ve got my hands on a Raspberry Pi 3 Model B Motherboard , I decided nows a good time to play around with the 16x2 LCD Module Controller HD44780 I had laying around (I’ve had this thing since December 2015). A live NFL (National Football League) score board seemed fitting as the season just started. I found a really good write up on raspberrypi-spy.co.uk about wiring up the controller and Pi, here is the diagram I used:

Using my first generation Raspberry Pi and a few USB / analog devices, i’ve been able to create (a rather slow) cleverbot voice communicator. The reason for the slow down is initialization and listening on the USB microphone, but other than that everything works as expected. #!/usr/bin/env python import speech_recognition as sr import pyttsx import cleverbot print 'Initializing, please wait...' # define our cleverbot cb = cleverbot.Cleverbot() # speech recognizer setup r = sr.

Well the kids have lost interest in Raspberry Pi Python programming for now, but look who’s still at it! The jankyiest of Lego stop motions. Here was the code I tossed together to make the gif above: #!/usr/bin/env python2 import os import time import shutil import datetime import tempfile import pygame.camera import pygame.image import RPi.GPIO as GPIO save_dir = '/usr/share/nginx/www' GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM) GPIO.setwarnings(False) GPIO.cleanup() GPIO.setup(17, GPIO.IN) pygame.camera.init() camera = pygame.camera.Camera('/dev/video0') def make_picture(filename): raw_input('Ready for picture?