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The latest addition to the Raspberry Pi product family just arrived at my front door, so here we go with the obligatory side-by-side picture!
This gallery contains 1 photo.
The latest addition to the Raspberry Pi product family just arrived at my front door, so here we go with the obligatory side-by-side picture!
Today, to celebrate their 5th birthday, the Raspberry Pi Foundation announced an exciting new version of the Raspberry Pi Zero. Our favourite mini single board computer now includes a feature that many of us have wished for: wireless connectivity!
(The third part of a running mini-series about the Raspberry Pi Zero, the second part is here).
In my last post about the Raspberry Pi Zero, I promised to give some ideas for projects that would be well-suited to implement with our favorite little hobby SBC. Through logical reasoning, we determined that the qualities to look out for are “battery-powered, space-confined, camera-connected, slighty complex but not too performance-critical projects that could not be served by JustAnotherApp on your phone”. In order to keep this post short (and worth your read), I’m going to limit the list to the 5 project ideas that I think are most exciting and at least reasonably original (so, everything on this list is off-limits), and that I might actually consider doing myself. So, without further ado, some of my best ideas:
(The second part of a running mini-series about the Raspberry Pi Zero, the first part is here).
The Raspberry Pi Zero is an amazing little tinkering trinket. It is among the smallest, cheapest and most efficient single board computers currently on the market, because of its radical design choices. First, it features almost no additional components besides the system-on-a-chip (SoC) and the RAM, which are stacked on top of each other. And second, its connectors are all chosen to be as flat as possible, making this the flattest offering on the market. Logically, these choices open up some doors while it closes others. Because of my personal interest in low-cost embedded/mobile/robotics projects, I’m mainly interested in the doors that open. What follows is thus a slightly biased analysis of the pros and cons of the Raspberry Pi Zero (version 1.3 available since May 2016).
(The first part of a mini-series about the Raspberry Pi Zero).
We all loved the original Raspberry Pi premise; a small and modest yet very affordable and versatile single-board hobby computer that brought computing projects into homes and classrooms alike. They were not the first or the only one on that market, but they hit a sweet spot in terms of value for money and community building that resulted in an unprecedented buzz.
After upgrading the OS on my 2008 MacBook Pro, it was struggling with today’s performance needs. The constant disk swapping because of insufficient RAM (2GB!) made the machine pretty unworkable; starting up or opening an app took several minutes, and for every mouse click or window switch there was a 20-30 freeze. Combining this with the fact that it did not have a battery nor a working DVD drive anymore, it unfortunately needed to be retired as my primary laptop. After some consideration, I decided to go for a brand spanking new Windows 10 machine instead, which can run everything robot that I used on my Mac. (Still no regrets after a couple of weeks of running with it).
Last week, I finally received my new robot controller board after more than three weeks of waiting. Well, actually, a complete new robot kit, since the controller board is not sold separately. Good thing as well, because as it turns out, the original GoPiGo is not available anymore (in NL), and the new one I received is a GoPiGo2… which is not compatible with the original GoPiGo. Allow me to elaborate….
Just to break the current update hiatus (life happened), I thought I would post a video that I made a couple of weeks ago. Although this video demoes nothing more than two servomotors being driven by ServoBlaster running on my Raspberry Pi (yawn!), something “extra” happens in the interaction between lighting, music & the autofocus of my phone cam, which I believe make it worth the 27 seconds of your time. Just watch the video, OK? ?
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Finally, I took some time to connect the camera! This required almost complete deconstruction, since the Raspberry Pi had to be dislodged in order to access the CSI to insert the new, longer, camera ribbon. Also, the camera unit needed to be turned 90 degrees to let the cable stick out the side of the robot’s head, so the head was disassembled as well. Anyway, here’s to the first time that FRAC is looking at itself! I have a feeling this might come in handy somehow….
It’s been some time since the last update, and that is not because I haven’t done any work on this project. Fact is, the work that I have been doing is not really going to do well as a party conversation starter…