Having received a Pi2Go Lite for his birthday, my eldest son finished assembling it and wanted to move on to some software. He’s used Scratch at school so the intention is to use ScratchGPIO (thanks @cymplecy) to control it and get it following a line. There seems to be little documentation on using the Pi2Go …
Author Archives: Martin
Experimenting with Thingspeak and ESP8266
A friend recently gave me an ESP12E module to play with. I’ve previously played with the ESP8266 at Open Source Hardware Camp 2015 when Omer Kilic ran an ESP8266 workshop. The workshop focused on NodeMCU and LUA. My immediate thought there was to use LUA again and I built some NodeMCU firmware to experiment with …
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50 Things to do as a Cub Scout
A fellow scouting leader (and member of the Escouts forum) recently decided to come up with a list of “50 things to do as a Cub” in a similar vein to the National Trust but more tightly focussed on scouting activities. I think it’s an excellent idea and the list he has generated is worthy …
Railmotor virtually started
As a member of the Buxton Model Engineering Society, I have accompanied other members on visits to the Sheffield & District Society of Model and Experimental Engineers (SMEE) miniature railway at Abbeydale where we are invited annually for private “running” days. It’s always fascinating to see the engines that others have built as well as …
BBB – mount and shrink a disk image
This describes how to take an image file (origBBB.img) that has been extracted from a Beaglebone Black (BBB) – (see here for how to do that) – and shrink it so that it will fit onto a smaller SD card. First we need to be able to inspect the file system locally. We can inspect …
How to backup BBB eMMC card
Ok, so you’ve been playing with your BBB and you’ve installed this package and that package, oh and that package you forgot about. So now you want to setup another BBB in exactly the same way but wait… oh no, what did you install again and how did you configure things… this could take some …
Beaglebone Black (BBB) Simple Web IO
Some time ago I wrote a short guide to getting simple webpage based control of the GPIO pins working on a Raspberry Pi. I thought it time to do something similar for the BBB. First off, I removed unwanted services but you may not be bothered about that so consider it optional. After that, install …
Getting openssl working with beaglebone black (BBB)
Today I needed to use MD5 in a C program on my BBB (running Angstrom) therefore I looked into openssl. All seemed straight forward until I realised that my cross compiler tool chain did not include an arm version of the libssl library.
Beaglebone Black with RS232 Cape
I’ve recently bought a Beaglebone Black (BBB) and an RS232 cape (BB-BONE-SERL-03). Mine is revision A1 (important to know which, see later). At the time of writing this and at the time I bought it, I did not realise that the cape was not yet supported in the Angstrom release. Because of the move to …
Sparge/Wort Aerator Heads
After promising several people late last year that I would make them a sparge/wort aerator head, I have finally managed to get some time to make them – apologies for the long wait 🙁 I’ve made a few of them, one to fit 10mm pipe and one to fit 15mm pipe. Previously the 10mm pipe …