Tag Archives: Open Source

Challenged to build a Raspberry PI Laptop – Part 1

08 Wednesday Nov 2017

Posted by in Digital, Open Source, Programming, Raspberry Pi

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Raspberry PIToday I got a challenge from Lewis Richards (@Stroker on Twitter) – A selfie with a Raspberry PI Laptop that I have built. Okay – Challenge accepted.

Turning a Raspberry PI into a laptop is not a new thing but does look like an interesting project to undertake. If you don’t want to build your own you could buy a Raspberry PI-Top and use this pre-built case to save a build.

Awesome DIY Raspberry Pi Laptop I want to see a selfie of you with one of these you’ve built!

Tweet: https://twitter.com/stroker/status/928259932373299200

However my challenge is to build one so I am currently working through the best way to do this and what functions and features I want to build in.
Current thinking around parts and screen are:
Things needed
  • Power supply – battery/mains and ability to charge the batteries
  • Raspberry PI 3 (inbuilt networking)
  • Cooling
  • Screen – 7 inch – Touchscreen
  • Keyboard – thin USB
  • Case
  • Mouse
  • Operating System
  • Applications
Requirements
  • I like the addition of other boards such as the arduino for connectivity as well as the Raspberry PI
  • Access to the ports on the Raspberry PI
  • I’m more into an external mouse but happy to include a form of track pad.
  • Suitable cooling for the laptop
  • Future expansion for the device or ability to swap items out
  • Portability of the device and solidity of the case
  • Do something unique/original for the build
Thinking about what else I can get into the device to add functionality and would welcome any suggestions to add to the device.
I will blog more parts to this build as I go through the design,build and get the relevant parts together.

Do It Yourself – AI Assistants

26 Friday May 2017

Posted by in IoT, Programming, Raspberry Pi, Tools

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CyborgThe options available to consume voice activated assistants are increasing with recent releases within the market.

The availability of pre-built off the shelf Assistants is growing and so is the ability to build your own using the open sourced versions.

Google recently gave away AIY (Do It Yourself Artificial Intelligence) a maker kit, with Voice Hat and components to work with a Raspberry PI on the front of the Raspberry PI Magazine issue 57 – (MagPI) inline with the release of the https://aiyprojects.withgoogle.com/

The demand for this kit was very high and as a result unfortunately there are none left and not much information at the moment of the kit becoming available for sale. There is a waiting list available and it will probably be released depending upon demand.

This aside whilst we await the release of the sale kit for AIY, you can still take advantage of the AIY capabilities and a Raspberry Pi 3 in a similar way to installing Amazon Alexa onto the PI.

  • Google AIY Build
  • Raspberry Pi 3
  • Generic Aux Speaker
  • USB Microphone

You could go one better by running both Alexa and Google AIY on the same Raspberry PI, using a build from xtools called AssistantPi.

AssistantPi is basically a tweak of AlexaPi. It includes the Google Assistant SDK and uses AlexaPi’s hotword recognition to activate either Assistant or Alexa. The installer provides an easy way to get everything set up in just under an hour.

https://www.hackster.io/xtools/assistantpi-74b772

A great project to try out and learn from, giving you the power of both Alexa and Google.

Attending GitHub Satellite 2017

23 Tuesday May 2017

Posted by in Development, Open Source, Programming, Raspberry Pi, STEM, Tools

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Yesterday I attended GitHub Satellite 2017 in LondonGithub

https://github.com/blog/2313-join-us-for-github-satellite-2017-may-22-23-in-london-uk

The event was well attended and there was a good buzz around the conference. GitHub Marketplace was launched at the conference and some of the initial vendors in the Marketplace demonstrated how their applications can be used in the lifecycle of coding. You could watch demos and chat to the companies at their vendor stalls to gain further information.

Below are my notes from the conference and Key Note opening speeches

Opening

The opening lead by Chris Wanstrath (Co-Founder & CEO, GitHub) and Kyle Daigle (Senior Engineering Manager, GitHub)

  • GitHub has 21 Million Developers
  • 59 Million Projects using the platform.
  • Expanding into gaming with Githib for Unity
  • Extentions for Visual Studio

ATOM

  • Help guide the approach with ATOM
  • 2.1 million active users of ATOM

Electron

  • GitHub desktop GUI new version based on electron. Open Source to allow it to be developed by community.
  • Electron platform for building desktop apps. Runs cross platforms.
  • Companies using electron to build internal apps.
  • Seeing big fortune 500 companies using electron for web, mobile and desktop apps.

GitHub as a platorm

  • Now 9 years old.
  • Today more API traffic than UI traffic
  • 5+ million users use integration
  • OAuth growing doubling each year
  • API ‘s have not been developed and remained static….. 9 years old.

World moving to a new world of API’s. Moving on from SOAP to REST to what’s next.What is the future of API’s:

GraphQL

  • Build queries on data you need.
    • Powering new features of GitHub
    • Suggested reviewers
    • Projects
    • Topics
  • 125 million GraphSQL internal queries a day.
  • GraphQL is open source.

GitHub Apps

  • Fine grain permissions
  • Choose how you want to give access to repositories
  • Using bots in Integrations

GitHub Marketplace (Launching today)

  • Find tools that meet your workflows best.
  • Pricing plans in marketplace
  • Marketplace has option to join and apply to be part of Marketplace.

Build and Grow Sessions

There were a number of sessions held in either the Build or Grow track which attendees could join.

I went to sessions in both tracks including the session on Building Interconnected Workflows which featured companies in the newly launched Market Place. Heard from these companies on how their products could be used in conjunction for a full code project lifecycle, which was interesting and good to hear.

Vitor Monteiro, GitHub
Andrew Homeyer, Waffle.io
Danielle Tomlinson, CircleCI
Jaime Jorge, Codacy
Cory Virok, Rollbar

There was a good session on Women in IT from Amy Dickens from the University of Nottingham which also covered topics of diversity and how workplaces and attitudes can change to make a difference.

Closing Session

The closing session was run by Marc Scott from the Raspberry PI Foundation who gave an overview of the Foundation, what it does and how the community can help review projects and sumbit projects for others to practice, learn from and enjoy. Also helping by joining local coding groups to pass on knowledge.

Sessions were streamed and Im hoping that replays are availble to catch up with the sessions I couldnt get to.

Unfortunately I could not get to todays workshop sessions but again hoping for streams of these following the event.

Building a Quadruped

07 Friday Apr 2017

Posted by in Arduino, Open Source, Programming, Robotics, STEM

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Robot3I decided to have a go at building a robot for a STEM session last weekend, to show the power of code and how it can be used to control something.  A moving robot is a great visualisation to demonstrate this.

After some searching I settled on a quadruped shown on thingverse (a 3d printing site). This is a build based on a robot called Chopstick Junior by Lumi.

Parts being printed, I set about thinking about the controls and motors. The parts are compatible with an SG90 servo. I needed 8 of these, for the knee and hip joints of the quadruped.

The assembly of the parts was a bit of a challenge as in the instructions it said you needed 3mm x 6mm screw/nuts to connect the shoulders together. You really need 3mm x 8mm screw/nuts as I have to countersink the holes a bit more to get the nuts to attach to the 6mm screw length.

Inserting the servos into the holes in the hips and legs required the unscrewing of the 4 small screws in each servo and temporarily removing the gear top. Once inserted this can be replaced and screwed down.

Once the servos were in place I centered the servos the best I could to allow backwards and forwards movement in each joint. I knew that later adjustment may be needed! This can easily be achieved removing the servo arm and hip/leg, then re-positioning and attaching the arm again.

The power is provided by 4 x AA batteries in a square battery holder. This was glued down onto the frame and fitted well into the build.

The power bus is provided by a small piece of circuit board. I used two lines for -v and +v. Each servo was then wired into the lines and the control wire to an Arduino Nano which is used as the brains of the robot.

The following pins were used on the Digital I/O on the Arduino Nano:

  • D2 – Hip 1
  • D3 – Knee1
  • D4 – Hip 2
  • D5 – Knee 2
  • D6 – Hip 3
  • D7 – Knee 3
  • D8 – Hip 4
  • D9 – Knee 4

I also wired in a sensor on the front of the robot to D10 and D11.

Wiring is grouped together to allow movement, but cut to a length that reduces excess that could get in the way of the legs.

A toggle switch provides an on/off for the power fixed to the rear of the robot. Remember to break the lines on the circuit board so it does not join any of the lines.

Once assembled I then got round to coding. I decided to use the opensource code for the Chopstick Junior as a base and make alterations. The quadruped responded well to the code and several physical servo adjustments were needed. Its now in a reasonable state, however balance is an issue in terms of walking steadily, so need to work more on this.  I have not yet coded movement to respond to the sensors yet, this will be done later.

The code is available via my Github:  https://github.com/Cloudmage/Robots

The robot went down well at the STEM session. Now to tweek that code……

Top view

Robot2

Side View

Robot3

Front View

Robot1

Raspberry PI on the PC & Mac

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

Posted by in Open Source, Raspberry Pi

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PIRaspberry Pi have released a desktop/Laptop version of their PIXEL running on Debian Linux – bootable via DVD or USB Stick, once you have downloaded and built the media.

Its good to see a lot of people enthused with installing Linux onto their old hardware sitting around.

I decided to try this myself on an old laptop (Celeron 1.2Ghz, 256Mb with a 20GB Hard Disk). Yes its a bit old, but does currently run Debian 8 (a bit slowly).

I downloaded the software ISO and burnt this to a DVD to run from. The machine booted okay, however the screen did have some issues with displaying the windows, however the backdrop did load okay.

This could be down to a few things, such as hardware (Memory) and not using a USB memory stick to boot from (DVD was doing a lot of reads). Perhaps an install onto the Hard Disk may have been a better option. One to try next.

pixel.jpg

I’m now moving on from this device to a bit more up to date hardware where this does run and in a virtual desktop.

What is good though is having a universal desktop on your PC/Laptop and Raspberry PI.

Reading through the comments on the Raspberry PI Blog, there are a few machines having issue, but it does work on the majority of devices.

The posts include instructions for installing on to a Hard Disk and also into VirtualBox mounting the ISO image.

Hard Disk

How to: Install to HDD (as the only OS)

Assumptions:
– The USB Stick you boot from is /dev/sdb
– The internal HDD is /dev/sda
Commands are given in double quotation marks.

1. Boot it from USB/DVD
2. Transfer the entire stick to your drive:
2.1. “sudo bash”
2.2. “dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=1M”
3. Reboot without the stick, should boot from internal HDD_
3.1 “reboot”
4. Resize the Partition:
4.1. “sudo bash”
4.2. “fdisk /dev/sda”
4.3. print partitions with “p”
4.4. write down the beginning of partition 2
4.5. delete partition 2 with “d”, then “2”
4.6. create a new parition with “n”, primary partition, starting at the location from 4.4
4.7. write with “w”
5. Reboot:
5.1. “reboot”
6. Resize the filesystem on /dev/sda2 to fill the disk:
6.1. “sudo bash”
6.2. “resize2fs /dev/sda2”

Source:  Egon Rath

VirtualBox

In VirtualBox I have mounted the iso as an image.
To install to disk change the following:

Replace “dd if=/dev/sdb of=/dev/sda bs=1M”
with “dd if=/dev/sr0 of=/dev/sda bs=1M”

Source: Menno Harzing

Source for comments: https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/pixel-pc-mac/#comments

 

Tiny computing – VoCore2

06 Sunday Nov 2016

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split1.pngSearching round on the crowdfunding sites for things that are coming, I found the VoCore2 on iniegogo.

https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/vocore2-4-coin-sized-linux-computer-with-wifi#/

VoCore has already had an v1 early release and is now heading for a v2 release in January 2017. The cost of this board is $4, although as you start to add the additional boards the cost can go up to around $50.

VoCore2 is a open source linux computer and a full functional wireless router but its size is smaller than a coin. It can perform as a VPN gateway to secure your network, an airplay station to play loseless music, a private cloud to store your photo, video and code. Benefit for its small size and low power consume, it can be easily mounted in wall, help you boost wireless signal in every room or setup house based mesh network.

What I do like about this design is that its small and compact and can be used for a lot of different purposes:

  • VPN Router
  • IoT/Appliance Control
  • Music Player/Streaming
  • Wifi

Its ability to be added to an existing ethernet socket and add heaps of functionality to the socket and its open source makes this device interesting for me, as well as its ability to then act as a wifi extender from that socket.

I would like to look at what could be done with it to provide additional IoT Security to a device plugged in/connected to a network utilising this board. So looks like another board on the wish list to have a go on.

Pin Outs for the board:

vocore

Source/Pics: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/vocore2-4-coin-sized-linux-computer-with-wifi#/

 

Build 2016 Resources

07 Thursday Apr 2016

Posted by in Development, IoT, Programming, Raspberry Pi, Security, Tools, Windows

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Following the latest Build 2016 conference Microsoft have new released a number of resources and videos on Channel 9, providing 49 pages of videos and presentations.

Lots of learning available.Code

Easier Markdown with GitHub

28 Thursday Jan 2016

Posted by in DevOps/OpsDev, Open Source, Programming

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Github

Its good to see that GitHub has now provided a toolbar to aid in formatting Markdown.

This will help some users from using HTML code format to a word processor GUI type experience. It should appeal to those who are starting out on their coding journey or want an easier life not having to remember if they have included all the <> and </> commands in their files.

Below is an example of a Markdown file that I did as part of a Data Science Coursera Course:  https://github.com/Cloudmage/ExData_Plotting1/blob/master/CodeBook.md

 

Code Book for Project 1 for Exploritory Data Analysis Course – Coursera
=======================================================

## Data Source
* <b>Dataset</b>: <a href=”https://d396qusza40orc.cloudfront.net/exdata%2Fdata%2Fhousehold_power_consumption.zip”>Electric power consumption</a> [20Mb]

* <b>Description</b>: Measurements of electric power consumption in
one household with a one-minute sampling rate over a period of almost
4 years. Different electrical quantities and some sub-metering values
are available.

## Data Sets Used

The following descriptions of the 9 variables in the dataset are taken
from
the <a href=”https://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/datasets/Individual+household+electric+power+consumption”>UCI
web site</a>:

<ol>
<li><b>Date</b>: Date in format dd/mm/yyyy </li>
<li><b>Time</b>: Time in format hh:mm:ss </li>
<li><b>Global_active_power</b>: household global minute-averaged active power (in kilowatt) </li>
<li><b>Global_reactive_power</b>: household global minute-averaged reactive power (in kilowatt) </li>
<li><b>Voltage</b>: minute-averaged voltage (in volt) </li>
<li><b>Global_intensity</b>: household global minute-averaged current intensity (in ampere) </li>
<li><b>Sub_metering_1</b>: energy sub-metering No. 1 (in watt-hour of active energy). It corresponds to the kitchen, containing mainly a dishwasher, an oven and a microwave (hot plates are not electric but gas powered). </li>
<li><b>Sub_metering_2</b>: energy sub-metering No. 2 (in watt-hour of active energy). It corresponds to the laundry room, containing a washing-machine, a tumble-drier, a refrigerator and a light. </li>
<li><b>Sub_metering_3</b>: energy sub-metering No. 3 (in watt-hour of active energy). It corresponds to an electric water-heater and an air-conditioner.</li>
</ol>

New Toolbar

 

 

Installing the Docker Toolbox – Exit Status 255 and 1

18 Monday Jan 2016

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I installed docker using the docker toolbox v1.9.1 application download and executable onto a Windows laptop.

Available at https://github.com/docker/toolbox/releases

The docker toolbox installs a number of components including:

  • dockerdocker 1.9.1
  • docker-machine 0.5.6
  • docker-compose 1.5.2
  • Kitematic 0.9.5.1
  • Boot2Docker ISO 1.9.1
  • VirtualBox 5.0.12

The first installation I did resulted in an issue with the IP addressing on the virtual adapters.

Docker IP

 

I tried fixing this in docker and VirtualBox, but did not have much success, so decided to go back to basics and remove and reinstall.

I did the reinstall as for some reason VirtualBox hung on the suggestion of removing the default vm and recreating it . First command below:

$ docker-machine rm default
$ docker-machine create --driver virtualbox default

This fix has worked for others though. I went slightly drastic with the reinstall but could’nt find why VirtualBox was not behaving.

Useful links/discussion on Exit Status 255:

Having reinstalled the applications rebooted and started the docker VM I was faced with an error message that something went wrong – exit status 1.

docker 2

Thankfully these days putting error messages into Google finds help as well as RTM (Read The Manual).

Having read a number of posts on the subject and trying some of the recommendations, I ended up upgrading VirtualBox to the latest test build v5.0.13. This resolved the issue and docker started correctly.

Useful links/discussion on Exit Status 1:

Testbuilds of VirtualBox available at:

Now fixed I can use docker on this laptop.

docker3

 

Manual tasks of today should be the Automated tasks of tomorrow

11 Monday Jan 2016

Posted by in Architecture, Development, DevOps/OpsDev, Innovation, Open Source, Productivity, Programming, Tools

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“Manual tasks of today should be the Automated tasks of tomorrow”.

CogsThere are lots of Automation tools available to people and businesses today to automate tasks that are carried out in a manual way. The pace at which this is happening is varying based on Habits and Patterns that we use on a daily basis. Also because change is involved which sometimes causes its own set of anxieties and issues.

Back in 2012 Bruno Oliveir published a graph on G+ on Geeks and repetitive tasks, which, shows a view of time vs task and how as geek vs non geek might approach automation.

geeks-vs-nongeeks-repetitive-tasks

An alternative view was published by Jon Udell in 2012 – Another way to think about geeks and repetitive tasks which shows an alternative view adding in more steps to show repetition.

alternate-view-of-automation

xkcd has an interesting view on the subject that does ring true in some cases where something does not exist and needs to be created in order to Automate.

automation

You need to be careful that in spending lots of time in trying to automate a task, that you don’t may spend more time in developing automation than could have been spent actually doing the task.

To get over this an element that is missing from these graphs is reuse and blueprints/patterns. The chances are that someone else has had a go at doing what your about to automate so there may be something to reuse rather than developing something yourself.

There are lots of tools and code repositories available today with more being developed. It will depend upon what you are automating as what to use.

Some of the tools available include;

There are too many to list – lots of others available.

Using an Agile approach as well may reduce the length of the task size line on the graph as you do not need to boil the ocean to automate. Break up tasks into their components and you may find it easier to automate.

These tools are also bringing the geek and non geek lines together as Application’s and API’s make it easier for automation to be implemented. The plot of the graph changes into a repeatable process and in effect becomes a loop for both the geeks and non geeks.

Automate

So what will you automate today?