Tag Archives: RaspberryPI

Geek Out as a Scout Leader – Rolling a NAT 20

14 Thursday Jan 2021

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What a great time to volunteer as a leader for Scouting and for young people to be in the scouting movement. The partnerships that the Scouting Association have created with third parties to help deliver programmes is at a great level with so many opportunities for both leaders and scouts to learn new activities. Each of the partners provide information, resources and packs to help the delivery of the badges.

Just announced is the Scouts partnership with Dungeons and Dragons which takes me back to my teen years rolling for that Nat 20!. This and with the Raspberry Pi, Electronic and Hackathons is a geek out for me. Its great to pass on the skills and knowledge to the next generation.

Here are an example of some of the partnerships and badges

So how can you volunteer to help and join in?

The below is from https://www.scouts.org.uk/volunteer

Scouts is needed now more than ever. The pandemic has hit our young people hard – with two thirds saying is impacted on their mental health. Having people positive role models to guide the way, and give that extra bit of encouragement is so important in times like these. We help young people step up, speak and find their place in the world. We help them gain skills for life.

Three great reasons to volunteer: 

  • You’ll share your skills and experience with young people, while developing yourself
  • You’ll have fun and meet new people in your area
  • You’ll inspire a generation (and they’ll never forget it)

 What to expect:

  • A warm welcome
  • Flexibility to get involved in a way that works for you
  • Easy access to training and resources online
  • Plenty of support and a great team

Whether you join us to directly support young people, or behind the scenes, as a volunteer manager, treasurer or fundraiser, we’ll match you with a role that suits the skills you have to share and those you’d like to gain.

No two weeks are the same, but the impact you make is always great.

You can start your journey here https://www.scouts.org.uk/groups/

Challenged to build a Raspberry PI Laptop – Part 2

26 Thursday Jul 2018

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Raspberry PIIts been a while since I wrote my first blog post on this (Challenged to build a Raspberry PI Laptop – Part 1) following on from the challenge I had been set by Lewis Richards.

Mainly due to other things taking my time, I’ve not been focusing on it, but have now purchased the relevant parts and am pulling together a design.

I have used fritzing to map out a rough circuit diagram based on research and reading I have been doing on the relevant parts for the laptop.

There isn’t a correct part in fritzing yet for the screen I chose so I have used a different part with a connector to show the relevant connections. Its on my to do list to look at creating the part properly.

Here is the parts list of the laptop. Similar to a lot of the designs on the internet already, although I am thinking about the idea of adding an arduino based board to it as well.

Parts List

  • Raspberry PI Zero W
  • AdaFruit Powerboost 500
  • XPT2046 LCD Touch Screen
  • 2000mAH Battery
  • Wires
  • Switch
  • Bluetooth Mini keyboard

The diagram does not yet show the keyboard wired in. It has its own battery inside so a bit more investigating on best to power using the one battery in the circuit.

Portable PI

Next on the list is to start the case design. I have a few ideas which I will try and write up in another blog post.

References

Challenged to build a Raspberry PI Laptop – Part 1

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

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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

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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.

Raspberry PI on the PC & Mac

27 Tuesday Dec 2016

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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

 

Raspberry Pi and New Starter Kit

14 Wednesday Sep 2016

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PIRaspberry Pi has reached a staggering 10 Million Pi devices.

It’s a long way from the reports back in May 2012 that 20,000 units had been shipped.

Moving from their bare bone boards and then buying a starter kit from 3rd parties to get you going on a Pi Adventure. Raspberry Pi are now producing  their own Starter Kit which includes the following:

  • A Raspberry Pi 3 Model B
  • An 8GB NOOBS SD card
  • An official case
  • An official 2.5A multi-region power supply
  • An official 1m HDMI cable
  • An optical mouse and a keyboard with high-quality scissor-switch action
  • A copy of Adventures in Raspberry Pi Foundation Edition

For me the best project that I have undertaken yet is the Amazon Alexa on the Pi3. However there are some others that I want to get round to such as

Jarvis Home Automation

https://hackaday.io/project/1214-project-jarvis-ai-home-automation-assistant

Multi Room Music Player

http://www.instructables.com/id/Raspberry-Pi-Multi-Room-Music-Player/

Gamer Coffee Table

http://www.instructables.com/id/Coffee-Table-Pi/

If your stuck for project ideas with your Pi, here is a link to 682 projects from Hackerday

https://hackaday.io/projects/tag/raspberry%20pi

Configuring the Raspberry PI with Ansible and AWSCLI

17 Friday Jun 2016

Posted by in Cloud, Open Source, Raspberry Pi

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PII wanted to set up my Raspberry Pi with Ansible and the AWSCLI package to allow the creation of AWS servers from the Pi.

As I was recycling a card I no longer needed reformatting the card and installing Raspbian on it seemed sensible start.

I use the SD Formatter programme to ensure that the SD Card is formatted correctly.

https://www.sdcard.org/downloads/formatter_4/

Then downloaded the latest image of Raspbian and used Win32DiskImager to install the OS onto the card.

http://www.raspberry-projects.com/pi/pi-operating-systems/win32diskimager

I have been caught out before with errors of “No space left on device” or similar so the first command I run is

 sudo raspi-config

Then select the Expand Filesystem menu option. This ensures that all the SD card is used.

A reboot is required for the changes to take effect.

The Pi is now ready to begin downloading packages.

The next task is to update and upgrade the software on the Pi using

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade –y

or

sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

The below will help with explaining what is the difference between upgrade and dist-upgrade

upgrade
    upgrade is used to install the newest versions of all packages
    currently installed on the system from the sources enumerated in
    /etc/apt/sources.list. Packages currently installed with new
    versions available are retrieved and upgraded; under no
    circumstances are currently installed packages removed, or packages
    not already installed retrieved and installed. New versions of
    currently installed packages that cannot be upgraded without
    changing the install status of another package will be left at
    their current version. An update must be performed first so that
    apt-get knows that new versions of packages are available.

dist-upgrade
    dist-upgrade in addition to performing the function of upgrade,
    also intelligently handles changing dependencies with new versions
    of packages; apt-get has a "smart" conflict resolution system, and
    it will attempt to upgrade the most important packages at the
    expense of less important ones if necessary. So, dist-upgrade
    command may remove some packages. The /etc/apt/sources.list file
    contains a list of locations from which to retrieve desired package
    files. See also apt_preferences(5) for a mechanism for overriding
    the general settings for individual packages.

If you want to clean up the build and remove any package files the following command can be used. This can also help save space if you have a small card.

sudo apt-get clean

After some Googling I found a good set of instructions on installing Ansible onto the Pi. As this Article says it needs some extra bits to make it work.

https://www.whiskykilo.com/install-ansible-on-rpi.html

There are a couple of steps missing below this site which I have added in below in bold.

sudo apt-get install python-dev -y

sudo apt-get install libffi-dev libssl-dev -y

cd ~

wget https://bootstrap.pypa.io/ez_setup.py -O - | sudo python

wget https://pypi.python.org/packages/f7/83/377e3dd2e95f9020dbd0dfd3c47aaa7deebe3c68d3857a4e51917146ae8b/pyasn1-0.1.9.tar.gz#md5=f00a02a631d4016818659d1cc38d229a

tar –xvzf pyasn1-0.1.9.tar.gz

cd pyasn1-0.1.9

python setup.py install

cd ~

wget http://releases.ansible.com/ansible/ansible-2.0.2.0.tar.gz

tar zxvf ansible-2.1.0.0.tar.gz

cd ansible-2.1.0.0

make

sudo make install

cd ~

It is always worth checking to see if there is a later version of the packages available and making the necessary changes to the lines above.

Next install the boto package

pip install --user boto

Next install the awscli package

sudo pip install awscli

more information on installing awscli can be found at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/installing.html

once installed you can then use the

aws help

command to check the installation has worked.

To configure the awscli follow the instructions at http://docs.aws.amazon.com/cli/latest/userguide/cli-chap-getting-started.html

assuming that you have an AWS account already.

Using the

aws configure

command you can enter your keys. The keys below are examples only

$ aws configure
AWS Access Key ID [None]: AKIAIOSFODNN7EXAMPLE
AWS Secret Access Key [None]: wJalrXUtnFEMI/K7MDENG/bPxRfiCYEXAMPLEKEY
Default region name [None]: us-west-2
Default output format [None]: ENTER

You should now be able to use Ansible and the AWSCLI on your Raspberry PI.

Pi Zero gets a Camera

16 Monday May 2016

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PIRaspberry Pi have just released another 30,000 Pi Zero Units to the marketplace. Finally I have managed to order one after having the Pi Zero on my wish list for sometime now.

The demand for the Pi Zero has meant that they do not stay on the shelves long. This has created a high cost market for them on popular auction sites and suppliers have been limiting people to 1 unit only when they order (if in stock).

The folks at RasperryPi are using a different manufacturing process to that of the Pi 1,2 & 3 to keep costs down, however it looks like they are hopefully going to be keeping up with the demand.

“There are roughly 30,000 new Zeros out there today, and we’ll be making thousands more each day until demand is met.”

Thank you RasperryPi

So whats new with this Pi Zero?

The Pi Zero has had a bit of a revamp between manufacturing batches and now contains a camera connector. source: Raspberry Pi Blog

The camera connector is about £4.00 which is the same cost as the Pi (£4.00). Then there is the cost of the Camera (approx £23.00), however it does make a low cost camera unit and opens up the possibilities of the Pi Zero.

Picture below from Raspberry Pi Blog: source: Raspberry Pi Blog

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

Just awaiting the postman now then time to do some more development stuff.

 

 

Amazon Alexa Voice Service and Raspberry Pi 3

26 Saturday Mar 2016

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PIFollowing on from my last blog post “Raspberry Pi and Amazon Alexa Voice Service” I decided on a wet and windy Saturday to install Alexa Voice Service onto my Raspberry Pi 3.

I followed the steps to install Alexa (https://github.com/amzn/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi) onto my Raspberry Pi 3 with some changes to versions of software to the latest builds.

Firstly extracting NOOBS at v1.9.0 Built: Mar 18 2016 – onto an 8GB Micro SD Card on my PC, then putting the SD Card into the Pi3 and booting from it.

Clicked to install Raspbian, which now needs 3029 MB space to install. The install itself took a while to extract the filesystem and install it. It extracted at around 3.6 MB/Sec.

Perhaps I should have just put a Raspian build onto my SD card using Win32 Disk Imager as that can build at around 16 MB/Sec using the PC rather than the Pi to extract the files.

The latest build does not display the Raspi-config screen. After build it reboots once you click the OK prompt straight into Raspbian.

The next stage it to get into the Raspi-config screen anyway from the Terminal prompt using the command:

sudo raspi-config

I went into the Advanced Options and then enabled SSH.

Using PuTTY I SSH’d onto my Pi 3 and installed VNC using:

sudo apt-get install tightvncserver

After starting the tightvncserver, I followed the instructions to autostart VNC by creating the autostart config.

Next I installed VLC as instructed using:

sudo apt-get install vlc-nox vlc-data

I did run into some Fetch Errors so followed the below

Unable to fetch errors If you run into some “Unable to fetch” errors while trying to install VLC, try the following:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install vlc-nox vlc-data

These sorted out the install of VLC and I then set the variables for VLC.

export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/usr/lib/vlc
export VLC_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/lib/vlc/plugins

Next task is to install Java.

curl -sL https://deb.nodesource.com/setup | sudo bash -
sudo apt-get install nodejs 
Then following the instructions to install the Java JDK.
  • Raspberry Pi 3 model – The binary you are looking for is “Linux ARM 64 Soft Float ABI”. Download the tar.gz file jdk-8u77-linux-arm64-vfp-hflt.tar.gz from the Oracle link above.

At this point I checked a Pull request into the Github page and noted that it had been corrected by some one to note

Although there is a 64-bit ARMv8 that Apple and some other smartphones use, there are no raspberry 64-bit ARM processors on pis yet. More info: [Raspberry Piblog.com](http://www.rpiblog.com/2014/03/installing-oracle-jdk-8-on-raspberry-pi.html)#

Thanks to pix64 for that nugget.

The easiest way to get the file onto your Raspberry Pi is to download it using the Pi itself. If you have download via the web browser on Raspian, the file will most probably be in the /home/pi/downloads directory. From the terminal you can type:

cd /home/pi/downloads
ls

This should show the file jdk-8u73-linux-arm32-vfp-hflt.tar.gz in the directory. Using the following command to move the file to the /usr/local directory.

sudo mv jdk-8u73-linux-arm32-vfp-hflt.tar.gz /usr/local

(Dont forget to use the tab key on the file name so you don’t have to type out the whole name. Start with JDK then tab).

You will need build 73 as the latest (77) isn’t compatiable with the build at this time

Returning to my PC and the SSH terminal I then extracted the .gz

sudo tar zxvf jdk-8u73-linux-arm32-vfp-hflt.tar.gz -C /opt

I then set the Java defaults with

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/javac javac /opt/jdk1.8.0_73/bin/javac 1

sudo update-alternatives --install /usr/bin/java java /opt/jdk1.8.0_73/bin/java 1

sudo update-alternatives --config javac

sudo update-alternatives --config java

Next is to install Maven which I downloaded on the PI and moved the file in the same way I did for the Oracle JDK. Downloaded from https://maven.apache.org/download.cgi

Again returning to my PC and the SSH terminal I extracted the .gz

sudo tar zxvf apache-maven-3.3.9-bin.tar.gz -C /opt

Then I set the defaults as instructed in the GitHub instructions for Alexa Voice Service.

At this point the instructions said that a .zip could be downloaded – Download the sample apps zip file. You can use http://kinolien.github.io/gitzip/ to help zip up the files to a .zip to download entering https://github.com/amzn/alexa-avs-raspberry-pi as the sub folder/sub directory to zip.

I downloaded this file to my Pi3 and extracted it. Renaming the directory to Alexa for easy reference. Storing it in the downloads area for now.

Following the instructions I ensured my Amazon Developer account was configured correctly.

The next part involved following the instructions to the letter as per the GitHub page to set the configuration and keys for the Alexa Voice Service.

I then installed Java 8 as per the instructions. This took a while to complete.

Now to test out the Alexa Voice Service app.

When I finally get a Pi Zero, I will try this config on that board. The Zero would certainly make a low entry point to the Alexa Voice Service.

The developer pages for Alexa Voice Service are at: https://developer.amazon.com/public/solutions/alexa/alexa-voice-service