Welcome

In February of 2012, the Raspberry Pi Foundation released a small ARM based computer with the goal of creating an environment that would encourage youngsters to learn about programming, instead of just using, computers. The size and abilities of the computer weren't that unique. The combination of the two were a bit unique... But what made the Raspberry Pi really stand out was the price tag: a computer the size of a credit card, capable of running Linux and using normal monitors, keyboards and mice, with a price tag of $35.00.

Have you tried fish?

Have you tried fish? It's a somewhat (it's about 10 years old) new shell, available for Linux and Mac, that includes a lot of really cool features, including color highlighting, a better completion paradigm, and a simplified command structure for scripting.

Beaglebone Black Header Pin Definitions

The attached PDF document boils down the header pin definitions to a single page, gleaned from the five or six definition tables in the Beaglebone Black documentation. The yellow and red pins are reserved for the HDMI and eMMC devices, leaving the white pins available for free use.

First Beaglebone Black project

RGBfade breadboard diagram

As a first project on the Beaglebone Black, I wanted to do something a bit more glamorous than a single blinking LED, so I decided to hook up an RGB LED, and use some of the PWM GPIO pins to drive it.

Another computer joins the fold...

Last week, I received a Beaglebone Black, Beagleboard's newest addition to their product line. This machine has an ARM 7 1000mHz processor, an on-board eMMC 2gig disk drive, HDMI support via a mini HDMI port, an Ethernet connection, and 512meg of memory. Plus, it is small enough to fit in an Altoids tin.

GPIO programming in Scratch

Sorry I haven't been around for awhile... Busy with other projects.

I noticed that someone is working on a library to allow Scratch to access the GPIO pins. This would give kids and teachers an easy way to put together programs in Scratch that would be able to access the real world; open up a portal to motors, LEDs, switches, sensors...

See it here at Cymplecy

A musical interlude...

I found this clip and had to share it. It's called "The Gahn"... It's photography and music created during a train ride across Australia.

http://youtu.be/nXJ5_m_lmiM

A Pi high performance cluster

I'm doing downtime post-surgery, and saw an article from the University of Southampton on installing and configuring mpich on the Raspberry Pi. I had a plethora of Pi's sitting here doing nothing useful (actually, three of them), and thought "Why not?" It's a sentiment that usually gets me in trouble, but you have to have a motto, right?

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Rochester Hackerspace!

The Rabbit Hole

A Rochester, MN Hackerspace is being set up! Take a look at this link to see the details of what's going on and for meeting times.

I've had enough!

I opened the site to allow people to register and post comments, and have since been flooded with spammers promoting their own sites at my expense, to the tune of thousands of userid registrations a day, and hundreds of bogus comments which I've needed to police. Due to these people's lack of general consideration, I'm closing the site to user registration at this point.

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