Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino

It’s been a while since I took the old Arduino out, blew the dust off it, and yet again attempted to make something.  We’ve had a love/hate relationship, as I’ve sometimes struggled to overcome my knowledge deficits, but more on that later.

I was prompted to revisit the world of Arduino when I was recently delighted and intrigued, to be contacted by Seeed Studio, to feature their Grove Beginner Kit for Arduino on this blog.  I accepted their offer of a free beginner kit in return for this blog post….

Testing SD Cards with Linux

While on holiday recently, my wife bought a 32GB micro-SD card, which she intended to use in her tablet.  Since then, it has been giving various errors, so I thought I should take it and verify its quality.

In order to test the card, we’re going to run three tests:

1. Access Speed, to assess the card Speed Class.
2. Drive Size, to assess if the reported size matches the actual size.
3. Data durability. to assess that data written can be read back reliably.

Store Files on your Android Phone with Linux

Take your files on the go with Android and Linux.  In this howto, I’ll show you how to easily attach your phone or tablet to your Linux PC and transfer files.

Weekend Project: Open Source Media Centre

I’ve been running a Raspberry Pi connected to my TV for a while now, and I’ve been using Rasbmc, a version of Kodi (formerly XBMC) quite happily.  I decided since I had a spare Raspberry Pi, I should do the same to my second TV in the lounge.  Setting this up and pointing it to my media files from the office shared drive, means I can now watch Game of Thrones while my wife catches up on her soaps.

Using this setup can get you a cheap media centre (small enough to hide behind the TV). Read on for setup instructions …

Weather Watching

For Christmas 2013, my good wife, knowing the geek that I am, gifted me a personal weather station.  I was delighted to receive it, and had it up on-line in no time, and it’s been happily chugging along for over a year since.  I’ve always intended to write about the set-up, so today I’m going to tackle that…

A Better Time-lapse Photography Script

My first attempt at a time lapse script came up a little short.  That script was intended to be quick and dirty.  In order to make it easier to use, I’ve written some improved scripts.

How To Take Timelapse Photos with Raspberry Pi

As part of our CanSat endeavours, we are going to use a Raspberry Pi to do some time-lapse photography as we descend after launch.  In order to do this we’ll need to configure our Pi to do this automatically.  Read on for a description on how to do this.

Home Theater Raspberry Pi

Enclosure – Raspberry Pi by SparkFunElectronics

So in Part One, we took an old external had drive, and added it as storage to a Raspberry Pi.  In Part Two, we took that Raspberry Pi and shared the new folders on the local network.  In this final tutorial, I’ll show what all of this has been for, and show you how to create your own Home Theater Raspberry Pi.

How to Share a Folder on Raspberry Pi

File Folders by One Way Stock

In part one of our tutorial, we discussed how to mount an external hard drive or USB drive on to our Raspberry Pi (or any other Linux based) computer. In this tutorial we will discuss how to share folders from that computer to your local network. I am doing this so I can share the media files I have on my external hard drive, and access them from many places on my network, such as my laptop, my android phone, and my Raspberry Pi running XBMC. You can use this tutorial to share files in a similar way.

How to Mount USB Disks on Raspberry Pi

Hard disk dissection by Roberto F.

I’ve got a Raspberry Pi, and I’ve got an old external hard drive. So what can I do with them? I decided I was going to create a networked shared drive from them, so in this first tutorial, I will show you how to mount the drive on a Linux operating system.  Doing this is easy, but can get a little tricky when you attach and remove drives on the fly.