PiCamera Fun at the Command Line

At January’s Wilmslow Coderdojo, we used the PiCamera for the first time.  We had a lot of fun encouraging the Ninjas to learn a little bit of python while taking selfies and playing with effects.

Based on some excellent work by Carl over at fortoffee.org.uk I produced some worksheets which are attached here.

Because playing with the PiCamera is such an accessible fun activity, it provides an ideal opportunity to introduce something a little more complex.  These worksheets use python, and the work is carried out completely at the command line, with no graphical IDE.

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DIY Raspberry Pi GPIO LEDs and Switches board

This board provides 4 buttons connected to Raspberry Pi GPIO to act as inputs, and 4 LEDs connected to GPIO to act as outputs.  Very simple!

GPIOboardphoto1

The motivation for the creation of this project was to try to do something with Raspberry Pi at our local CoderDojo which was different to what could be done with hardware that the “ninjas” had already been exposed to.

The ability to easily interface with hardware is what really sets the Raspberry Pi apart.  Scratch, python, etc., are all available on the laptops which they are already using – so I thought this would show them a different side to programming.

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On arch, systemd journal eats SD card space

I use archlinuxarm on pisaac’s SD card, because it’s the most basic system I could find.
I don’t need any fancy GUIs, and I also prefer “The Arch Way” generally to any other Linux distro paradigm.

I discovered an issue recently where my SD card (only 2GB) was getting very full, and tracked it down to systemd’s journal using almost 0.5GB.

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The Trouble with PiFace

Do Your Research!

Initially, I had thought that PiFaceDigital would be an ideal way to control Pisaac, my Raspberry Pi robot.piface-digital

It has 8 digital inputs, with switches fitted to four, and 8 digital outputs, with LEDs fitted, of which two also control two hefty looking relays, which I thought would be capable of controlling my two motors.

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