How To #10: Raspberry Pi

For the 10th How To in the history of this blog, I thought I would do a How To special: Raspberry Pi! In this post, I will teach you about Raspberry Pi, how to get started, and some other tidbits of information.

About Raspberry Pi
Raspberry Pi is a small board that has a computer on it. The computer on the Raspberry Pi is the same you would find in a Kindle. It runs on Linux and its "hard drive" is a 4 gigabyte or above SD card. It is powered by a normal cell phone charger or any other power supply that can give 5V and maybe 1A. You can program it to do certain things, like an Arduino or other microcontroller. You can program an Arduino from a Raspberry Pi, too.

How To Get Started
I won't be explaining every detail of the getting started process, but I will give some, like the parts and the SD card. First, you need to have: a Raspberry Pi, a power supply, a USB cable, a mouse, a keyboard, an SD card, a laptop, and a monitor. You need the laptop in order to format the SD card. If your laptop does not have an SD card reader, then you need to buy one that is compatible with your computer. Once you do that, go on to the Raspberry Pi website and download the Raspian file or other system, and, if you want to, download the torrent file. Next, move the file to the SD card, wait a little bit, and the operating system is now on the SD card. Furthermore, put the SD card in the Raspberry Pi, connect all the equipment to the Raspberry Pi, and power it on. If it does not work, check to make sure that everything is plugged in correctly, that you downloaded the system correctly, and, if all that checks out okay, pinch the SD card between your thumb and the Raspberry Pi board. Once you have it pinched, power on the board. If it works, find a way to keep the SD card tight. I used this strategy, and it worked. Check out the troubleshooting page on the Raspberry Pi website for more methods.
A really useful book I used was Getting Started with Raspberry Pi by Matt Richardson. It goes over a lot of stuff that I didn't include here. Once you have everything going, do some awesome projects with the Raspberry Pi, and have fun!

Catching Up

It has been a very long time since my last post. That is because of school and other stuff going on in the weekends. Mainly all that has happened is Easter (I got a Sonic Screwdriver!). I also got just this morning the 33rd volume of Make (which is awesome). When summer break comes, I will be doing more frequent posts and more projects. I also got Google Chrome since my last post, and it is much better than Internet Explorer (in my opinion). My G/T project presentation was last weekend, as well, and it was very fun. In case you didn't see my post about it, my project was how many balloons will lift a house, so I had to research online to find the answer. The only restriction was I couldn't do a question like, "Why is the sky blue?" because you could easily find the answer online. I have also been watching a really cool show on BBC America called Doctor Who, and I recommend you watch it. It's a mix between sci-fi and awesomeness.

Oreo Cookie Seperator

A few days ago my friend and I made an Oreo separator. When you turned it on, you would place the Oreo in the trajectory of the knife, wait ten seconds, and it would slice through the crème and give you two parts: one cookie, one crème. His favorite part was cookie, and my favorite part was crème, so it was a win-win. The prototype circuit was just a servo connected to an Arduino, and a knife connected to the servo horn. It took us about 30 seconds to build it (no joke)! It was really, really simple. The code was just a modified version of my team's HackPHX robot pen code. When we tested the prototype, however, it kind of worked. The servo didn't have enough strength to slice through the crème. In the next version, we're going to switch the servo with a DC motor. Hopefully that will work. Let's also hope that the separator machine doesn't get an opinion of its own, and it splits the cookie unfairly!

HackPHX

Last week was HackPHX, and it was awesome. Our team number was 4, and we built a Doctor Who themed robot that was supposed to be a portable printer, but it ended up being a light following robot. If we fully completed it, it would follow lights around a stage I built, and put a dot near the light. At the end, you would trace the dots and get an image. For the decoration we built a 3D printed K9 from Doctor Who. The entire night was really fun, lasting from 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. When it was nearing the end, I 3D printed a sonic screwdriver from Doctor Who, and we put it on top of the robot. My teammates were Jac and Stewart (follow them on twitter :) ) and they were a huge help. Other teams built really cool stuff, like a clock, an eye that follows you around, and a Simon game. The secret ingredient we had to use was the Shield Bot from Seeed Studios. The entire event was really fun, and I enjoyed it a lot.
If you want to see all the teams' code, pictures, and other stuff related to teams' projects, check out the GitHub page for HackPHX.
Stewart's Twitter: @intel_stewart
Jac's Twitter: @JacGoudsmit

The desk in the machine shop after 12 hours of hacking

G/T Project Progress

In my G/T class at school, we have to answer a question that can't be easily answered (for example, you can't do why is the sky blue, because you can easily find the answer to that question by Googling it). My question that I am asking is, how many balloons will lift a house/car/space shuttle/etc.? Your question also has to have some value to it (if you ask why the sky is blue, it has no real value to it (it does have a knowledge value to it, though)). The value to my question is in knowledge: it gives ideas to spark ideas in other fields.
Right now, I'm building Lego houses (one small, one medium, and one large) to lift with balloons. I'm going to factor in all the variables in an equation I made, and that will probably give me the approximate number of balloons it will take to lift the object. If not, I will probably tweak the air pressure variable, because that variable divides all the balloons (in the variable n1 (the one is subscript)) by 14.7, which might be too much, and, since all the testing will b done in a room, it probably won't matter.
Another topic I wanted to talk about: sorry for the lack of posts, I have just been really busy with school and projects and stuff.

Arduino Random Number Generator

Yesterday I was messing around with Arduino and I made some code that generates a value from 0 to 1000. In the code you can change the lower value in the constrain() command to any number you want, just make sure that the higher value is larger than the value you put in.
Here is the code:
int a = constrain(a, 1000, 2000);

void setup()
{
Serial.begin(9600);
randomSeed(A0);
}

void loop()
{
Serial.println(random(a));
}
Make sure you don't use pin A0, too!

New Room!



 

My mom, yesterday, rearranged my room while I was at school! All the fiction books in my room are now arranged in alphabetical order by author, and all my electronics books are now on the shelf above my electronics workbench. My Rep Rap is in the corner of my room now, instead of in my soldering area, and my electronics workbench is now one space over from where it originally was. Hydrobot even has a space; up on a shelf, where it is now breaking down (ever since the presentation, it has slowly been falling apart :( ).
A reminder for all HackPHX members: Be prepared!!!