Thanks to Keith Wright for diligently testing it and pointing out bugs for me – fixed some issues in the gpio command, and while I was at it, I added in 2 new functions to it to allow for easy exporting/unexporting of the /sys/class/gpio interface – so now you can write a little script to do the exports for you, then run your own program that uses that interface (e.g.) a Python, shell, or php script, then un-export them afterwards, all without needing to be root (or use the sudo command)
Just uploaded a new version of wiringPi with a few bug fixes. the main one being in digitalWrite when the range check for the pin number was fine when it was wiringPi pins, but not fine for the newly introduced GPIO pin numbers.
I’ve also added in some additions – a shiftIn/Out module and a serial port access module. These are just handy additions, but I use them myself in other projects, so it’s a handy place to keep them.
As usual, fedback welcome!
-Gordon
My little ladder game seems to have generated some interest – or was it my comment about the GPIO port standing for Game Port IO? Who knows, it’s fun anyhow…
But it’s got me thinking – what else can I do with a row of LEDs and a button. The Ladder game isn’t original, it was from a magazine published over 30 years ago, but what else can I think of to use on the same platform…
Some sort of reaction tester? shooter? Will crank up my imagination and see what comes up, but suggestions are welcome!
Working on some fun projects and examples with the Raspberry Pi’s on-board GPIO ports and the SK Pang Starter kit.
All the fun is over here…
Just a note to say that I’ve updated my WiringPi libraries. It now should work fine with C++ programs and there is an added function (and flag to the gpio program) to switch fron the WiringPi Arudino-like pin numbering to the native BCM_GPIO pin numbering.
No updates for a while as I’ve spent most of this week cooking. If every you think that running a little baking hobby business is fun, then great, it is fun! Until you decide to take on doing an afternoon tea for 100 people…
More when I can get more time out of the kitchen… Lost count of the number of scones but I think it’s close to 200. 8 big cakes (Lemon Drizzle, Chocolate, Victoria sandwich and coffee & walnut), 100 mini cup-cakes, and 240 slices of bread into dainty sandwiches!
Then there’s tea, lemonade, lashing of ginger beer (non-alcoholic) and so on…
If only the weather was looking better… Ah well, we do have an indoor hall as well as a big garden!
— Quick update after the event. A huge success with most of the food eaten! If you want photos, they’re over on our Moorbakes site.
To use the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi, I have written my own access library and modeled it on the Arduino Wiring system. It started life as the means to allow my BASIC to access the GPIO pins, but I’ve now tidied it up and released it as a library in its own right.
All the details are here.
Friday saw me on a train to Manchester to attend the 2012 UCubed Unconference and what a great time it was too.
I went just because I could! But I also had my Raspberry Pi to demo as well as showing my BASIC interpreter running on it along with all the other stuff that comes with it – The Debian install and LXDE desktop. It generated a lot of interest indeed!
It generated so much interest, that I barely had time to see and talk to more people! However I did attend the talk given by Alan O’Donohoe and on my way to the station, Alan put me on the spot for a quick audio-boo on IRC!
Some of Alans photos of the day can be found here
Another chap who caught my eye was Julian Skidmore of the Fignition project. Pretty amazing stuff – he has an Atmel 8-bit chip (same as Arduino chip), displaying video entirely in software and it runs a variant of FIG Forth.
The venue for the event was Manchesters MadLab a pretty fantastic place!
Thanks to Alan, Les and the others for organising it. It certainly made a nice change from sleepy Devon!
Here we go! My Raspberry Pi has arrived and I’ve been having some fun. First job was to secure the additional bits and pieces for it – USB keyboard, mouse, powered hub and (still on order!) HDMI to DVI adapter.
First impressions? It’s small – but then again, so is the main-board inside your average mobile phone which these days is actually more powerful than the Raspberry Pi, so I really shouldn’t be surprised!
First task was to boot it up – I’d already prepared a 4GB SD card with the latest Debian image on the Raspberry Pi website. I plugged it all together and before long (really, 5 seconds) it was booting up. Part of their boot-up sequence involves a reboot, but that only too a few more seconds and it was there. Login with the published details and that was that. One more Linux box to my collection!
My BASIC is at the stage where I’m writing lots of little (and not so little!) demos for it, and I’m having a lot of fun re-writing some of the old games and demos I wrote and used all that time back, and noticing something else… Computers now are much faster and more capable than they were 30 years ago, so why not take advantage of it…
One of the things I wrote back then was a turtle graphics interpreter for the Apple II. I wrote it in Apples Applesoft BASIC, so it was slow, even then. BASIC interpreting a simple turtle graphics language I’d developed so I could draw pretty pictures. Some would take up to 5 minutes to draw!
Now, build turtle graphics into RTB and write some programs to explot it… And I find that the pictures are not only fast, but fast enough to animate! So you draw a nice spiral, but if you draw it in a loop, changing the start angle every iteration, it spins – something that took over a minute 30 years ago can now be done 30 times a second.
So this opeens up a whole new world of possibilities – animated turtle graphics! That in itself is quite exciting, but what else can we do?
Watch this space as they say…