This Halloween I created an indoor halloween light effect using a Raspberry Pi and a PIR sensor. Unlike previous years my children weren’t really involved in making this one, which is because my 9 year old daughter decided to create her own Raspberry Pi based Halloween Project. She has created a Raspberry Pi, Makey Makey […]

It’s useful to be able to turn mains electricity on using a computer program. Whilst it’s not hard to create an electronic circuit that can switch mains voltages, if not done correctly it can be dangerous. This is where the remote control sockets can be used to create a physical barrier between the low voltage […]

This is the second book that I’ve been the technical book reviewer for, the first being Learn Raspberry Pi with Linux. When I was contacted by Apress to ask if I’d do the review then I didn’t hesitate to say yes as from the description this sounded like just the sort of book I would […]

During the second world war Bletchley Park was home to the Government Code and Cypher School and played a critical role deciphering encrypted messages. I first visited a several years ago before it was opened to the public, it seamed a shame then that such an important part of British history wasn’t more accessible. Since […]

One of the things I’ve been doing as a STEM Ambassador is to help support a Raspberry Pi club at a local high school. At first the club was led by the sixth form students, with the teachers and myself helping out as required. This was working well at first, but with many of the […]

When I first showed my Raspberry Pi based “Ruby Robot” at the Raspberry Jam at Pycon UK, I promised a guide would be forthcoming. I’ve now finished the first draft of my guide to creating the robot. The guide does more than just take the reader through the steps to create a robot. It also […]

As an adult I often try and imagine myself in my children’s shoes to try and think about how appropriate something would be for their age group. Usually I can get a reasonable idea of how well they will pick something up, but this review is one where my daughter has helped me to see what it is like to learn programming through a child’s eyes.

This is a review of the Fuze Raspberry Pi based computer.

In the past few years we’ve created a family craft project at Christmas. This has normally been a large Christmas picture. This year we have created a craft project using electronics and programming on the Raspberry Pi.

For my latest Raspberry Pi project I wanted to be able to detect when a person was in the room. I happened to have a Zilog PIR sensor from SK Pang that I’d bought, but not used. This provides details to get the PIR sensor working with the Raspberry Pi. The data sheet for the […]

The PiFace is a digital input output board that fits on the top of the Raspberry Pi computer. The board provides an element of protection for the Raspberry Pi. Connections are made to external devices through screw terminals mounted on the board. This is easier than connecting wires to the GPIO ports on the Raspberry Pi.