Introduction Our writing group meets Friday mornings at a local coffee shop. I usually write these blog posts at these sessions. Often when writing about the Raspberry Pi or another SBC, I have to leave early because I need to go home to try some more things on the physical device. Raspberry Pi Connect is a service from the Raspberry Pi organization that lets you remotely connect to your Pi through their servers. I thought I’d be able to write this article in the coffee shop and use Raspberry Pi Connect to access my Pi 5 for anything additional I needed. Of course, I arrive at the coffee shop ..read more

Introduction The Raspberry Pi 5 is quite a speedy little computer, but the main bottleneck is using microSD cards for storage rather than SSD type memory drives found in most other computers. You could connect an SSD drive to the Pi via an USB port, but then this only runs at USB speed rather than full SSD speed and isn’t much better than a microSD card. The Raspberry Pi 5 added a PCI express connector with the promise that this would allow a fast way to connect SSD drives as well as other devices requiring faster data transfer rates. At the time of shipping there wasn’t a way to utilize this ..read more

Introduction Last time, the SunFounder PiDog was introduced, this time we’ll introduce how to program the PiDog to do our bidding. Previously, we looked at the SunFounder PiCar and how to program it. Both robots share the same RobotHat to interface the Raspberry Pi with the various servos, motors and devices attached to the robot. For the PiCar this is fairly simple as you just need to turn on the motors to go and set the steering servo to the angle you want to turn. The PiDog is much more complicated. There are eight servo motors that control the legs. On each leg, one servo sets the angle of ..read more

Introduction I recently received a SunFounder PiDog robot dog kit. I reviewed the SunFounder PiCar here along with software projects here and here. There are a lot of similarities between the PiCar and the PiDog as they are both controlled by a Raspberry Pi and both share the same robot hat to control the mechanisms, The PiDog is a more advanced kit, as there are more parts and more steps to the assembly than the PiCar. Having already assembled the PiCar was a big help as I was familiar with how SunFounder kits go together which sped up the process quite a bit.. The PiDog has eight servo motor ..read more

Introduction Last time, we programmed a SunFounder PiCar-X to behave similar to a Roomba, to basically move around a room following an algorithm to go all over the place. This was a first step and had a few limitations. The main one is that it could easily get stuck, since if there is nothing in front of the ultrasonic sensor, then it doesn’t detect it is stuck. This blog post adds some basic image processing to the algorithm, so if two consecutive images from the camera are the same, then it considers itself stuck and will try to extricate itself. The complete program listing is at the end of ..read more

Introduction I received an early XMas present of a SunFounder PiCar-X. This is a car that is controlled via a Raspberry Pi, it contains a number of sensors, including a pan-tilt camera, ultrasonic module and a line tracking module, so you can experiment with self-driving programs. It is capable of avoiding obstacles, following objects, tracking lines, and recognizing objects. You can program it using either Python or EzBlocks (a Scratch-like language).  It costs under $100 and includes a battery that powers the whole thing, including the on-board Pi. This article is an overview of the ass ..read more

Introduction The new Raspberry Pi 5 started shipping back on Oct 23, 2023. I didn’t pre-order, but managed to get a 8Gig unit towards the end of November. This article covers what is new and a few impressions of running this fresh new Pi. What’s New There is a lot new in the Raspberry Pi 5, here is a list of the key improvements: Broadcom BCM2712 quad-core Arm Cortex A76 processor @ 2.4GHz, which is significantly faster than the Pi 4. RP1 I/O controller, adding functionality from the RP2040 and offloading I/O processing from the CPU. A PCI Express port that will eventually allow the connectio ..read more

Introduction Last time, we assembled a small RISC-V program to run on my FPGA RISC-V core running on a Digilent Basys3 development board. To do this we used RARS, which is a quite good Assembler, Debugger, Simulator for RISC-V; in this article I thought I’d point out some other tools available from the official RISC-V github page, including the full GNU C toolchain. The intent of RISC-V is to be as open source as possible. The main page for the RISC-V Github site contains links to all the RISC-V specifications as well as quite a bit of software including simulators and test tools to test your ..read more

Introduction There was a Raspberry Pi IR camera on sale in the last Prime Day sale, so I thought I’d get one and see what it can do. This is an inexpensive 5MP camera that works night or day and cost me $22. Basically this is a chance to get into Raspberry Pi camera support, play with an infrared camera and play with my 3D printer. You can shoot videos, but I haven’t played with this yet. This blog is the start of that journey. The Camera The camera arrived in a static envelope with no instructions and in three parts that required bolting together. The bolts are very small and hard to fit in t ..read more

Assembly Language Tutorial Six for MagPi Magazine I’m in the process of writing a series of Assembly Language tutorials for MagPi Magazine. The sixth and final one appeared in issue #121 on page 58. The PDF version of the magazine is free to download, but MagPi always appreciates any donations. This article doesn’t look at ARM Assembly Language, instead it looks at the special Assembly Language used by the Raspberry Pi Pico’s Programmable I/O processors. If a CPU needs to handle all the aspects of I/O operations itself, this can take a significant percentage of its processing power. To offloa ..read more