Smart charger and 5V portable power supply

 

SMART CHARGERNowadays almost every electronic gadgets are powered or recharged by a USB port (full size, mini o micro) as well as many of consumer products we use every day, including our smartphone. To recharge or give power to such products, there are many portable rechargers which have a rechargeable lithium battery and the electronics necessary to convert the battery voltage to 5V and to recharge the internal cell. The cost of these smart chargers is very affordable but we’re hardware makers, aren’t we? So why don’t to do it by ourselves to give power to our Raspberry Pi, arduino or Beaglebone black? We’ll show you a possible way to design one of these intelligent portable power supply. Continue reading

ChipKIT Pi

chipKIT_PiMicrochip and element14 designed a very useful board which will add more power to your Raspberry Pi. The chipKIT Pi board has been developed in order to allow users to create advanced applications like touch sensing, audio processing and sophisticated control, thanks to the powerful PIC32MX250F128B. The board is compatible with Arduino and can be easily programmed with the free chipKIT™ Multi-Platform IDE (MPIDE) that can be hosted on the Raspberry Pi. Continue reading

Raspberry Pi vs all

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A comparison of some of the most popular development board available to the hobbyists.

Raspberry Pi is one of the most known board in the hobbyist world and it is easy to guess why: its success is mainly lead by its low and accessible price for a product with very interesting features. Since Raspberry Pi has been introduced on the market, a borderline has been defined and everyone who wants to design and develop a new board which will be appreciated and loved by the worldwide hobbyistic community, must compare its product with the Raspberry, mainly in terms of final price. Continue reading

Raspberry Pi SD slot replacement

NEW_SLOTMaybe you have already experienced the “red LED only” issue with your Raspberry Pi. If you are sure that everything is ok (power supply, SD card, OS files) maybe you have a SD card slot issue: the plastic sides of the original holder could be damaged and the memory card doesn’t have a good contact and your board can’t boot. In such case the best thing to do is to replace the SD slot. Find out an exact part replacement it was really hard however why use again a thin, plastic holder when a better metallic part could permanently fix the SD contact issue? Finally we decided to use this part, made by Wurth Elektronik and available from Farnell: http://uk.farnell.com/wurth-elektronik/693063020911/memory-socket-sd-card-9way/dp/2081361?Ntt=693063020911

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Raspberry PI opensource video surveillance with Zoneminder

 

RaspberryRasperri Pi was mainly designed to be used by young people who want to learn and discover the electronics and programming world without investing big amount of money. The latest improved version which has a 512 MB RAM available can be used to perform more complicated tasks as the one we want to show you today: how to make your home opensource video surveillance system using Raspberry PI, Zoneminder and a IP cam. In this system the Rasperry Pi works as a DVR (Digital Video Recorder); the acquired video files will be stored into the SD memory card and can be reached from everywhere by using a FTP server like Vsftpd. Continue reading