RAREblog

I took C3Pi to the Elephant and Castle Mini Maker Faire a few days ago, but had to leave early since he suddenly stopped working. At the time I blamed a loss of battery power, and thought that he'd wiped the file system on his SD card. Various holdups meant that I have only just been able to try to fix the problem which turns out to be rather simpler. C3Pi has two controllers on board: a Raspberry Pi model B+ does the thinking, and a Teensy 3.1 controls his motors. The Pi B+ uses a micro SD card but when I removed it the card was even more micro than usual: half the card had been broken off! I have no idea how this happened but poor old C3PI is off the hook. He's now back in action with a newly-flashed SD card and will soon be getting the first of a series of upgrades. I mentioned that I had only just been able to get around to investigating the problem. I spend several days after the Faire learning about wearable electronics. I'd been asked if I could help with a weara...

From Wembley to Southend Adafruit Gemma This evening I'm off to Createspace in Wembley to work on some wearable electronics. I'm helping with a wearable electronics workshop at this weekend's Southend Raspberry Jam , and I need to practice! I've been to several Raspberry Jams at Southend, and thoroughly enjoyed them. There's always a strong local presence as well as a group of regular visitors from further away. Great talks and workshops - whether you're an beginner at making things or an old hand, you'll find interesting and helpful people. Createspace Createspace is my nearest maker space. I've been to the London Hackspace, which is awesome, but it takes me a while to get there from home. Createspace has an impressive collection of facilities and is much easier for me to get to. They have open nights, and there's a regular meetup for electronic hackers. Gemma and Flora Tonight I'll be experimenting with Adafruit's Gemma and F...

C3Pi from above I went along this morning to the Elephant and Castle Mini Maker Faire to introduce C3Pi to some of my fellow makers. The event was extremely well organised and I had no problem finding my desk and setting up. Before long C3Pi was running through his paces - fairly limited at the moment, as he still has no sensors and is controlled by a very simple command line interface. That's about to change, thanks to Joe Walnes' brilliant websocketd - more details below. In spite of his limited repertoire C3Pi soon made new friends and performed admirably. It's always a little nerve-wracking when he runs on a desktop. He has been known to get over-excited and career off in unexpected directions, but this morning he behaved himself... Power problems ... until just before lunchtime, that is. I'm still not certain what happened, but I think C3Pi's batteries ran low. What I know is that the ssh session connecting my laptop to the Pi suddenly starte...