RAREblog

 I just got my copy of Mastering the I2C bus - an excellent book, the first in Elektor.com's LabWorx series. The author, Vincent Himpe, really knows his stuff. I've been using the I2C bus since I started with PIC micros back in the last millennium, but I learned something on just about every page of the book. The book covers the background and history of the I2C bus and explains it from hardware and software perspectives. There's a useful chapter on FAQs, and the book also covers debugging. The author makes a good selection of commonly used devices, and explains how to use them. The last part of the book describes a series of I2C project boards, (available from an Elektor partner) and covers their purpose, their design and application. You're encouraged to download code from a dedicated website. I had  a problem getting on the site yesterday, but after a fast response from Elektor I now have access to the software and PCB layouts. We'll be supporting I2C o...

Eben Upton recorded this video with Slashdot about the distribution of  Raspberry Pi a few days ago.

The Raspberry Pi launch has happened. Sort of. The Pi is selling from from Farnell and RS Components. Except both sites have crashed, due to the demand. There will be a lot of impatient people today, and for now I suspect that the main mood among RasPi supporters is frustration. That will pass. Somehow this tiny $35 computer has captured the minds of people in the same way as the Apollo moon landings did. (Yes, I was watching as the Eagle landed). At a time when we're all feeling the pinch of austerity,  and uncertain about the future, the Pi is a ray of hope - a sigh that bad times may be here, but better times will come. I spent last evening in the company of geekish friends at the Extreme Tuesday Club. Just about everyone had heard of Raspberry Pi, and there was a warm glow about it. Best of all, I met an old friend who knows someone who might buy my vintage Acorn microcomputer. I offered it in exchange for a donation to the Pi foundation a while back, and wa...

I've been crazy busy with our start-up  for the last week or so, but I've still managed to find time to look at Seeed Studio's Grove Toy Kit . The kit consists of an Arduino shield (the Twig ), a set of peripherals (the Leaves ), and a set of cables that you use to link them up. OLED display The Leaves in the Toy Kit include a couple of high-powered servos, a tri-colour LED, a tiny, crisp 128*64 OLED display, a sound sensor, a buzzer, a PIR motion sensor, a 3-axis accelerometer and plenty of cables. There are many other leaves available, and they can all connected to the motherboard using the cables provided. The documentation is sparse, but usable; we'll do our best to add to it. At present the Grove is targeted at the Arduino, but we're looking at the possibility of connecting it to the Raspberry Pi. It's a natural fit with our planned extension board, and  would offer an excellent platform for experimenters wanting to explore the Internet of ...

Last night I went along to an excellent free meeting organised by OSHUG (the Open Source Hardware User Group). The timing couldn't have been better. The topic was Manufacturing, and we had three excellent presentations about the realities of bringing Open Source Hardware products to market. Since quick2wire is going to open source our Hardware, Software and Documentation, this was spot on for me! The talks were great, but the session in the pub was also really useful, and fun. I got to meet two people I've previously only known on-line: Sukkin Pang, the founder of SK Pang electronics , and  Aaron Nielsen  who runs .:oomlout:. here in the UK. Both are great guys, really ready to share information and help us out. I also got to make a whole raft of other new friends from the Open Source Hardware community. The group meets once a month and I shall certainly be going along to future sessions. You can find out more at their  website .

oomlout's ARDX starter kit Over at Quick2Wire we're two steps closer to the launch of our Rapsberry Pi add-on - an experimenter's kit, inspired by the many great starter kits you can get for the Arduino. (I've often mentioned my favourite, the oomlout starter kit , which started me on this road a couple of years ago.) We've had quite a few people signing up for email news at our rather minimalist website. Today I'll be sending out a few details of what we have in mind, along with a very short questionnaire about the contents of the planned kit. Meanwhile I'm prototying the board that will be at the heart of the kit. It uses a few surface mount devices. I'm a bit old to be soldering things I can hardly see, but I've just got the first level shifter chip mounted on a DIP board, and I'm hoping to breadboard a working interface over the week-end. Of course, we don't have a Raspberry Pi to test against yet (hint, Liz!), so we will...

I've just got back home after an enjoyable afternoon introducing my brother-in-law to the Arduino. He's a designer by profession. He lives on a Dutch barge near Canary wharf, so he's a competent electrician, but he's new to embedded hardware and micro controllers. (If you want a quiet but luxurious place to stay in Docklands with a 5 star breakfast, take a look at their website ). I took along oomlout's excellent  ARDX arduino starter kit , and by the afternoon he was tweaking happily tweaking example sketches. He now sees why I find the embedded world so exciting, and I hope he'll be contributing to our Raspberry Pi -based projects at quick2wire . At the end of our session we started talking about CAD for electronics. As a designer he uses CAD a lot and wondered what CAD tools were used for electronics. Since we'd spent the afternoon working with a breadboard, I showed him Fritzing , When he saw how easy it was ...