Tuesday, 30 April 2013

Lack of progress and updates

Not been able to do much over the past few weeks. It's been a mixture of working nights and a 14 month old son who enjoys helping daddy dismantle things ( pulled ethernet cable out of the hub ) I know he's only trying to help .

Friday, 19 April 2013

Robotic arm is now made

I will not show you how I managed to put the kit together, but here is the collage of how I put the Robotic Arm together from the start to finish!


Sunday, 14 April 2013

Supercomputer built with Raspberry Pi

If you're a computational engineer, there's no question aboutwhat you do with the Raspberry Pi: you make a supercomputer cluster.

Researchers at the University of Southampton have followed their instincts and built Iridis-Pi, a tiny 64-node cluster based on the Raspberry Pi's usual Debian Wheezy distribution and linked through Ethernet. While no one would mistake any one Raspberry Pi for a powerhouse, the sheer number of networked devices gives the design both some computing grunt and 1TB worth of storage in SD cards.

Going so small also leads to some truly uncommon rackmounting -- team lead Simon Cox and his son James grouped the entire array in two towers of Lego, which likely makes it the most adorable compute cluster you'll ever see.

There's instructions to help build your own Iridis-Pi at the source link, and the best part is that it won't require a university-level budget to run.

Crafting the exact system you see here costs under £2,500, or less than a grown-up supercomputer's energy bill.


Saturday, 13 April 2013

New parts for project

Today I've purchased some parts for project #whitePi, I'm not going to be buying brand new all the time in fact my goal is to purchase as much as I can on the second hand market

1 X Tiny USB 2.0 wireless Bluetooth adapter dongle

2 x Dell 17" LCD screens

2 X Dell black USB keyboards

1 X HDMI to DVI cable

Friday, 12 April 2013

USB Robotic Arm kit

Flesh Based Arms are so 2008

In the future every home will have a sophisticated robot arm. You know... to do the dishes, walk the dog, and assemble Lego kits for us. But waiting for the future always takes so long, which is why I picked up the Edge Robotic Arm Kit from maplin. With a bit of tinkering, and no soldering I'll have a passable replacement for my own meaty appendage. Five axes of robotic movement are at my command. I will be able to command the gripper to open and close, wrist motion of 120 degrees, an extensive elbow range of 300 degrees, base rotation of 270 degrees, base motion of 180 degrees, vertical reach of 15 inches, horizontal reach of 12.6 inches, and lifting capacity of 100g. whew! An LED spotlight on the gripper illuminates what I intend to pickup.

I plan to run the robotic arm using the raspberry pi but right now I need to build it and get it up and running before the fun can start .

I will post with updates


Thursday, 11 April 2013

What is project #whitePi

Recently I discovered the little gem that is a Raspberry Pi. A quick search on google will show the many project that you can do with a raspberry Pi.

What is a Raspberry Pi ?

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video.

So what is project #whitePi about then ?

After seeing the many project on google and YouTube I started to get excited about the possibilities off my little PC, my plan is to replicate some of the projects and thus #whitePi was born. The hash tag is being used so your able to to follow my progress on twitter.