Monday, April 06, 2015

Upping Raspberry Pi 2's power to the USB ports

Interesting post on upping the Raspberry Pi 2's power to the USB ports. Out of the box the USB peripherals are limited to 600mA.

http://hackaday.com/2015/04/06/more-power-for-raspberry-pi-usb-ports/

Friday, April 03, 2015

Raspberry Pi, Quite Exciting

As I write this i am installing an operating system image on the microSD card of a Raspberry Pi that just arrived. I'm rather surprised at the level of excitement that I feel waiting for it to complete.

Unpacking the Pi reminds me of days long ago when our Atari 800 arrived and shortly thereafter came BASIC, PEEK, POKE, and some 6502 assembler. Yes, 8 KB of RAM, that was living high on the hog. I later parlayed my meager 6502 experience into building a graphical supply-side economics demonstration on the Apple II in high school. Those were the days. (Today, my work machine has 16 GB of RAM--2 million times as much--mostly taken up by web browser programs....)

I expect in coming weeks, as I find time, I'll perform amazing feats such as making an LED light up (no code!) and making an LED flash (a little Python code!) and then doing the same in C++ (okay, where is the right header file?!).

How far will this go? Multiple LEDs of different colors? Multiple concurrent LEDs flash patterns? Wait, can I use the Boost libraries? I bet I can. :) Only time will tell.