Musings on the Human Condition

Figure 1 | Raspberry Pi Introduction First, let me clarify that this blog is about the $35 Model B (512 MB RAM, 2 USB ports, and an Ethernet port), not its cheaper cousin, the $25 Model A (256 MB RAM, 1 USB port, no Ethernet port). To learn more, see the FAQ . The FAQ is short and informative. I recommend reading it even if you don't have questions. Take 1 My first goal was to get my Raspberry Pi up and running. The first thing I needed was power. So, I hooked up a cable/adapter combination to connect the USB A port on my laptop (5 V, 500-900 mA) to the USB Micro B port on my Raspberry Pi. Doing so caused the red LED on my Pi to turn on (see figure 1). So, I figured I had a good power source established. (As it turns out, learning about USB standards is one of the many educational side-effects of trying to setup a Pi device of your own. There are some finer points about whether the power source is providing the Pi with sufficient power, relative to the required 3.3 v...

PICAXE 08M2+ I generally prefer to do things the hard way. For example, you can either microwave a frozen dinner or cook from scratch. The microwave option is a good backup plan, but cooking from scratch has far too many advantages, as I outlined in a recent blog post on the do-it-yourself way of life. In the electronics and robotics world, the analogy of cooking from scratch is to build circuits using a bare bones micro-controller chip (e.g. the PICAXE ) rather than a fancy board (e.g. the Arduino ). Therefore, once I get a circuit working with the packaged Arduino approach (e.g. this robot I built recently), I usually try to replicate the circuit using more basic components like the PICAXE. My decision to consider the PICAXE was influenced by Charles Platt's coverage of it in his awesome book Make: Electronics . But essentially, I am a minimalist and I want to see how much I can get done with a bare bones chip rather than a bulky board-based micro-controller like the Ar...