Greetings loyal readers! A quick update on “stuff” in and around Planet Spell Foundry. The main issue to talk about is the recent Global Component Shortages which seem to have affected the whole world for much of the last year. From a lack of new cars to limited availability of graphics cards, anyone making anything …
The “Rainbow Screen of Death” aka “Rainbow screen at boot” is that dreaded Rainbow screen that appears and doesn’t disappear when you boot up your Raspberry Pi. It gets stuck on the Rainbow. Its arrival is never a good sign. Whilst there is a multitude of reasons for this to happen: Like outdated firmware on …
Raspberry Pi Rainbow Screen Of Death: How To Stack Multiple HATS And Avoid Disaster Read More »
It’s not unheard of for the i2c bus to “lock-up” on you, which can stop your system from working. If you are trying to operate a remote or embedded system, this is not ideal. This article discusses techniques that you can use to try and make your system more fault-tolerant and attempt to recover from …
Reliable Embedded Systems: Recovering Arduino i2c Bus Lock-ups Read More »
The previous article in this series introduced the “Watchdog Timer “ as a tool to use to build more reliable systems; it will reset the Arduino processor in the event of the application locking up. However, as in medicine, this is like treating the symptom and not the cause. Why did the application lock-up in …
Reliable Embedded Systems: Using The Arduino Watchdog With Crash Tracking Read More »
A previous article in the series introduced the concept of the Arduino Watchdog Timer and its value in developing more reliable embedded systems. When developing systems based on the Sleepy Pi platform, we make extensive use of an Arduino library to put the Arduino to sleep. In some cases, this library uses the watchdog internally …
Reliable Embedded Systems: Using The Arduino Watchdog With Sleepy Pi Read More »
Embedded systems are generally extremely reliable; they are closer to the “bare metal” and don’t have the layers that a Desktop Operating System has and thus there is less to go wrong*. However, they are not without their own challenges and can also hang on occasion. This can be for a variety of reasons, from …
Reliable Embedded Systems: Using The Arduino Watchdog Read More »
The Sleepy PI 2 is mostly compatible with the Raspberry Pi 4 – this describes how to connect it up properly.
** Updated for Raspberry Pi 4 ** This used to be relatively straightforward, but with move from Raspbian Wheezy to Raspbian Jessie, (and then Raspbian Stretch and Buster) things changed. Add to this, the newer Raspberry Pi 3 and 4 family with new hardware and the whole thing became a bit of a Dog’s Breakfast and issues with …
Configuring The GPIO Serial Port On Raspbian Jessie and Stretch Including Pi 3 and 4 Read More »
The original Sleepy Pi was introduced over 2 1/2 years ago and has been doing sterling service ever since, finding it’s way to all four corners of the globe. With the 26-pin connector it is compatible with all models of Raspberry Pi. However, with the introduction of the Raspberry Pi B+ a new 40-pin GPIO …
Anthony in Good’ol Blighty has built an Automated Recording Unit Pi (ARUPI) for recording Soundscapes in Ecology research. He’s created a detailed Instructable that shows how he’s built it. An ARUPI can be used to : monitor the birds in your garden or just to make nice recordings of the dawn chorus, without having to …
Project: ARUPi – A Low-Cost Automated Recording Unit for Soundscape Ecologists Read More »
