I think I’ve finally come up with a project that I can really see progressing past the breadboard into a full blown solution.

I saw an article a couple of weeks back about a guy who was creating an internet radio/google music player in an old radio casing. A few months back I migrated my music to Google Music but it’s really annoying having to have the laptop/pc on to listen to music.

So my idea is this, use the python google music api - an unoffical api to access the music from google before streaming it. I’ll make use of the 16x2 LCD screen I got a couple of weeks ago and some buttons to drive a menu system.

I intend to, once I’ve perfected the code and prototyped the hardware, to house the pi and screen in a nice housing. It will however necessitate the purchase of a new pi.

personalspokesman:

Day 156 - soldering fun for the weekend

yum-i-love-chicken:

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I can’t see the need myself but sounds interesting

Well I got home to last night to find that the dog had chewed through the phone cable. After a quick dash to B&Q I fixed my connection problems with a new wire and plenty of wire clips.

Anyway today I try to access my PI from work to do some coding at lunch only to find I couldn’t access it. I guess that my ddclient configuration didn’t work after all. I’ll try to configure it tonight if I can remember how, I just wish my mobile coverage would allow me to test this at home.

Soldering practice on a spare DIL socket

oneandahalfbastards:

Raspberry Pi Model B build: Running Ras PI version of XBMC. USB block has 3 powered ports on the outside and two on the inside with a wifi adapter and blue tooth receiver in the block.  The BT receiver is for a hand held wireless keyboard with built in mouse pad. 

Raspberry pi steampunk style

So my plans for this weekend - other than building a playhouse - was to solder together an I²C add on board for my PI.

I’d counted and recounted the lines on my stripe board and had one line to spare so I marked it all out on dot paper and prepared the stripeboard for cutting.

So off I went, success at first the board cut really easily, then disaster, I’d gotten down towards the end and the corner came off. luckily it was only the last 4 lines so my vision was still good. it would just not be as visually appealing.

Then disaster number two, my soldering of the week before must have been a complete fluke as it was a complete mess, I couldn’t even bring myself to photograph it, it really was terrible. Luckily I was soldering the DIP sockets not the ICs I’d got, a big thumbs up to HobbyTronics for their catalogue and speed of delivery btw.

Anyway I will now take my broken stripe card and practice and practice and practice till I can solder like a pro. before I try this again.

While I really want to learn Python I’m also very impatient and wanted to get something up and running sooner rather then later, I’ve therefore turned to the excellent tutorials at Adafruit. In particular I have hacked the DHT Humidity Sensing on Raspberry Pi with GDocs Logging guide to use the values from my existing code.

So version 1 of my temperature monitor simply appends a new row to a database with a timestamp and temperature every 30 minutes. For those of you sad enough to be interested in the temperature in my living room take a look at the spreadsheet.

Anyway until the next part…

So I’ve spent some time this evening trying to find a decent free editor to draw up some circuit diagrams, after a few failed attempts I came across CircuitLab. I seems to do more or less everything I would want. I would have liked the ability to create custom components in other formats but I can’t expect perfection from something I am getting for free.

Anyhoo, here is the circuit diagram for the setup I did yesterday.

I’ll look into the logging software side of things over the coming days should I get the time around other things. And then hopefully next week I’ll be able to solder it all up although I’m still not sure of the best way to house the sensor. Any ideas?

One of the components I ordered last week was the TC74 digital temperature sensor. I got the 5v version so I also got an adafruit level shifter.

My first task was to solder the pins onto the level shifter, my first attempt at soldering in almost 20 years since CDT lessons at school. It looks a little messy but not bad for my first attempt.

I’ve now connected it all up, following Jan Wagemakers guide inserting the level shifter to the clock and data lines. Using the i2c tools I can now get the temperature by issuing a command.

Next Steps - move the setup onto some stripeboard and solder it all into place. Also I need to work on the software side to log the data periodically rather than just on demand via a command.