Beauty and the Beast
Finally, the last accessory I ordered for my Raspberry Pi Zero (that’s the little red thing behind my keyboard) has arrived – an Acer 43″ ET430K monitor. The Zero won’t quite drive this monitor at its maximum resolution of 3840×2160 pixels, but as you can see, you get enough real estate to do real graphics […]
Charting Reaction Times on the Raspberry Pi
Earlier this week I collected some reaction timer data on my Pi using the BBC micro:bit as an input device. I only produced an “ASCII art” chart at the time: times←ReactionTimer.Play times 251 305 294 415 338 298 294 251 378 ReactionTimer.AsciiChart times 425| 400| * 375| * 350+ 325| * 300| […]
micro:bit Reaction Timer in APL on the Pi and BBC micro:bit
I have a bit of a cold today, so I decided that instead of hopping in an icy car and driving to the office in order to spend the day drinking coffee and answering e-mail, I should stay at home, turn up the radiators, make lots of tea (with honey!) and have some fun writing […]
Morse Code – Revisited using the BBC micro:bit
As mentioned last week, I have found a new way to provide a front end processor for my Pi, the BBC micro:bit. This week, I have started putting the new system through its paces: The microbit class in our GitHub repository has been beefed up to make it more resilient in the case where serial […]
Raspberry APL Pi and Python on the micro:bit
A couple of years ago I spent many happy hours writing APL code to control robots which each embedded a Raspberry Pi. It was fun but it was a bumpy ride – my interest eventually faded when I discovered that it was just too difficult to make sense of raw accelerometer data, which I was […]
Turning to a Heading with an MPU-9150
As the odour of fried electronics dissipates in the air, I’m unexpectedly afforded the opportunity to write this blog post a day or two earlier than planned. The on-board compass was exhibiting significant deviation, so I consulted my nephew Thorbjørn Christensen at DTU-Space. Thorbjørn makes a living designing magnetometers for space agencies around the world, […]
Making Controlled Turns with the DyaBot
This blog originally started when I took delivery of the DyaBot, a Raspberry Pi and Arduino based variant of the C3Pi running Dyalog v13.2. The architecture of the ‘bot and instructions for building your own inexpensive robot can all be found in blog entries from April to July of last year. The downside of only using inexpensive components is […]
Dancing with the Bots
Last week the ‘bots were busy preparing for the J Language Conference in Toronto, where they made their first public appearance together. Upon returning to Bramley they continued training and we are proud to present the first recording of their new dance: [embedplusvideo height=”400″ width=”584″ editlink=”http://bit.ly/1u6Knob” standard=”http://www.youtube.com/v/oO50UqFBsCw?fs=1&vq=hd720″ vars=”ytid=oO50UqFBsCw&width=584&height=400&start=&stop=&rs=w&hd=1&autoplay=0&react=1&chapters=¬es=” id=”ep3993″ /] The ‘bots are both running […]
The Blog is Back!
It is now 3 weeks since we shipped Dyalog version 14.0 and released the new Dyalog web site, so it’s probably time to stop celebrating and get back to work. The ‘bot batteries have been recharged and the ‘bots are learning to work as a team using v14.0 futures and isolates. That’s all I can […]
APL-Controlled Robot Performs Death-Defying Stunts Using PiCam
Regular readers will remember my whining about the poor precision of both infra-red and ultrasonic sensors. But today, the Raspberry Pi / Dyalog APL – controlled “DyaBot” was observed driving on a dinner table – where the slightest navigational error could mean a 3-foot plunge and certain death! How can this be? [embedplusvideo height=”400″ width=”584″ editlink=”http://bit.ly/19azC9S” […]
