Damp-Pi – Room Moisture Extraction with Raspberry Pi

20150824_165453bOver the last while I’ve been having a problem with excess humidity in the shower rooms. Imagine that, the builder never put in extractor fans when the house was built! Anyway, I could put in those fancy extractor fans with the built in timers or humidity sensors, but I decided to do things the more interesting way, by using a small computer to read the values from a humidity sensor in each room, and based on the readings, turn on the fan until the humidity was reduced to an acceptable level.

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Raspberry Pi 2 Benchmarked

IMG_1343 copyI got myself a new Raspberry Pi 2 Model B this morning. I was intrigued by its quad-core cpu and how it would stack up against the other single board computers that I’ve benchmarked in the past, which were:

  • Raspberry Pi Model B+
  • Beaglebone Black
  • Intel Edison
  • Imagination MIPS Creator CI20

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Creator CI20 Benchmarked

800px-CI20_perspectiveI recently got a MIPS Creator CI20 from the guys at Imagination to play with. So here’s a quick of my first impressions, including a few benchmarks with sysbench. Performance overall was quite good compared to a Raspberry Pi 1 model B+, and even was pretty good compared to an Intel Edison on the CPU benchmark.  Continue reading “Creator CI20 Benchmarked”

First Intel® Edison project – DSLR Camera Controller

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I’ve been working on camera hacks for a couple of year now. It started with the CameraPi, which was a Raspberry Pi mini-computer stuffed into an old battery grip for my Canon 5D Mark II Camera. Then came various variants on that, including a DIY time-lapse rail, the results you can see in the time-lapse section of this website. Theres’ also some water droplet photography, automated focus stacking, and even a bark activated door opener, not to mention the PiPhone.

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Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black, Intel Edison – Benchmarked.

IMG_1062bRecently I took delivery of an Intel Edison with a Mini-Breakout Board. I was awestruck by the size of the thing, but it was not until I started using it properly for a couple of projects that I noticed that it seemed a little bit ‘snappier’ than boards I’d used in the past (Raspberry Pi, Beaglebone Black). So I decided to do a little benchmarking.

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PiPhone – A Raspberry Pi based Smartphone

IMG_0872cHere’s my latest DIY project, a smartphone based on a Raspberry Pi. It’s called – wait for it – the PiPhone. It makes use an Adafruit touchscreen interface and a Sim900 GSM/GPRS module to make phone calls. It’s more of a proof of concept to see what could be done with a relatively small form factor with off-the-shelf (cheap) components. I don’t expect everyone to be rushing out to build this one, but I had great fun in doing it, as it builds quite nicely on my previous projects, especially the Lapse Pi, a touchscreen time-lapse controller, and uses most of the same hardware.

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