What to do with my Raspberry Pi

2015-04-24 written by: Brad





I have just recently been introduced to the Raspberry Pi and I thought it could turn out some fun projects…so I bought one. What is a Raspberry Pi?… It is just a small computer the size of a deck of cards, but what makes it unique is the general purpose input output pins (GPIO) that can be programmed. If you are interested in learning more about the Pi and what it can do, just do some searching online…there is tons of information out there.

My first thought was to make a smart cabin. So I went about drawing out an algorithm that would monitor battery voltage, and automatically start the generator when the battery bank fell below a certain level. I will be coming back to this at some point…but I have a lot of playing to do for now.




That led me down the path of monitoring battery voltage. After a little research online I hade a crude voltage divider set up connected to an analog to digital converter (ADC) and some python code written that would tell me the voltage of my battery bank…in the garage Smile.




While I had the ADC pinned up I figured I would play around with a temperature sensor my pi starter kit came with. That turned out to be fairly complex and I had to squeeze out some high level math functions to figure out the temperature, but I managed to get it working.




What’s a smart cabin without some type of video monitoring system…? This part turned out to be pretty simple really. I found a web cam at the local thrift store and picked it up for about 3 dollars. A few minutes of research, copy and pasting code…etc I had my security camera up and running. I set it up in the garage to try and catch some critters with a crunched up ritz cracker, but the only thing I caught was my kids playing games with me Smile




I will be playing around with motor controllers here in the near future. I bought a few h bridge motor controllers, and that will be the start of my next project.

Raspberry Pi

Category: Miscellaneous Projects