published by nickscott on Tue, 09/25/2012 - 18:58
I've finally got around to spending some more time working on my dive light, it is still not as much as I would like, but is better than nothing. At this stage, the remaining work to do on the light head is as follows. Get a thicker lense, and proper o-rings for this. The lense will most likely be 4mm acrylic, with an o-ring on either side of it. This will be a lot more waterproof than the current arangement.
published by nickscott on Mon, 09/03/2012 - 19:31
The Pi had me intrigued as to how capable it was in a small nginx cluster, and how well it would scale. To test this out, I set up 2 pi's running Raspbian, and installed nginx, php, php-fpm on it, and set it up to run drupal. 2 VM's were then set up, 1 for a web master, and 1 as a mysql server. The mysql server had more resources, both were running on my desktop in virtualbox. I then restored a copy of this site to each, (excluding the database), configured them to use the mysql database on the VM, and tested them. A bit of chasing missing packages, and it was up and running.
published by nickscott on Sat, 09/01/2012 - 19:56
Recently I have been getting fustrated with the constant sprawl of cables over my desk, and this has only got worse as I have started doing more projects with the raspberry pi boards. I now own two, and it was becoming a challenge to keep my desk in a workable state. I was also wanting a better solution to power my projects when I am working on them, as I have been powering them from my PC power supply, (from a molex splitter, bringing out 12v and 5v). Although this worked, it did cause me a few problems, when I made a mistake and tripped the power supply.
published by nickscott on Sat, 09/01/2012 - 19:33
I have finally got around to putting the Rasapberry Pi into a small project. Currently it is being used to log the temperature, and to control 2 of the GPIO's from a website. The OS I ended up using was raspbian, and have used nginx for the web server. The website was built on php / jquery mobile, jquery mobile was chosen as I felt it was a good chance to learn it.
published by nickscott on Fri, 06/22/2012 - 23:47
My Raspberry Pi has finally arrived, (well, it arrived the day after I went away for a month), and have just had a chance to start playing with it. First SD card turned out to be a non starter, so went with a second one, which works well, but unfortunately only gives me one to play with for now, so will order another in coming days. Still undecided as to what to use it for, XBMC or a small server? Looking through the debian repositories, there seems to be most of the software I want available, so first up, I'll try installing MPD, and seeing how I get on with that.
published by nickscott on Tue, 05/15/2012 - 22:09
Recently I decided to rebuild my main dive light. This was a dive light, with an otterbox case for a battery housing, and 2x XM-L led's in a rectangular aluminum case. For now, I will be reusing the battery housing, while focusing ona new light head first. This will be based on 3x XM-L led's in the light housing from a cheap chinese 10W led light. The main reason for this casing is it seems like it will be easy to make waterproof (better oring needed in back section, oring on the cable gland, and most likely two orings on a replacement lens, one behind and one infront of).
published by nickscott on Thu, 03/08/2012 - 21:20
This project was a simple one for a friend, who needed to get temperature data into a system, via RS232. This was done using an attiny2313 as a bridge, getting temperature data from a one-wire sensor, and passing it through to the serial port. This project was also used as an opportunity to try out the DorkBotPdx pcb service, which I was extremely happy with. The only mistake that was made on the board was forgetting the pull up resistor on the one wire interface, this was easily fixed with a SMD resistor on the underside of the board, between two of the header pins.
published by nickscott on Thu, 03/08/2012 - 18:23
Build information of a large countdown clock I built for a camp.
published by nickscott on Sun, 03/04/2012 - 16:10
The Raspberry Pi has finally ben released, and I have one ordered, for delivery around April some time. The use for my first one is something not very imaginative at all, its going to be used to run XBMC, in our lounge, to provide a better way of playing back videos (music is already taken care of with MPD, but that might get moved off our server, and onto the Raspberry Pi, so we can relocate the server). Once I can get my hands on some more, the uses will be as follows.
published by nickscott on Sun, 03/04/2012 - 14:37
A brief tear down of a 10W led light off ebay.
