Controlling an LED from a Raspberry Pi

Whilst fleshing out ideas for my new ZX Spectrum game, I’ve also found some time to work with my Raspberry Pi. A while ago I bought a breakout board kit for the Pi. This was easily constructed so I needed to then test it. The board connects via the i2c bus and exposes several ports that can be used as inputs or outputs. The controller chip only costs about a £1 so if things went wrong it is a lot cheaper to buy a new chip than it is a new Pi. By default the Pi has the i2c support turned off. This can be enabled by commenting out the i2c line in the blacklist file. A few supporting files need to be download and then it’s ready to work. I adapted some Python code and wired up a LED and resistor to my breadboard. I could then switch the LED on and off from the command line. This isn’t exactly rocket science but it proves that everything is installed correctly and I that can still solder properly. The next step is to look at controlling my amateur radio kit remotely. Here are some pictures of the board and a screen shot of the Python program. I am still using VNC to connect to the Pi so I can program from the comfort of my lounge.

 

 

 

Virgin Atlantic Challenge on a Raspberry Pi

I can now die a happy man. After a bit of fiddling I finally managed to get the game I wrote back in 1986 to run on my Raspberry Pi. The game is “Virgin Atlantic Challenge” and you play the part of Mr B. Not a great game but good to see it running again on hardware I couldn’t have dreamt of way back then.

VNC running on a Raspberry Pi

Having a shortage of monitors around the house, I decided it would be easier to run VNC on my Raspberry Pi and connect to it remotely. I had some fun giving it a fixed IP address and amending my DHCP server to exclude this value. It took a little while to get everything to boot correctly and auto start the VNC server but I got there in the end. Here is a screenshot of the VNC client running on my Windows 8 laptop. If anyone wants some advice on how I set this all up, let me know and I’ll blog the settings etc.