Today during the Raspberry Jam, I had time to work on two different projects – One blinky LED and one invisible wireless.
We had a Pimoroni Unicorn Hat that needed testing, so I worked through the installing the libraries and showing off the examples (From their github repository)
The documentation has three main ways to install the library – As I like to check my software supply-chain, I initially wanted to install directly from the github source, but those instructions have some missing steps and didn’t work straight away. Skipping immediately past the “curl|bash” option, I used the python package installer “pip3 install” method – which just worked. Once the library was installed, I was able to quickly prove that the board worked and could show off the examples (and walk through how the simple example worked)
There was also a NFC board to play with, which we were able to plug into a Raspberry Pi using a usb-serial adapter (Though, for a more permanent install, we could use the Pi’s onboard serial console). We made it work with the libnfc5 package (and by configuring the right serial port in the config file)
After a quick conversation about power consumption and software reliability, I quickly plugged it into an arduino instead and tested the NFC reader using the Adafruit-PN532 library – that library is missing some of the needed features (eg, Felica card support – used by the Hong Kong Octopus) but we could demonstrate the basic functions.
