Fun and productive Rasbperry Jam today. As it was the last jam of the year, we didnt have a huge number of people, but we still had plenty of projects to show off and work on – including some surprise yak shaving.
I was showing off my relatively rare “red” raspberry pi (The red color means it was a Pi made in China, specifically for the China market – so probably not so rare if you are popping over to Shenzhen)
We had a space member show up with her blinkenrobot kit to solder – This is a blinky LED toy that you can program directly from your mobile phone.
When starting to work on my own project, I discovered that the power supply that I had chosen was not working (lucky I tested it first – it was outputting 50 volts and would have fried my pi!) So, I tore it apart and had a look at the insides. It turns out that one of the capacitors had exploded – so I have added a 220uF, 65V capacitor to the shopping list for the next person to visit an electronics store.
My project was to setup a spare raspberry pi with an installation of the software that manages the door access to the space. I am doing this so that we can both fully document the installation process (and automate as much as possible with Ansible – hopefully making it simpler for others to experiment with the software) and also because I want to upgrade the door computer to run Raspbian Buster.
