After the successful first project of getting a PIR sensor to work with Arduino I thought I’d try something a bit more practical and bespoke. The idea with this is you can use the Arduino to change the colour of an LED if there are any critical or warning errors in Nagios Monitoring software.
This time we’re going to get the Arduino to read input over its USB serial interface from a Raspverry Pi and depending on what it receives either make the LED light green or red.
If, like me, you use a Raspberry Pi as a multimedia centre it’s really handy being able to kick off a torrent without having to be logged into the Pi. This is especially useful if you want to download something using your phone, to your Pi, from literally anywhere.
Here’s how to configure Transmission so you can download torrents to your Pi from anywhere.
When I first read about this I thought it can’t be real but it is. The Raspberry Pi can be used as a stereo FM transmitter. It’s a pretty nifty discovery which uses a GPIO pin on the Pi to generate spread-spectrum clock signals and outputs FM Radio energy.
There’s no point in me rewording what has already been written so here is the explanation from the guys who discovered it over at icrobotics.co.uk… Read More
I’ll be writing a post about how great Mopify is shortly but essentially it’s a web plugin for Mopidy which provides a web front end to Spotify running on just about any machine. It means you can control Spotify running on a machine plugged into your HiFi without the needs for the Spotify App on your device. This is handy where you have other people in the house with their own accounts but still want them to be able to control the music on the main HiFi.
Of course, an ideal host machine might well be a Raspberry Pi with a decent USB Soundcard.
Mopidy runs its own little web server which means Read More
I wanted a way to detect if someone was in the house without anyone having to do anything. This is useful, for example, to run a script or launch a program if we can identify who it is. The solution I wanted to play with was using mobile phones. Given that folks are fairly attached to their phones these days this seemed a reasonable detection method.
The script below is written in Python and uses bluetooth to detect if anyone Read More