I’ve been a little quiet lately; some of that was end of the semester and family activities, but part of it was that I’ve been trying to put the finishing touches on a new project. I now think that OMIS – the open millifluidic inquiry system, is ready for display.
Ahh, the age-old question of the chicken or the egg. There’s a similar theme in my family having to do with my Dad and making stuff. He introduced me to electronics when I was too young to realize how awesome it was, I introduced him to the Raspberry Pi, then he introduced me to Adruino. I introduced him to video capture on the Pi (with the help of a 3D printed camera case) and he turned it around into a nest cam! Ahh, so there’s the bird connection, this is a post about setting up a quick and dirty (and surprisingly effective) nest cam!
No, there’s no typo in the title. While this post does describe building an instrument (a colorimeter) from scratch, it also uses the Scratch programming language to control the operation of the instrument. Read on to learn the why’s and how’s.
I read somewhere that it should be possible to install Moodle on a Raspberry Pi. Since I just received my model 3, which is spiffy enough to run the Raspberry Pi blog, I wanted to see how easy it to set up and operate a Moodle server on my Pi.
The Go! Link from Vernier Software & Technology (Vernier), is a USB adapter for their proprietary sensors which also provides some basic features such as a buffer, sensor auto-identification and raw voltage reading conversion. Vernier provides a software development kit which allows programmers to use Go! devices in their own systems. Since Wolfram’s Mathematica software became available on the Raspberry Pi, I have been thinking about how one can build a flexible sensor system using Vernier’s products and based on the inexpensive computer and the powerful data analysis and visualization tools of Mathematica. This project isn’t new, and my earlier attempts were highlighted on the Raspberry Pi blog and I recently announced a previous version of this software package. What I’m presenting now is a more user-friendly system that makes data collection easy through the device driver framework incorporated into Mathematica.