Control Raspi GPIO Pins In The Browser

August 22, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 30 Comments

Now instead of wrangling Python or PHP to do your bidding, [Eric] came up with a way to control the GPIO pins on his Raspberry Pi in a browser.

[Eric] calls his project WebIOPi, and it’s the perfect tool if you’d just like to blink a LED or control a relay over the internet. Simply by pointing his browser to the IP of his Raspi, [Eric] can turn GPIO pins on and off, directly from his desktop browser.

All the code for WebIOPi is available on [Eric]’s Google code page. The UI of [Eric]’s project is fully customizable, so it’s entirely possible to control your garage door from a smart phone simply by loading up a web page hosted on your Raspi and pressing a button.

Right now WebIOPi is only able to turn GPIO pins on and off. That will change as [Eric] implements UART, SPI, and I2C in his project, making it possible to do a lot of cool stuff without having to write much – if any – code.

Expand Your Pi With A Gertboard

August 18, 2012 by Caleb Kraft 18 Comments

[Gert van Loo], the person who designed the alpha hardware for the Raspberry pi model B, has put out an expansion board for the Raspberry pi that we think many of you might be interested in seeing. Dubbed the Gertboard, this expands the Raspi with some GPIO goodness.

We have seen TONS of tutorials for the Raspberry pi, and a few projects as well. We’re hoping that we’ll start seeing more projects where the Raspberry pi is the brain, but only part of the project, start becoming more frequent. The board is pretty cool, now lets see what you guys can build with all that power!

[thanks Zimm3rmann]

Light Painting With The Raspi

August 14, 2012 by Brian Benchoff 3 Comments

The art of taking long exposure photographs with blinking RGB LEDs has improved greatly over the years, mostly due to the extremely easy to use Arduino and hundreds of tutorials on the web. If there’s one problem with light painting with a ‘duino, it’s that large, full color images take up a ton of storage space, much more than the flash memory on an Arduino can provide. Wanting fancier and more colorful light painted images, [Phil] over at Adafruit used a Raspberry Pi to make some very awesome light painted images.

Like any Adafruit tutorial that uses LEDs, the build begins with a digital RGB LED strip wired to the GPIO pins on the Raspi. After loading up the Adafruit educational Raspi Li nux distro for hardware SPI support, the only thing left to do was writing a Python script to display images in the air.

[Phil] says vertical, hand-held LED bars are old hat, so he took a hula hoop and a few bits of PVC pipe, attached the LED strip, and put it on his bike. The results are really impressive – we’re loving the flames in the title pic – and considering the Raspi is a full-fledged computer, light paintings larger than what [Phil] made are very possible.