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Orford Ness Lighthouse VR tour

With the sad news that Orford Ness lighthouse will be demolished, here are a few 360 photos I took with a borrowed Ricoh Theta S when visiting the site on a tour organised by the Orford Ness Lighthouse Trust in 2016.

Orford Ness lighthouse has stood on this site since Napoleonic times, finally being decommissioned in 2013 following erosion which made the structure unsafe – since then the site has…

This week has seen the launch of World Animal Protection’s Exotic Pets campaign – including a campaign action to stop Turkish Airlines from alledgedly trafficking endangered Grey parrots, and a spoof website intended to expose the darker side of buying exotic pets.

Send pre-filled tweets using tweetyourmp.com

Rather excitingly my little side project tweetyourmp.com was mentioned by pukka chef Jamie Oliver as part of his campaign for healthy eating:

Big yellow sign

After my panic that I might not have enough bandwidth subsided, I thought it might be a good moment to give Tweety our MP a bit of love, so I’ve added the option to pre-fill tweets.

The tweet text is passed across using a custom URL – this…

Indiana Jones Idol Swap party game

My sister in law does epic children’s parties (a couple of years back I had a lot of fun playing Snape and being mean to all the kids who weren’t in Slytherin) and this year I was given a request to build a game for an upcoming Indiana-Jones themed party.

Remember that bit at the very beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark where Indy has to balance the idol with a bag of sand to avoid the traps…

Countdown to Christmas with the Arduino advent calendar!

This year, as part of the publicity for their Christmas charity gifts, Concern Worldwide (who I’m lucky enough to work for) commissioned  to come up with a design for an advent calendar.

The resulting design by Robert Fiszer is really rather lovely (you can check out the campaign here)- and lends itself rather well to be illuminated as a Christmas decoration for the Concern office.

Concern Advent…

Official Raspberry Pi display

This week saw the launch of the official Raspberry Pi display, so I thought I would write up a quick review to share some of my initial thoughts about the device.

Ever since the first version of the Pi there’s been a CSI connector on the board – and although there have been lots of devices that use either USB or the GPIO pins to provide simple touch screens, this is the first to use this official…

Ryanteck Raspberry Pi Serial Debug Clip review

When building projects on the Raspberry Pi that run ‘headless’ I’ve often found it necessary to connect to the Pi to see what’s going on, work out why it’s not working as I expected or to simply shut it down neatly without yanking out the power cable.

There are a few ways to do this – you could carry around a keyboard and monitor, hook them up to the Pi and see what’s what. The extremely useful…

Raspberry Pi powered General Election Swingometer

In the UK it’s election time again and the BBC are preparing to wheel out the latest version of their Swingometer. The BBC Swingometer dates back to 1959, and was a visual device for displaying the balance in seats won by the two main political parties. The Swingometer coined a whole load of phrases along the lines of a ‘swing away’ or ‘swing towards’ a particular party or candidate, and was well…

5 geeky DIY Christmas gift ideas

With Christmas rapidly approaching, one of my aims this year is to at least attempt a bit of DIY Christmas gifting. So if you know me, there are potential spoilers ahead and stop reading this right now. So here are five ideas I may or may not be considering as part of my Christmas gift ideas. These really are quite geeky, but then so are most of my friends and family.

1. 3d printed jewellery

We…

Happy Christmas – and here’s to 2014

Here’s Mrs T looking festive in the snow.

[sphere 1980]

  And here are a few things that happened in 2014, including the nerdy things I blogged about.

£15 DIY usb microscope

At the Elephant and Castle Mini Maker Faire this weekend I picked up a £15 microscope kit from the guys at StoneTurners (hello!).

This is a hack kit based on a USB webcam where you remove the lens and reverse it to create a cheap microscope. In the box you get a set of parts including the camera itself, a plastic screw pot, some neoprene material and a few laser cut parts.

*small robot not…

ASCII camera with the Holga 120d

So now I’ve finished my digital Holga project, one of the things I wanted to do was to get a bit creative with it – so here’s my first attempt at an ASCII art generating camera.

High contrast images work best.

This uses the ASCII art script written by Steven Kay, please visit his blog to find out more– I’ve modified the original script to use the python picamera library – this helps speed up the…

How to find a Raspberry Pi on your network

Here’s a quick tip to finding a Raspberry Pi on your network using the nmap network scanning security tool.

Quite often you might want to run a ‘headless’ Raspberry Pi without a screen or keyboard, using SSH to connect. SSH can be enabled in the config menu when you first boot the Pi. You can then find the IP address of your Pi when you’re initially setting it up using the ifconfig command in the…

Cheap Raspberry Pi outdoor case

Here’s  a very cheap outdoor waterproof case for the Raspberry Pi.

I’ve been experimenting with the AirPi weather sensor kit(available on Tindie). This is a lovely kit which comes bundled with an air-pressure, humidity, light, temperature and NO2 and CO sensors. The AirPi is fairly easy to solder together and comes complete with some nice software that automatically uploads your recordings to a…

Controlling Lego motors with the Ryanteck Raspberry Pi board

I’ve reviewed a few Raspberry Pi add on boards before, including the PiFace which includes a multitude of inputs and outputs and the minimalistic LEDborg which has a very bright single multicoloured LED.

Ryanteck Raspberry Pi Motor Controller Board Kitis a GPIO add on board that allows you to control 2 motors with your Raspberry Pi. Although it’s much simpler than the PiFace it’s cheaper (about…

Raspberry Pi LED scrolling sign

I’ve been playing around with LED scrolling signs for a while now and have been looking for an affordable sign to use for a project. Some LED signs are really expensive but I’ve recently come across this one from Embedded Adventures:

It’s a 80×8 display with three colours – Red Green, and Red/Green mixed to produce Orange. It measures about 35x4cm in size so is ideal for something eye catching.

B…