Year: 2016

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Experimenting with the Raspberry Pi Sense Hat | Opensource.com


The Opensource.com team has been fascinated by the Raspberry Pi Sense HAT, a low-cost addon for the Raspberry Pi that enables astronauts and citizen scientists alike to easily collect measurements from a variety of sensors to conduct science experiments or just have fun. So we decided to try one out ourselves. We grabbed a side room at our offices in Red Hat Tower and spent an hour or two learning what it can do. First step, attaching the device. Easy enough!

Source: Experimenting with the Raspberry Pi Sense Hat | Opensource.com

Fun things to do with your RPi.

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Use npm shrinkwrap to manage dependencies in your node app

The reason to use npm’s shrinkwrap feature is that, while you can fix the versions of your direct dependencies in your package.json, you can’t fix the versions of their dependencies, which may be quite loosely specified. This means that if you or someone else rebuilds the image at some future time, you can’t guarantee (without using shrinkwrap) that it won’t pull down a different version of some indirect dependency, breaking your app. This seems to happen to me much more often than one might expect, so I advocate using shrinkwrap. If you are familiar with ruby’s excellent bundler dependency manager, npm-shrinkwrap.json is much like Gemfile.lock.

Source: Lessons from Building a Node App in Docker

Dependencies in the node ecosystem can be a real pain in the ass. Some relief can be had by using npm shrinkwrap to manage the dependencies of your dependencies.

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Octa-core Cortex-A53 hacker SBC sells for $60


FriendlyARM’s $60, open spec “NanoPC-T3” SBC runs Android or Linux on an octa-core Cortex-A53 SoC packed with wireless and media interfaces, plus 8GB eMMC.

The 100 x 60mm NanoPC-T3 is essentially a NanoPC-T2 with a faster processor and a 2GB RAM option in addition to the standard 1GB. The SBC is further equipped with 8GB of eMMC and an SD slot. You also get GbE, WiFi, Bluetooth 4.0, four USB host ports, and a micro-USB client port. Media ports include HDMI, LVDS, LCD, MIPI-DSI, MIPI-CSI, and audio.

Source: Octa-core Cortex-A53 hacker SBC sells for $60

Some SBC goodness for those processor intense DIY projects out there. Very cool that it’ll run either Android or Linux. FriendlyARM also sells an array of  certified externals to help get things up and running. See http://elide.us/9K to order yours.