friday fun

A collection of 29 posts

fridayfun

Friday Fun - Custom Key Holder

Taking a break from tech this week and in this post we learn how to convert a tool keychain into a folding keyholder.

fridayfun

Friday Fun - Six New Projects!

Six new projects covering Python, Pi, Arduino and much more!

friday fun

Friday Fun - Look No Code!

You don't need a Raspberry Pi or Arduino for this project, but you can still dabble with electronics.

friday fun

Friday Fun - Hacking Poundland Halloween Electronics

Can we hack three items from Poundland into one much better project? Of course we can!

fridayfun

Friday Fun - Adafruit Chainsaw

Scare more candy while trick or treating by making your own chainsaw...

fridayfun

Friday Fun - Neopixel Camera Light

Create colourful and artistically lit photos with < £10 of equipment and a little code.

fridayfun

Friday Fun: Python Pollen Projects

How can we use pollen count data in three different ways? Well read this post and you can try it for yourself.

fridayfun

Friday Fun: Being a complete Hidiot!

All it took was to tidy my desk... Back in December 2017 RawHex sent me a Hidiot kit, as they knew of my love for the ATtiny85. (Sorry about the delay RawHex...) All three of these boards use an ATtiny85. From L - R Digistamp, Adafruit Gemma, Generic ATtiny85 clone

micro python

Friday Fun: Adafruit Gemma M0 and Neopixels

Friday Fun has been away for three months! Have I been sat around watching TV? Yes....I mean no, I've been busy with work. But I'm back and this time its a personal project...! */me pauses for laughs* Meet Gemma M0 Last week I was in

arduino

Friday Fun: Hacking a Toy Car With 4Duino

Disclaimer: These boards were provided by 4tronix for the purpose of the blog post. This isn't a "review" as such, but you can be assured that the comments that I make are not influenced in any way. I will point out the good and bad openly

fridayfun

Friday Fun: Get Notifications On Your Desktop

Bit of a personal project this week, created to meet a specific need, but it contains some useful Python libraries for creating notifications and parsing RSS feeds. So I spend a lot of time researching, reading and looking for the latest news, mainly Raspberry Pi news because we all know

fridayfun

Friday Fun: Bluedot Presentation Tool

Presentations...fun aren't they? For the serious presenter a "clicker" remote is a must! You know what I mean, the person at the front, wielding the power of the presentation using a clicker to advance the slides. But clickers aren't cheap, and for most

friday fun

Friday Fun: Envirophat Colour Detector

I'm back at Picademy...yay!!! You may have seen that this week I was back at Picademy! Yay! Two days of learning, sharing and making. One of the projects caught my eye, and it was a project that used the Pi Camera to detect a colour. But why

friday fun

Friday Fun: Intro to Node-RED

I've recently developed a love for Node-RED... At first I was afraid, I was petrified, of this language as it seemed so far removed from what I would normally use. But isn't it just Scratch...with wires? Well yeah Node-RED is a block based languages, but

microbit

Friday Fun: Sending Serial Data From micro:bit to laptop

Cereal Killer If you haven't seen Hackers yet, then rectify that ASAP. ^^^ Yes this is "Cereal Killer" aka the dude who plays Shaggy in Scooby Doo...jinkies! Serial, no not the stuff that is loaded with sugar, that's cereal. Serial is a connection protocol.

electronics

Friday Fun: DIY MP3 Player

The finished project, ok there are still a few things to do, but it is ready for its debut How cheap can an MP3 player be? What if I said £1-2...would you believe me? Well it is true, thanks to the GPD2846A a simple circuit board which I purchased

friday fun

Friday Fun QR Code Madness!

Yeah that's the Greggs logo in a QR code for this website QR codes, (Quick Response), are all around us. We see them on adverts, newspapers, drinks bottles. They are a quick way for mobile users to access web content, as all you need is a camera and

friday fun

Friday Fun: Get the news with RSS and GUI Zero

I'll come out and admit it, I am a news junkie, have been since I was a teenager. I like to keep up to date with what is going on, across a variety of topics. For this week's Friday Fun, I'll show you how

friday fun

Healthy Eating with Python

*Click on the Play button to run the code* This blog post was inspired by Mr Rooney's tweet. fit = input("what is your diet?") if fit == "beer and kebab": print ("you fatty") — Mr A. Rooney (@arooneycompsci) June 15, 2017 Ok so I&

Windows

Friday Fun: Directly Connecting to your Raspberry Pi

How can I connect to a Raspberry Pi? SSH - A Secure connection between computers over a local or world wide network. Typically in the form of a command line interface (shell) VNC - An insecure connection between computers over a local or world wide network. Used to "see&

friday fun

Friday Fun: Speed Reading With Python

How fast can you read? For some Friday Fun this week we shall create a Python application that will help us to read MUCH more quickly. Reading generally involves our eyes scanning a page of text looking for the next word in the sequence. But we can improve our speed

friday fun

Using a TMP36 sensor with micro:bit

Every maker has their favourite sensor, board, component. For me the humble L298N is my motor controller of choice, the DS18B20 for temperature sensing, and IR obstacle sensor for simple input. But recently I stumbled upon the TMP36, another temperature sensor, but this is an analogue sensor. Meaning that the

microbit

#Pounderland Solar Powered micro:bit

Time for some friday fun! I really do love Poundland... They stock cheap electronics that can be torn apart and turned into anything you can think of. Right now they have loads of these solar powered bulbs, that are quite hackable. First we can see that they have lots of

friday fun

Cheap Robotics

Yeah the GIF is @all_about_code robot made from the Cam Jam Kit 3 and an old cover for a power socket. For some Friday fun this week... It's spreadsheets!!! Before this blog post is hurriedly closed, give me a moment. The other day Laurence Molloy gave

microbit

micro:bit Infrared Timing Gate

In early March 2017 I, along with local hacker Dave Gallop were asked by St Mary Magdalen's Catholic Primary School to come along and help them build some supersonic race cars for the Bloodhound SSC project with teams of children designing, building and testing their designs using a