python

A collection of 78 posts

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.

tuesdaytooling

Tuesday Tooling - Python Webbrowser

This week a handy Python library that enables us to open a web browser! So what is it? Webbrowser is a Pythonic way to open a web browser on any operating system. Can't I just use subprocess / popen / something else? Sure you can, but using webbrowser we have

kits

All the gear...and lots of ideas!

In mid 2017 I was posed a unique challenge "Would you be interested in creating a Raspberry Pi Zero W based kit?" Obviously I jumped at the chance and here it is! Getting You Started with Raspberry Pi Zero W Kit - MLK001 This kit is based around

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

tuesdaytooling

Tuesday Tooling: Record / Replay Keystrokes With Python

For this weeks Tuesday Tooling we take a look at a Python library that offers to simulate and record keyboard input! So what is it called? Keyboard : Record and simulate keyboard events on Windows and Linux. Where can I find it? You can find it on pypi Who made it?

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

tuesdaytooling

Tuesday Tooling: MkDocs

Another Tuesday Tooling blog post, and this week a quick look at a handy tool to create great looking documentation, and best of all it uses Python! tl;dr MkDocs is a great tool to write documentation in markdown, which is then converted by MkDocs (Python) in to a static

python

Tuesday Tooling: Custom Python Spinners

Tooling Tuesday is a new series of short, to the point blog posts that highlight a fun and useful tool for developers, coders, makers, hackers and of course system administrators. For the first in the series of Tueday Tooling blog posts, I have chosen to highlight a rather fun and

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

python

Log all teh data!

Log files, sys admins LOVE them. They can be used to look busy, or you can be busy looking through them for data. I remember setting an Asterisk server to show me very verbose data once, just so the boss would leave me alone to work on a project 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.

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

Raspberry Pi

DS18B20 Temperature Sensor With Python (Raspberry Pi)

Yesterday at Liverpool Makefest, which incidentally was great, I spoke to a young man who wanted to use the Raspberry Pi to control his petrol powered radio control car. His first idea for a project was to monitor the temperature of the engine, so he purchased a DS18B20 sensor from

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&

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

picademy

Planes, Training and Automated File Renaming

Recently at Picademy Birmingham, I set myself a quick challenge. To create a timelapse of the lovely airfield that our training centre overlooked. So I setup a Raspberry Pi Zero W to take a photograph every 1 minute for three hours. I made a quick #PiZeroW based timelapse to capture

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

friday fun

Using Hot Wires / Snap Circuits with Raspberry Pi

It's Friday!! Time for some fun! Hot Wires / Snap Circuits are simple circuit building blocks that are used to teach electronics to small children. They use press studs, similar to those used on coats, to connect the components, which are encased in a plastic shell meaning that small

python

Hack the planet!!...With Python

So I'm sat watching a film called Hackers...cheesy hacker movie set in the 1990s. But I really do like it. Sure the dialogue is really bad, and the hacking is pure Hollywood, but it is a fascinating I think I'll be watching this tonight pic.

python

Enabling a Python script to launch when booting a Raspberry Pi

Hello, this blog post was inspired by Dave Darch... @biglesp @martinohanlon @LegoJames @guru What's best way to launch a .py file at boot, headless. Eg. drums.py from Explorerhat...systemd? — Dave Darch (@davedarch) August 22, 2016 There are many ways to run a Python script at boot, but

Raspberry Pi

Using Raspberry Pi in museums

Blackpool has a long history of entertainment with many big names coming to Blackpool during it's "Golden Age". I was recently asked by Blackpool Council to provide a Raspberry Pi workshop as part of a two day unveiling of a new project. The project would see

python

Trinket - Hacking Python in the browser

Hacking Python in the browser! At a recent Code Club regional meeting I learnt of a very handy way of writing Python in the browser. Trinket.io is a browser based Python editor that enables educators to quickly get started with Python. It includes a number of Just like Python

hacking

Micro Python

Python is my favourite language and it has been my favourite for around three years. Why? Well because I understand it and I can use it to make different projects. I also enjoy hacking micro controllers so what if there were a micro controller based on Python....well there is

hacking

FT232H GPIO Breakout board

Recently I've received many different micro controller boards but one that has rally caught my eye is the Adafruit FT232H. But why? Well it enables any computer to have GPIO pins that can be controlled using Python similar to the Raspberry Pi. The board comes as a kit,