"The quotation marks mean you can't get done for copyright infingment" - Anon. My girlfriend is obsessed with the Harry Potter franchise. For Christmas, I decided to attempt to make magic as real as I could using the wonder that is electronics, programming and determination. [Update] Improving Reliability I set out to make a [...] Read more

So, all the parts are made as a prototype. At this point I had about two days before I was skipping town to spend christmas with my family (as was my girlfriend) - so I needed to get this finished fast. Please forgive the lack of photos of the builds! Putting together a circuit: I didn't want to have to use up the Arduino shield to make this [...] Read more

I've lumped all the code for each part of the project together on this page. It's no great elegant work but it gets the job done! Raspberry Pi: As I mentioned earlier - all the programming on the Raspberry Pi is done in Python. Sure - it has quite a serious overhead of being interpretted, especially on an embedded platform like the Pi, but [...] Read more

Initially, I decided that a stepper motor would be the best choice for the project. I needed something that could rotate through a full 360 degrees in a constant direction (clockwise) and that I could control the speed and position of the spindle. Stepper motors are controlled by sending pulses of varying duration to the motor in order to control [...] Read more

The RPi GPIO Python Libraries provide a good way of accessing the GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi in Python. There are other ways such as the wiringpi project which allows you to program the Pi in a similar way to an Arduino but I chose this one because it was the first and simplist way I found of controling access to the pins, here's a simple [...] Read more