"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
Latest Work...
Harry Potter / Weasley Clock Part IV - Bringing it all together!
Published on Feb 10, 2013
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
Harry Potter / Weasley Clock Part III - Coding
Published on Feb 10, 2013
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
Harry Potter / Weasley Clock Part II - Making Stuff Move
Published on Feb 5, 2013
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
Harry Potter / Weasley Clock Part I - Internet Connected LED
Published on Feb 5, 2013
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