Posts in Category: Electronics

Pi Zero tweak

My loving bride was able to get me another Pi Zero for Christmas!  This is the 1.3 version with the camera slot.  I decided to make it a little more capable by giving it a normal female USB slot and adding on a serial port so I can talk to it from any computer with a USB port.  Nothing too fancy but makes it a little more usable so I can skip the OTG cable.  Right now I just have a Wifi adapter hooked up to it with the connections already set…so if I’m at home or work, it will connect automatically and shoot me an email with the IP and then I can just SSH.  Kinda nice. =)

Visual Studio Code on Raspberry Pi 3!

So after many attempts following this post I finally got Visual Studio Code running on my Pi 3!  Here is a breakdown of what I did.

You’re going to need to uninstall whatever version of Node you have so you can updated to the latest arm build:

Birdbox Update!

In my original post, I was hoping to capture some birds building a nest and laying/hatching eggs….but to no avail.  Months have gone by with hardly any activity so I’ve stopped checking it.  Well, I checked yesterday and found out a gray squirrel has made a nest and had babies!  In checking the files, there are 100s of videos to go through.  Still trying to sift through them all but will post more interesting ones as I find them.  In the meantime, here is a video of the little ones nursing.  =)

Pi Zero and cheap ebay 3.5″ display

So I ordered one of these puppies because I’m cheap.  Of course, there were no instructions with it so I did some searching around on other similar listings and found one that gave a very vague set of instructions right in the listing.  Long story short, I found it is pretty much like the waveshare displays so I went with those instructions.PiZeroDisplay1

In the end, I couldn’t get it up and running on my Raspberry Pi 3…the screen would just stay white. =( I do want to add that I used the lastest raspbian image from the Pi foundation site, I did NOT try one of the pre-made waveshare images. I’m always hesitant to use some other pre-made images…maybe it’s just the conspiracy theorist in me.  I have a Pi 2 I might try it on at some point but just for kicks, I went straight for my Pi Zero.  =)

Pretty much, followed the waveshare instructions for it and it worked fine!  I also should add thatPiZeroDisplay3 when I started with the Pi Zero, I didn’t plug the screen in at first…I followed the instructions and when it rebooted, I shut it down then plugged in the screen and turned it on with success.  When I tried with the Pi 3, I plugged the screen in right from the start.  Don’t know if that made a difference or not.

Luckily, I didn’t have to calibrate the screen as it seemed correct.  BUT…I couldn’t do a right click! After some digging, I found this site.  The key pieces here are to modify the /etc/X11/xorg.conf.d/99-calibration.conf….and when you modify that, modify the one that is appropriate in the LCD-show directory where first downloaded the PiZeroDisplay4drivers…because if you switch back and forth between HDMI and your display, it will replace it as well.

The only lines you care about adding in are the “EmulateThirdButton***” options.  You don’t need to touch anything else.  Once you modify that file, save and reboot and voila! You can now press and hold for a right click!

Next steps for me are to get a battery (and charging circuit?) for this little guy…well..and a keyboard.  Might try retro pie as well. =)

Looking at the pin-out, I’m pretty sure there are some spare GPIO pins in the ones that it looks like it is using.  Found this ebay listing which looks identical except it has a gap where it plugs in.PiZeroDisplay2

PiZeroDisplay5

UPDATE: totally just got this working with RetroPie! After setting up the LCD drivers, you have to have the framebuffer send to the TFT.  Found a post here that explains what to do…just have to change things for the 35a LCD is all.  Worked like a charm.  I have to play with the speed a little as it is kind of laggy but still pretty cool!

RetroPieLCD_1 RetroPieLCD_2