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Monthly Archives: April 2013

Raspberry Pi with Redundant Power Supply

Everyday I get lot of ideas for Raspberry Pi. One such is to make it mobile like integrate it with my car. In that case I have to think of alternative power source if my car is not running. Lipo Rider Pro from SeeedStudio came to my rescue.LiPo Rider ProFeatures

  • Maximum 1A load output
  • Battery and Solar panel connector is JST 2.0
  • Stable 5V USB power supply regardless of source
  • Charge/Recharge algorithms built into chip
  • Charge Lithium Polymer Battery through solar power or USB
  • Stable supply voltage through either lithium battery or USB
  • 2 x USB ports let you program your kit while charging your Lithium battery
  • LED indications for battery full or charging states
  • 4 green LED instruct quantity of electricity of lithium battery

The above pictures shows that how I have implemented the Lipo Rider board for redundant power supply. I am not sure how efficient this will be on the move, so far I am happy that it is doing what it is supposed to do. Sometimes I get a feeling that the battery pack is always being used and it is not getting charged even if the USB power is connected. Have to debug this further 😉

Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Shield – iPhone Controlled Relay

After searching for a while I finally found an Arduino Bluetooth 4.0 shield from RedBear. My main aim was to able to control an Arduino from iPhone using Bluetooth 4.0.

Today I used SainSmart 8 Channel DC 5V Relay to play around. This relay is very easy to use with Arduino / Raspberry Pi.

To play around with the BLE shield I used the iPhone app and the Arduino code mentioned on their website. You should be able to follow the instruction and design your needed circuits to control. In my case the final setup looked something like this

Arduino with Bluetooth 4.0 Shield - iPhone Controlled Relay

Small video demo to see the above setup in action 😉

Stay tuned for more updates as soon as get time to work on these exciting projects 😉

Resize Raspberry Pi Partition Easily Using raspi-config

I have been playing with my Raspberry Pi for couple of weeks now and recently I ran into this issue of low space. Even though I had 8GB memory card it was only partitioned to use 4GB. After Googling for sometime I found there is a built in tool with Raspberry Pi which helps to resize the partition easily ie raspi-config.

Please check if your Raspberry Pi is running on Debian GNU/Linux wheezy/sid

Start raspi-config

Select expand_rootfs

Raspberry Pi raspi-config screen 1

raspi-config will configure Raspberry Pi to resize the partition during next reboot

Raspberry Pi raspi-config screen 2

raspi-config will request to reboot

Raspberry Pi raspi-config screen 3

During reboot process you can see that partition is getting resized

Raspberry Pi Resize Boot Screen

Once reboot is completed you can see more space on your rootfs.

Raspberry Pi Partion Info

I think this is the best way to resize the partition. No data loss or any special tool required to complete this operation 😀

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