Sunday, January 26, 2014

Tower FM


 
Jon and Vix, breakfast show hosts on Tower FM.with me!

Forgot to post this earlier...this is from 2012 when we were getting ready for the Olympics. Tower FM organised a sing-song about Bolton not being chosen for the Olympics. Schools in Bolton joined in singing a VERY catchy song with words about Bolton.
Jon and Vix came into my school to record the song, it was fun, we set up microphones linked to the Radio Broadcast Unit outside and recorded the song along with a video which was on the Tower FM site.

I really want one of these Radio Broadcast Units for myself!









Dream on Steve....

Tuesday, January 21, 2014

Raspberry Pi with VGA Monitor






At last I have finally got around to getting the Raspberry Pi working!
I bought this little goody over a year ago and since then have got some of the bits and pieces needed to make it work. First, the Operating System which I found easier to buy a 8Gb SD card with the NOOBS already installed...about £7. Also needed a suitable PSU...£4 and a nice little case £2.95 all from Amazon. A great source for bits for the RPi.
 


Next I needed a HDMI to VGA adaptor so that I can connect to an old VGA monitor which sits around doing nothing. The RPi only has an HDMI socket. Now these adaptors are notorious for not working and can also be quite expensive, but searching on Amazon I found one with loads of good reviews and how to make it work on the RPi. At a cost of only £9, I decided to risk it and order one.
If you look in the customer reviews of the product it tells you how to edit the boot/config.txt and change the settings to make it work correctly using the built in text editor called 'Nano' on the RPi.

How to do it:

This method is most useful if you can see the display of the Raspberry Pi and you wish to make minor adjustments.
  • Reboot the Raspberry Pi and enter your username and password.
  • To edit the configuration file, enter the command
sudo nano /boot/config.txt
  • Type in the necessary configuration parameters
  • Save the edited file
Press Control-x
Press y
Press [enter]
  • After exiting the editor, restart using the command
sudo reboot


Here are the changes that I made:

edited /boot/config.txt initially to uncomment the hdmi_safe=1 line
booted the pi - (low-res vga mode)
in terminal
sudo nano /boot/config.txt
commented out the hdmi_safe line
uncommented/edited to give the following settings: (uncomment means remove the # at the beginning of the line)

hdmi_drive=2
hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=16
hdmi_force_hotplug=1 

ctrl + o to save
ctrl + x to exit
sudo reboot

I think the important setting for me was:

hdmi_force_hotplug=1

This forces video out from your R-Pi, whether it detects the HDMI monitor or not (the R-pi doesn't send out video unless it detects a monitor, as default, but the monitor wasn't switching on unless it detected input


Now it works a treat on my old monitor!

Here is the adaptor that I used....

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Adapter-Laptop-Power-Free-Raspberry-support/dp/B0088K7QUQ/ref=cm_cr_pr_product_top

Friday, January 10, 2014

Analogue Native Vol. 2


I love this...my second Analogue Native blog book! 


It is amazing to be able to produce your own book from the blog posts. I decided that I had enough blog posts to produce the second volume of my 'Biography'. If anyone is thinking of making their own blog book I can recommend 'Blog2Print'. They are a company in New York and you can produce your own blog book on line. You can leave it on line free, but if you want to have it printed like I have done, the cost is quite reasonable. The results are fantastic and is delivered within two weeks.  Try it!

http://blog2print.sharedbook.com