The Raspberry Pi Thread [6]

Ok, I'll toss it back in the box. My Adafruit order is supposed to arrive Friday. Something to do on the weekend if that happens.

caperjack said:

I got lots I could do, I just cant get motivated...

I'm kinda in the same boat. I've been really sore due to all this cold wet weather. Hard to get motivated to anything, not just Pi stuff, anything.

I go for a walk just about every morning with my dog around 7 AM. Then cruise the forums for a couple of hours when I get home. After that I lay low until the afternoon walk. Just got back from that, it was nice, sunny for a change.

Nice, have some fun. My Adafruit order arrived. Just finished a bit of header soldering. Will do a bit more tomorrow. I need to solder a DS3231 RTC to a Proto Hat. I'm going to give my Pi A+ and Sense Hat to my daughter. I want to run that original THP.py weather file on it. And don't want to have to get the time and date over WIFI. The A+ doesn't have WIFI. Plus I want her to be able to just plug it in and it do its thing with no setup from her. I have a couple of spare DS3231's in my box of Pi stuff. And just got the Proto Hat and stacking header in this order. I got two packs of those black nylon standoffs too. The metal ones add up cost wise and I don't need them to be that strong for this build. The only downside is you get some odd lengths you'll probably never use. I'll repurpose the case when its empty though. I have one already that's more than half empty. I'll put its contents into the other two.
Black Nylon Screw and Stand-off Set – M2.5 Thread : ID 3299 : $16.95 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits

There are few good files on the go for the PICO Explorer, on the Pimoroni forum. Have a look see at what Tonygo2 has posted. I ran his Display Pack demo and it was pretty cool and had a lot of impressive button press etc functions.

One thing I finally bought was a level shifter, been wanting one for a while now. The Pi and PICO are 3V logic and sending 5V in will damage a GPIO input. And some Arduinos like my UNO, are 5V logic, while others like my MKR1000 are 3V logic. The level shifter will let me use 5V logic devices on my PICO. Stuff like my 16x2 display. I have the SPI / i2c adapter but it uses 5V logic. It will work the other way too, its bidirectional. Should come in real handy and actually get me doing stuff on my PICO with no worries of letting the magic blue smoke out.
8-channel Bi-directional Logic Level Converter [TXB0108] : ID 395 : $8.00 : Adafruit Industries, Unique & fun DIY electronics and kits