Powering your Pi

This blog is a presentation covering two things.
First 10 minutes, I talk about a problem with the resistance of the USB power leads, which may be strangling your Pi.
Then I go on to a specific use case where I use the MCP3008 to monitor battery voltage and current for the purpose of monitoring a Sealed Lead Acid (SLA) backup battery, which is providing a backup power supply for a Pi project.

My previous blog entry is a presentation about the MCP3008 Analogue to Digital Converter on Raspberry Pi, and you might want to check that out first if you want a deep dive into the MCP3008. In the presentation below, I describe how to use the MCP3008's differential mode (something I somewhat dismissed in the previous presentation), and how it can operate slightly outside the power supply of the chip, which is particularly useful for current monitoring.

This is a presentation I gave at Raspberry Pint in London on 29th January 2019. I would like to thank CodeNode for making the video available.

Video Slides

MCP3008 Analogue to Digital Converter on Raspberry Pi

The Microchip® MCP3008 Analogue to Digital Converter [Datasheet] is commonly used to add analogue (or analog for US readers) inputs to the Raspberry Pi. It is very easy to connect to the Pi using an SPI bus on 4 of the Pi's GPIO ports. There is plenty of software support for it, but it is also easy to bit-bang from a program if you want to drive it entirely yourself.

This is a presentation I gave at Raspberry Pint in London on 24th April 2018 on using the MCP3008 on the Pi, including a live experiment to see how fast I could make it run (how many samples per second). My next blog entry looks at an application design which includes an MCP3008 used in a novel way.

I would like to thank CodeNode for making the video available.
I do not represent or speak for Microchip®.

Video Slides

Rasperry Pi as a Replacement Controller

I build lots of Raspberry Pi based controllers, and sometimes retrofit them into existing appliances. This can give the appliances a new lease of life, and add a bunch of features they didn't have beforehand.

This is a presentation I gave at Raspberry Pint in London on 27th February 2018 on two retrofit controller projects, and I would like to thank CodeNode for making a video available.

Video Slides