If you missed Part 1 and Part 2, it’s probably best you at least read Part 1 to understand the scope of the project. Part 2 discusses how the hardware is modified to fit into a restrictive enclosure, measuring only 10mm deep.
From the start, I wanted to stretch the boundaries of the Pi On The Wall, and therefore, Raspberry Pi power consumption. It seemed like a rather fun exercise. This post describes what I did in reducing power consumption fairly drastically, given what can be done in this limited power space.
For those who want a jist of what follows: I reduced power requirements of the Raspberry Pi with PiTFT and WiFi drastically.…
This is Part 2 of a series of blogs regarding the development of a wall-mounted server based on the Raspberry Pi, featuring WiFi and a colour touchscreen. Part 1 can be found here.
The enclosure I’m using, a re-purposed room thermostat casing, places some very tight constraints on the dimensions of the Raspberry Pi and PiTFT board.The plastic used in the case is quite sturdy, and is at least 2mm in thickness. Therefore the real inner depth of the case is about 12mm. As for the width of the Pi, we need to shave at least 4mm from the side.…
I’ve been working away at an idea I had that seemed too good to sit on, so jumped at it. It’s easier to explain the purpose in an image:
I’ve been meaning to set up my Raspberry Pi to monitor the Heatmiser WiFi thermostat I use, as well as being a small home server. I have a standard wall mount plate free in the hall of our house, the sort of thing the above would mount into and be wired direct to mains for 24/7 operation. I thought it would be cool to take a cheap thermostat, gut it, and replace it’s internals with Pi goodness – throwing in a colour touchscreen for good measure.…
Still working on my bench power supply, and wanted to move from my 16×2 retro LCD to something a bit more funky, and found these which use the Samsung S6D02A1 chip.
1.8 Inch Serial SPI TFT LCD Display Module With Power IC SD Socket At the time of writing, you can get these from a UK warehouse for £3.30 shipped for a single unit. That’s awesome. However, the comments were quite bad and many people had issues with them – no matter how it was wired an Arduino wouldn’t drive it.
After lots of trial and error and searching all over, I discovered the secret hack: put 1K resistors between all I/O pins, and Vcc is +5v.…
I needed to monitor my boilers activity as I thought something may not be quite right about its activity – gas usage is fairly high and our thermostat is fairly low – only 18 degrees C.
Our thermostat is programmed to become active twice a day, in the morning, and then in the late afternoon to evening. During this time the thermostat switches a wire to live (230v) to signal heat requested to the boiler, which is an older and not very efficient model.
I decided to build a quick and dirty datalogger based on an Arduino Nano and an SD card interface.…
