Raspberry Pi Tutorials

Many of you will be familiar with the Windows screensaver/lock screen.  If you are going to leave your PC alone for any amount of time where others may have access to it (like in a busy office) then it is advisable to lock it every time you walk away from it using the Win+L key combinations. But we are talking about the Raspberry Pi here.  If you are running it headerless or in command line mode and you are not logged in, then anyone who has access to it will need to log in (you have changed the default password,...

Let’s be honest. Lights are cool. Multi coloured lights are very cool. Controllable multi coloured lights are awesome. This tutorial goes through some of the controllable multi coloured lights you can use with a Raspberry Pi. Neopixels The fine folks over at Adafruit produce a number of different products that are multi coloured controllable lights that they call Neopixels. The ones we’re going to look at are Breadboard friendly Neopixels Sewable Neopixels Neopixel strips Neopixel rings Breadboard friendly Neopixels Don’t let the name put you off! You don’t have to use a breadboard with these Neopixels. Once soldered, these Neopixels...

IFTTT (If This Then That) is a free IoT service that allows you to send a trigger from one device/thing, and allow that trigger to make something happen elsewhere. Confusing? Perhaps, but a quick example should help show the simplicity of it: Our recipe ('applet') could be: "If I send an email with the subject 'turn on', then switch on my smart lightbulb". The 'THIS' is the email and the 'THAT' is lighting the WiFi lightbulb. Simple right? IFTTT Services The exciting thing about IFTTT is the sheer number of services you can use as either triggers (THIS) or actions (THAT). There...

There are multiple ways of auto-starting programs on the Raspberry Pi when it boots or you log in.  There’s ‘cron’, ‘init’, Gnome Scheduler amongst others. However, the latest version of Raspbian includes another one, called ‘systemd’. systemd ‘systemd’ is actually a suite of applications used for managing the operating system.  The reason I like it is because you can set up a ‘service’ (your program) that systemd will automatically manage for you.  So if, for example, your program crashes, systemd can restart it.  This is especially useful if your Raspberry Pi is being used for monitoring something or logging measurements...

We’re always being told to choose a long, hard to guess password for all our accounts, so how can we log into a Raspberry Pi without a password using ssh (Secure Shell)? Passwords are not the most secure way of logging in.  They can be guessed, or ‘brute-forced’ by making millions of guesses using common words or known passwords.  There is a better way; by using secrets that only the Raspberry Pi and the computer you are logging in with knows in the form of certificates. For this we will use a tool to generate what is known as a...