At the first Tinkerers meeting, I will be demonstrating a simple Arduino UNO connected to a 16x2 LCD and set up to print a message
I have previously made a board with the LCD soldered up with right angle pin headers and also added a Potentiometer, (to control the LCD) this makes it much easier to wire up to an Arduino. As most of the work is done. I made the board using a prototyping board that is in the same layout as a standard size breadboard and soldered the required components on. The advantage with this is that if I wanted to connect to a Raspberry Pi, it should be a case of replacing the M/F Dupont wires with F/F Dupont wires.
So using instructions here which also includes how to connect everything up.
A few photos of the project.
This is my soldered up display board, with potentiometer and pin headers. Makes it easier to wire up.
The LCD showing a message for the Tinkerers group
Finally the Arduino UNO used to run the code to control the LCD.
SFD 2024
Software Freedom Day (SFD) is an annual worldwide celebration of Free Software. SFD is a public education effort with the aim of increasing awareness of Free Software and its virtues, and encouraging its use.
I have set up an event for Paignton, details are here and below.
Date : 21st September 2024
Time : 11 am to 13:00
Location : STEAM Café & Discovery Centre
13 Torbay Road, Paignton, Devon
If you would like to get in touch, please send a message via the lug list or drop in to the DCGLUG Matrix channel.
I spend time at the weekend moderating as part of the Libre Planet conference organised by the Free software foundation.
Very relaxed, which gave time to chat to attendees, and also caught a few talks. So have some follow-up work to do, as the talk on Software Freedom day and self-hosting were also fascinating.
The latter of the two talks, mentioned above, led to an interesting discussion on how essential internet infrastructure is maintained, so in essence it seems essential components are maintained in some cases by a single person. So a big thank-you goes out now to the small army of people keeping everything going.
The FSF have two blog posts reflecting on the weekend.
I have now set up a Minetest server on a Raspberry Pi. This works and I am able to ssh in to the Pi and start remotely.
I have also set up a 3.5” Pi screen, set the pi to auto login and display the IP address(s) of the Pi. I followed some of the instructions at [2],[3] to set up the screen but didn't need the sections for setting up the gui.
The next step is to set up a router so try and provide an internal network at the library for playing minetest. I followed so
We had a quiet session today so we were busy getting two computers installed with Windows 8, and another dual booting Windows XP and Windows 8. This went really well, after installing the OS we installed some applications that we want to use during sessions.
We spent the latter ½ of the event trying to sort out Wi-Fi as one of the computers lost connection, we ended in the IT suits, using the e-machines as a Wi-Fi hotspot (bridge to library Wi-Fi) so the Lenovo could connect properly.
We really DO need a reliable solution for this.
The next Stem group event will take place on :
Date: Saturday, April 27th 2024
Time: 10:30am to 15:00
Location: Paignton Library and Information Centre
Room: 13 & IT Learning Centre
What is planned?
Run through of Lego Robot presentation
Run through of model car presentation
This is so that we can ensure when we do the actual presentations we are able to.
LibreOffice 24.2 Features
A short feature looking at the LibreOffice 24.2 features.
