After looking at various very cool and vary old display technologies on eBay, I ran across a 4 line dot matrix VFD display. It was one of 4 left, so I decided to order it and build a project similar to this one that an IRC friend linked me to: http://www.pyrofersprojects.com/blog/vfd-clock-with-snmp-and-ntp/. I originally was going …
December 2013 archive
Dec 21
Raspbian: Run a Program at Startup
There are many directions out there that don’t work on Raspbian. Specifically the “upstart” scripts, as Raspbian doesn’t come with upstart, and will mess things up greatly if you install it. Raspbian uses init.d. It’s fairly simple to get things going since a nice script was provided at the link below, mirrored here. Create script …
Dec 21
Raspbian: Wifi Going to Sleep
It seemed like I couldn’t contact my Pi after a while (and my SSH session would end seemingly for no reason). I would start a ping and it would time out for the first few times before it would start responding. At first I thought the Pi itself was, or the USB ports were going …
Dec 21
Python: Parsing Online XML The Easy Way
On my Raspberry Pi VFD project, I needed a way to download the XML feed from weather.gov to display the weather. After hours of searching Google and trying different things, I finally came across a way that actually works, using lxml and urllib2. I am still very new at Python, so I don’t completely understand …