Testing the eclipse viewing box

     I set my box up around 5pm three days before the eclipse to see if it would work. I used a saw horse to support it. I hope the saw horse will work the day of the eclipse when it will be much closer to a right angle. Aiming the box was a bit tricky. You want to align it with the sun so that the box's shadow is the same as the end of the box. It took a bit of fiddling to get it close but when I looked in the view window I couldn't see anything. I then got the brilliant idea to remove the aluminum with the pin hole. Now I had a large bright cutout I could aim at my screen.

Constructing an Eclipse Viewing Box

     I've got my eclipse viewing box all set up and ready to go. Actually, I made two, but the second one isn't nearly as complicated. I tested it out today around 5 pm so the angle of the sun was not very steep. It's about 6 feet long but I haven't measured it yet.

Solar eclipse on August 21, 2017: research on making a simple viewer

     The eclipse is coming up soon and I want to make an eclipse viewer.  I don't plan on going to the areas for the best viewing, I have work that morning. I live in Fort Worth, Texas and we should see about 75% coverage of the Sun which is good enough for me. On April 8 2024, there will be a solar eclipse passing over us. This year is kind of like good practice for the next one.

     I'm thrifty and I don't want to pay $10 for paper, but certified, solar viewing glasses that were only $1 last year. I wonder how much they are going to go for in the totality zone on that day? I looked up many videos on how to make a pinhole projector and they were pretty much all similar but I like the pictures and basic steps on Livescience.com here. Go there to find the supply list and instructions. Making a solar viewer is practically free, if you have everything around the house. You can get a cardboard box for free from a big box store if you show up and ask for it when they are unloading the merchandise and have many sitting around.

     From watching all the videos, I did pick up a few more tips to add to the basic viewer. A longer box will give you a bigger projected viewing circle, one video mentioned 6 feet was a good length. A box with a lid makes construction easier. Several methods for diminishing the ambient light, which will make the projected image of the Sun brighter, include: painting the box black on the inside, duct taping the seams and all the joins, and adding a tube to the side, instead of a window, but the tube will also make it hard to photograph and share. Using a piece cut from an aluminum soda can to put your pin hole in will make a nice crisp sturdy projection if you sand it smooth, as opposed to tin foil. Just use a needle or small pin to make the pin hole, it should not be big or the projected image will be fuzzy. The simplest cheapest viewer is just using your hands and the pavement like #2 in this article. Using a colander or making multiple pinholes in a pattern will make a very pretty viewer like the picture in #3 here, same article as previous link. Using binoculars, with one side covered, or a monocular mounted on a tripod can give you a beautiful large image good for recording or to see sunspots on normal sunny days.

     My husband will be bringing home a nice long box & paint it black on the inside for me this week so I can put it together next weekend. Hopefully the 21st will be a sunny day.

     For 2024, I hope to get a monocular setup going like in this guy's video or maybe a camera setup to take pictures or just setup another box like the one I'm making this year, mount a Raspberry Pi with the camera module hooked up inside it so it can be completely enclosed and take videos & pictures remotely. I hope someone does a project like that this time so I can see theirs, if not I'll blog it then, hopefully. I also plan to buy some solar viewing film the year or two before so I can make my own glasses/filters.

Using buttons, but not the kind on a shirt

    The title is a bad sewing joke, sorry, not sorry. I had to skip Mr. McWhorter's lesson on controlling servos because I don't have one, yet. I really want to learn how to do that. I can see myself using them in all kinds of projects one day. I'm absolutely thrilled to be able to do these kinds of things at home. Back in the day, these kinds of projects would have been hard without major equipment and expensive for me. Not to mention, I had no idea where to get parts and now they're just a click away.

     I'm going on to the next lesson on You Tube: Raspberry Pi LESSON 29: Using GPIO pins as Inputs and Reading them in Python. So we need buttons for inputs instead of the keyboard. My little Elegoo electronics fun kit came with 10 small buttons. Fortunately, I have small hands. Here's my RPi, wired up and ready to go.

     I watched the video, typed in the code and it worked! Woot!

     I controlled a printout on the screen with buttons I wired to the RPi! Such little achievements are good for the soul.

Changing the brightness on an LED

     The next lesson I tackled was Raspberry Pi LESSON 27: Analog Voltages Using GPIO PWM in Python. I don't know exactly what's going on here but I did it anyway.

     Mr. McWhorter didn't explain everything going on here but I'm sure I could Wiki it. Is there a Wiki for electronics? I might have to put down the RPi and find out. I'm sure I'll find out eventually in my studies for college. He might have gone over these concepts on his videos for the Arduino but I haven't watched those as I don't have one.

Something I forgot

Blogger does not like to post my pictures from Google drive with a link. This was the case years ago when I was blogging. I thought it had been fixed because it was still an option. I need to remember to upload them from my computer from now on. I hope all of my photos, even though they're not the greatest, are up now. I'm glad I caught it now rather than later but it was still frustrating.

Controlling an LED using GPIO pins

     I've booted up my Raspberry Pi 3 and my laptop and gathered my little electronics kit from Elegoo. I'm running the VNC viewer to control my RPi from my laptop in headless mode. I updated my RPi since I haven't turned it on in a week or so. I'll be using the tutorial, Raspberry Pi Linux LESSON 26: Controlling GPIO Pins in Python, found here at toptechboy.com. I watched the video a couple of weeks ago so I think I'm ready to jump in.

      I shut my RPi down and unplugged it to hook up the circuit. The resistors are tiny and are marked but I wanted to see if I could read them. I found this page with an explanation of reading the color codes but there are many more pages on the internet.

     There doesn't seem to be any gold or silver line to place to the right but in the above orientation it seems correct. The orange looks brown but if I ASSUME it is orange, which could make an ASS out of U and ME and fry my RPi, then we have rings in order orange, orange, black, black, brown.

Using the VNC viewer

     Taking my laptop and new Raspberry Pi 3 to the living room and using the big screen TV was a bit of a hassle. The tutorials I was watching on You Tube used a program to see the terminal and use the RPi2 right on their desktop without having to hook it up to a keyboard, mouse or screen.  This is called using the RPi in headless mode.

     I searched around on You Tube to find out how to do that on the RPi3. It turns out there is a utility on the RPi3 already installed but you do need to hook it up with all the peripherals to set it up. The utility is the RealVNC software. There's some information here at RaspberryPi.org but it was very simple to do using the GUI (graphic user interface or Windows-like environment).

Elegoo Upgraded Electronics Fun Kit

     I bought the Elegoo Upgraded Electronics Fun Kit from Amazon to start making some simple circuits with programs on the Raspberry Pi 3.

      It came with a lot of parts for under $20.

     The only problem is, besides some spec sheets for the specific parts on their website, that there is no documentation so I don't know what I can do with all of the bits. I guess that is what the internet is for. I just have this feeling that I could be missing out on some cool projects because I don't know how to use these components. Of course, I might also start a fire. We'll see.

Downloading some old Unix games

     I found some safe games to download and play in chapter 3 of the Conquer the Command Line Terminal Guide  from the official Raspberry Pi magazine, The MagPI.

     They are nothing fancy. Its a group of textual games that were played on Unix systems. You can find a list and some screen shots of different games at this link. All you need to do is type in:

sudo apt-get install bsdgames

and hit enter to download and install them. It wasn't stated clearly in the guide but all you have to do is type in the name of the game at the command prompt to play them. They don't all have instructions so, playing robots, as the guide suggested, was a bit mystifying to me. I just found a Wiki article on it but it still seems odd. Tetris, however, was still Tetris but lacked color.

 There are many more games you can get on the Raspbian OS at the terminal prompt. You can find the list here at Debian.org and also much more free software to run on the "Jessie" version of Raspbian. Not all of it is guaranteed to run but some of it is supposedly quite good. I'm new to all this Linux stuff so I can't vouch for it. If I do find some good stuff, I'll post about it. Have fun.

Running RetroPie

     I got my RetroPie up and going the other day. Flashing the image to the disk took about 20 minutes. I stuck it in my RPi3 & it booted up perfectly.

     I got the image for the OS and over 3000 games, also known as ROMs, at level1online's You Tube video here. You can read all the problems I had with the torrent downloader on my previous post.

      The A and B buttons are switched because he set it up for a certain controller but level1 also has a video for how to change the settings.

      My kids were playing on it quickly and it ran for hours. My son was playing some Kingdom Hearts for the Gameboy Advance.

     Now, my son is interested in an RPi of his own.

Stupid is as stupid does

     The title is one of my favorite sayings from the Forrest Gump movie. I should have taken his mama's advice. This could also be titled "You Tube made me do it" but I like to think I'm a responsible adult and can admit my own mistakes.

    So there I was learning all I could about the Raspberry Pi and drooling over the simple electronics projects I could do when I came across a You Tube video. This You Tube video contained images from a sweet RetroPie gaming setup that the poster put together as a 16Gb starter version. RetroPie is a vintage game console emulator OS so you can play all of the video games from the early Atari up to the PlayStation 1 I think. It has over 3000 games in the disk image and I wanted it, for my husband and son of course.

     The poster of the video had a link for the torrent download but I didn't have a down loader on my laptop. I downloaded the first one that came up on a search. What a mistake!

Raspberry Pi 3 - backing up the OS

     After getting the Raspberry Pi updated and shut down safely, I continued doing research and discovered it was a good idea to back up the micro-SD card with the OS (operating system). The OS can get corrupted very easily and having a backup is a good idea.

      I found a lot of similar information online. Backing up the OS mainly involved downloading the WIN32 Disk Imager and using it to make a copy to your regular PC's hard drive. This didn't work for me because my OS disk that came with my RPi was partitioned and I couldn't figure out how to do it. I've found recently that there is a setting that I need to adjust to change it but I have not tried it yet so if it works I'll document it.

     Fortunately, there is a utility on the RPi3 itself to make a backup onto a USB stick drive. I happened to have a spare 64Gb available and backed up my OS onto that. The process took about 10 minutes but I was not timing it. The backup utility will delete all information on the USB stick so double check it to make sure you don't lose important information. I believe previous versions of the RPi did not have this capability.

Conquering the Command Line

     Conquering the Command Line is the name of the guide the MagPi published to start working in the terminal. You can find a free PDF download here or buy it to support RaspberryPi.org. I highly recommend it. It seems to be written for ages high school to adults.

     I just finished it and it had a lot of good information, more than the videos I was watching. I feel much more comfortable at the command prompt. I loved the little bits of programming history it included. Some of the chapters I didn't need so I skipped them. Now my brain is mush.

     There was this cute little Easter egg in it that I have to share. Try it on your RPi.

Screen shots of updating OS

     I grabbed these screen shots of today's update of the OS. I have not changed my username yet but there's nothing really on here yet either. I highlighted where I typed in a command and the prompt at the end showing it was ready for more.

My new Raspberry Pi3 and how to update the OS

(Warning! Bad cell phone pictures ahead!)

     This is my Raspberry Pi 3 B+. It is actually as small as claimed. I had to insert the RPi into the case & then the middle layer snapped on and the cover is placed on top but it doesn't snap & is easily removable to access the GPIO pins and other connectors on the board.

The Raspberry Pi makes an awesome gift and a link to a beginner resource.

     Last week my dear sweet husband bought me a Raspberry Pi 3 kit, like the one here from CanaKit, on Amazon just to be sweet. Raspberry Pis (RPi for short) have been on the edges of my radar for over a year but this newer model is everything a college student studying for her Electrical Engineering degree could ever want.

     It reminds me of my childhood when I got an electronics kit  similar to this one for Christmas.

That was one of my favorite gifts as a child. Who needs another Barbie when you can make stuff. However, the RPi has much more versatility and I was really excited to jump into it.

     The kit comes with little documentation but before I even got the RPi I started researching how to use it and what it can do. Whoa, there is a lot of information out there. The RPi has been around since 2012 and there are many enthusiasts and makers who have used it for a variety of projects or just as a portable computer and gaming console. Many assume you already know what you are doing or going to do with it and don't actually explain much. The official magazine, made by the original creators, has all the pdfs you need to start for free but I'm better with videos.

     I found some useful videos on You Tube and eventually found Paul McWhorter's channel where he has a playlist with lessons on Linux. He has a very "high school teacher" kind of teaching style, casual and repetitive. This is good for me because I haven't done anything on a computer at a command prompt since the mid-late eighties in middle school. I'm currently on lesson 31 and I am so excited! I ordered a kit from Amazon with some electronics components and a breadboard so I can do what he has done. Just being able to program an LED to turn on and off seems like magic to me & I can't wait to get started! He also has a website at http://www.toptechboy.com/ where you can access the lessons but I haven't used it yet.

     I've learned so much from him already. I need to leave him lots of positive feedback because he is a wonderful resource for beginners like me. I highly recommend him for anyone working with any age child or a beginner adult. Next post will cover getting my RPi.