About: beaks.live – the hardware

This is the bird box that is shown at beaks.live. It is on the side of a house in Cambourne, about 8 miles west of Cambridge, in the UK. When I put a camera in this bird box last year, I was not optimistic. Expecting to capture nothing more than the inside of an empty […]

Taming the PiFM Transmitter (Part 2)

In part one of this guide it became clear that a Raspberry Pi with a 700 mm long wire on pin 7, running a variant of the PiFM software is an easy way to make a nuisance of yourself. We might not be broadcasting kilowatts of power and realistically, you are not going to be […]

Taming the PiFM Transmitter (Part 1)

One of the million things you can do with a Raspberry Pi is using it as an FM radio transmitter. It is stupidly easy; you just attach a 700 mm long wire to pin 7 and install one of the many variants of the original program which was hacked together at a code club meeting. […]

Pirpl – it’s another Pirate Radio PLaylist thing!

If you liked the previous Pi-rate Radio Jukebox (and 15 people did!), you won’t want to miss this latest version of it.  It’s basically the same thing, but it runs as a daemon, so you can fire up your favourite tunes using a browser rather than logging in to your Pi to start up scripts.  As usual it’s […]

Pi-rate Radio Jukebox

Note: there is an update to this post. There is a nice hack for a Raspberry Pi where you can turn it into an FM transmitter.  While this is illegal in most countries, the range is quite limited so it’s fairly unlikely you’ll go to prison. The only hardware needed is your Raspberry Pi and a piece […]

Miscallaneous Wibble

This post is part of a short series of tutorials for people who are new to using their Raspberry Pi.  It will make more sense if you start at the beginning. Continued from here. First page here 12.  Some other useful bits and bobs Firstly, let me say that Linux is a huge subject and […]

A streaming pile of Pi

Continued from here. First page here. 11. Setting up your uPNP media server A uPNP media server allows you to stream videos from your Pi to any device that can talk to it.  A lot of tellies do this these days, along with PS3s, XBoxs, iPads, tablets and your PC.  With a server on your […]

Memory sticks and torrents

Continued from here. First page here. 9. Thanks for the memories For this chapter you’ll need a memory stick or a pre-formatted external hard drive with a USB connection.  As we are going to be putting videos on it, the larger the better.  Got one?  Good.  Stuff it up your Pi’s USB port.  There should […]

Torrents of Pi

Continued from here First page here 8.  Installing a Bittorrent Client I don’t know about you, but I want to install a Bittorrent client on your Pi, and I’ll tell you why.  If your PC uses a wireless router and you use Bittorrent, you will probably find that the Bittorrent traffic over your network utterly […]