It's not all code and soldering

I regularly play in a local fantasy LARP and my partner came up with an idea for a jokey motivational sign based on multiple in-game screw-ups we've had.

This weekend I chucked this together using things I had kicking around. I'm not in the least bit artistic so the lettering is done with laser printable transfer sheet. I love this stuff.

I found a small piece of slate, cut it down with an angle grinder, notched it for screws and also used hot glue to stop it moving about.

Having a lump of stone that you write on with chalk seemed the appropriate thing for a fantasy LARP, rather than an LED matrix. :-)

Beaglebone Black Unboxing

Just took delivery of this today. Very impressed so far with the fact that it's usable via USB out of the box as it powers the board and at the same time gives you a virtual Ethernet adaptor over which you can connect to it.

Having stuck a real Ethernet cable in it's merrily updating the distribution and once it's done that I'll have a play with running some of my resource heavy Python code on it. It's been bought to see if the faster, later ARM chip it's based on delivers the performance boost I'd like. An overclocked Pi is OK but only really has the grunt in Turbo overclock mode and this is slightly unstable in my experience.

I lack a micro-HDMI lead so I've not been able to play with the GUI but to be honest I've been using that as a bit of a crutch with my current Pi-based project. I need to start changing it so that it starts up when the Pi boots and can be controlled by GPIO connected buttons or remotely with SSH.