About Me & My Pi

Me, Myself and I

My name is Jason, I am a 30 something husband, and father of two wonderful girls, living in Radlett, in the UK. 

I am a Systems Engineer working in London, and have been a "geek" for as long as I can remember. 

I love playing with gimmicks and gadgets, which led me on to messing about with electronics and integrating them with a Raspberry Pi.

I don't proclaim to be a master in electronics, nor Python (which I use in the projects I do on the Pi), but I love to learn about how things work, and enjoy tinkering. I have written this blog from a point of view of novice, trying my best to explain as best I can (from my own workings out), to help anyone else who comes across them.

If you find any of the posts useful, or if you have any questions please do not hesitate to leave a post.

Me and my Pi

When the Pi was first released round 2011, I got on the band wagon and put my back order in, along with the hundreds of thousands of others. Though the Pi was mainly designed by geeks of my generation to gives kids of nowadays the ability to do some of the things we used to do back in the day, I am afraid that I am quite sure a few of the orders that were placed were mainly for the guys of the likes of me. This little device brought back memories of taking apart my first ever PC (286, 2MB SIP RAM, 20MB Hard Drive), and putting it back together again just to see how it worked.

Unfortunately family life caught up with me and my poor Pi ended up being shelved and gathered dust. Now and again I would get it out in an attempt to do something with it but, but once again it got forgotten and put away like that unwanted cell phone. I even bought a whole development kit for it from SK Pang Electronics

In December of 2014, I thought, enough is enough and took it out, set it up right under the screen of the family computer (much to the eye rolling of my wife). I treated it to a new, faster SD Card, and pimped it out with a copper heatsink (There really is no need for it, but it just looks cool)

And there it sits with wires protruding from its GPIO ports like sort of cyborg. With LCD screens and LED's pinned all over its breadboard, waiting in anticipation for the next attempt and some sort of idea I may have.

I run the device headless and wireless, and it works great.

Python is my programming language of choice, and find it very easy to work with, though it can be a little fussy, but with a little coercion and respect, like snake charming, I get it to do what I want without biting me in the a$$.