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whiskers

2,953 karma · joined June 14, 2010

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whiskers··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
Cost per area is pretty much what drives all display pricing. :-)
whiskers··on Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations
This project will work with a 7.3" display just as well - they are £79.50! https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/inky-impression?variant=5...

Disclaimer: I am the CEO of Pimoroni :-)

whiskers··on My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II
Pick and place machines can place components very precisely at any angle - they really don’t care!
whiskers··on Raspberry Pi Pico 2 at 873.5MHz with 3.05V Core Abuse
They did, it's the Raspberry Pi Pico (as opposed to the Raspberry Pi) as a dev board or the RP2350 (as opposed to the BCMXXXX) as a chip.
whiskers··on Raspberry Pi Pico 2 at 873.5MHz with 3.05V Core Abuse
Yes.
whiskers··on Raspberry Pi Pico 2 at 873.5MHz with 3.05V Core Abuse
This is about the Raspberry Pi Pico 2 (based on the RP2350), not the original Raspberry Pi.
whiskers··on Raspberry Pi Pico 2 at 873.5MHz with 3.05V Core Abuse
Haha — this was a fun day! It's honestly surprising how robust the RP2350 was under such extreme experimentation. Mike's write-up walks through pushing the core voltages far beyond stock limits and dry-ice cooling to see what the silicon could handle.

Credit where it's due: Mike is a wizard. He's been involved in some of our more adventurous tinkering, and his input on the more complex areas of our product software has been invaluable. Check out his GitHub for some really interesting projects: https://github.com/MichaelBell

Blatant plug: We have a wide range of boards based on the RP2350 for all sorts of projects! https://shop.pimoroni.com/collections/pico :-)

whiskers··on Steve Jackson Games Is Bringing the Fighting Fantasy Books to the US
You might be thinking of Progress Quest!
whiskers··on New 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $120
There's been much debate about Raspberry Pi straying from its mission to provide affordable computers. I disagree.

Raspberry Pi offers models ranging from $10 to $120, all readily available — more so than ever.

Adjusted for inflation, the original $35 Raspberry Pi Model B (launched 2012) would be $50 today. The Raspberry Pi 5 2GB is also $50 today and vastly outperforms the original, delivering far greater bang for buck.

Though I can’t speak to their internal decisions, it’s seems from the outside that they continue to try to maximise the value of the Raspberry Pi while maintaining the original price point.

Disclaimer: Co-founder of Pimoroni, one of the first Raspberry Pi resellers.

whiskers··on New 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $120
It is still cheap and accessible. The cheapest Pi model is just over $10 [1], the most expensive is $120 [2].

And within that range there are a number of options with different CPU power, connectivity options, and RAM. Take your pick!

[1] Raspberry Pi Zero - https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero

[2] Raspberry Pi 5 16GB - https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-5

whiskers··on New 16GB Raspberry Pi 5 on sale now at $120
Because now there is a large range of options.

Here's your $20 Pi (still supported and available to buy): https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-zero-2-w

Here's your $120 Pi (many times faster and with 32 x the RAM): https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-5

The choice is right there for you with many other options in between...

whiskers··on Raspberry Pi AI Kit
We have a pre-order up for these while stock is limited during launch in case you want to get in the queue! https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-ai-kit
whiskers··on light-dark()
It's not.. `light-color` refers to the colour you want presented if the user's preference is for a "light" theme.

It's not declaring the relative brightness of the two colours - I agree it could be documented a little less ambiguously with something like `light-theme-color`.

whiskers··on Tell HN: Raspberry Pi 4 8GB available again
Clickable link to product page: https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-4
whiskers··on Tell HN: Digikey has 1822 Pi4 8GB and 3793 1GB in stock
For UK customers we also have 2GB, 4GB, and 8GB Raspberry Pi 4 in stock, things are finally starting to improve meaningfully! https://shop.pimoroni.com/products/raspberry-pi-4

We do ship worldwide but other resellers worldwide are also stocked right now - happy days! :-)

Disclaimer: Co-founder of Pimoroni

whiskers··on WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners
Home baked bread freezes really well so take advantage of that! I also bake a lot of bread at home and usually make a batch of 1kg of flour at a time, that results in two good sized loaves - one goes in the freezer until the other is finished.

I freeze it in an air tight bag, and I take it out of the freezer a day before we want to start using it and let it thaw at room temperature.

whiskers··on WHO advises against use of artificial sweeteners
I've been in America only once while overnighting in a hotel near LAX en-route to New Zealand from the UK.

Everything I ate at that hotel tasted sweet from the pizza I ordered that night to the toast I had in the morning. What should have been delicious and savoury was instead sickening and unpleasant - it was so weird.

whiskers··on At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end
This is correct, and we have been able to ease up on the restrictions a bit recently:

  - we reset the date before which you needed to have a previous order
  - the Pi Zero W is now available to all customers up to 10 per order
I appreciate it's been frustrating but things are improving and will continue to improve - you'll see a lot change over the next couple of months I'm sure.

We've done our best during this time to combat the scalpers - no solution is going to be perfect but we did what we felt was right to give our loyal customers as much support as we could.

whiskers··on At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end
As a counter point to this we, Pimoroni, supported a few smaller businesses that relied on Raspberry Pi during the shortages with modest numbers in direct coordination with Raspberry Pi.

These were not "the largest companies" by any metric. They were often orders of just tens or hundreds of units. It was absolutely about trying to keep commercial users who had locked into the Pi ecosystem viable during the supply chain disruption.

whiskers··on At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end
"Those Pis are not coming back."

Yes, they are.

Disclaimer: CEO of Pimoroni - an approved Raspberry Pi reseller.

whiskers··on At last, the Raspberry Pi shortage is finally coming to an end
We shipped thousands last week and we didn't ship them to scalpers: https://shop.pimoroni.com/pages/ordering-restrictions-for-ra...

Plenty more will come in short order, the past couple of years have been a real mess on supply chains - it's been hard on all of us.

whiskers··on Show HN: An accessible, beautiful Raspberry Pi Pico pinout
As best we understand once the supply chain issues with the parts that the 2W relies on are resolved that too will be similarly available.

All Pi products have a different bill of materials (or they wouldn't be different products) so they are all affected in different ways by the issues of the past couple of years.

Patience will be rewarded, etc.

whiskers··on Family Photos vs 256 Kb RAM
I used 100kB as an example purely because it was in the ball park of the images talked about in the article - not because it's a hard limit!

Inky Frame has an SD card slot on board which can store huge images if needed. JPEG also can be decoded in chunks so there is never any need to store the entire image in memory, simply scale and encode the chunks and store the result in the framebuffer - in principle there is nothing stopping you displaying multi megabyte images on Inky Frame.

You do seem to misunderstand our product range - it is targeted at Makers who want to take the base hardware and modify the software (and possibly to some degree the hardware) to create their own inventions and scratch their own itches. It's not really mass market stuff where you straight up plug and play.

whiskers··on Family Photos vs 256 Kb RAM
Context: I'm the CEO of Pimoroni who make this product.

I feel like something is missing here but I don't know what.

Our examples show large JPEGs being loaded in MicroPython no problem. For example this one from our examples is 100kB: https://github.com/pimoroni/pimoroni-pico/blob/main/micropyt...

During testing I worked with many images that were larger than that and never ran into issues either. I think the examples provided are pretty clear and demonstrate how to use the product reasonably.

We focus on MicroPython because the C++ SDK for connectivity is pretty gnarly for most people to work with - it is our intention you should never have to leave MicroPython to use this product.

No idea what the battery issue could be but I've never heard of any problem like that before and we've shipped thousands of this product over the past year. We'd be happy to get the unit back and test it for you if you want - or just replace it!

Please drop me a line if you want to discuss these issues further and I'll do my best to help!

whiskers··on Pico3D: Open World 3D Game Engine for the PicoSystem (RP2040 Microcontroller)
The only part of the enclosure that is exposed PCB is the front plate, the rest is machined anodised aluminium - it feels great.

All of our products meet the REACH and RoHS requiements for restricted and hazardous materials.

TL;DR It's fine.

whiskers··on Prehistoric timeline in Africa pushed back by more than 10M years
I feel like you should add the appearance of the first dinosaurs to this list (~240mya)!
whiskers··on The E-Ink Badge
If you look at the back of the badger you'll see that we put a set of pads to solder to for GPIO!

It also has a "Qw/ST" connector (STEMMA + Qwiic) that exposes an I2C bus so is ideal for adding sensors, or you could bash on an IO expander for a heap more pins!

whiskers··on Blockbench – A low-poly 3D model editor
It's usually called "Nearest Neighbour"!
whiskers··on The new iPad makes no sense
Then write about that - that's not the clickbait angle they have gone for.

A large chunk of that 36% can be explained by inflation - heck perhaps until now they have been artificially keeping the base price low to capture marketshare - who knows?

Full disclosure: I believe that the new price point makes iPad a much less compelling option. I also hate the way the article framed it. There was no need to construct a false reality when they could have simply run with 36% price increase - that's story enough.

whiskers··on The new iPad makes no sense
But they specifically refer to the price of the old model as $329 which doesn't include the keyboard. They are moving the goalposts to try to make this a story. It isn't a story, it's nonsense.
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