Dropbox on Raspberry Pi via SSHFS

July 10, 2012 - 4 mins read

This tutorial will demonstrate how to mount Dropbox (or any filesystem) over the network on the Raspberry Pi using SSHFS (Secure SHell FileSystem). For this procedure to work for your Dropbox share, you will need another machine somewhere that is running Dropbox, and is accessible to the Raspberry Pi via SSH. Note: The following is not actually specific to the Raspberry Pi, nor to Dropbox. The tutorial generalizes for other systems and architectures that are not officially supported by Dropbox, as well as for mounting of other non Dropbox shares over the network.

MSP430 Launchpad + PWM

July 9, 2012 - 2 mins read

Inspired by this tutorial. The following tutorial will describe how perform pulse width modulation using a MSP430g2553 TI Launchpad to control a sparkfun servo motor. Prerequisites Please see Cross-Compiling for TI MSP430 Launchpad to setup your development environment. Hardware Servo motor MSP430 Power I’m using the Arduino to power the servo motors. Alternatively you may use USB, a wall plug, or a battery. The MSP430 is being used to generate the PWM for control.

Peer Guardian on Raspberry Pi

July 8, 2012 - 2 mins read

This tutorial will show how to compile and install Peer Guardian on a Raspberry Pi. The process requires the at least the 2012-06-18-wheezy-beta.zip or newer Debian image (or manual kernel re-compilation). This will NOT work with debian6-19-04-2012.zip since the kernel does not have net filtering enabled. Also, you will need a decent sized SD card (4GB at least) … the dependencies alone require 382 MB. First, install the required package dependencies.

Arduino Physical CPU Gauges

July 3, 2012 - 2 mins read

Use Arduino and two hobby servos to control physical servo gauges for cpu activity, memory usage, bandwidth, and more. The script uses the python psutil and pyserial modules. The psutil module provides an interface for retrieving information on all running processes and system utilization (CPU, disk, memory, network) providing service similar to command line tools such as ps, top, iostat, and netstat. The servo control portion of the project is based on Arduino-Python 4-Axis Servo Controlby Brian Wendt, and the Arduino sketch is essentially unmodified from the SerialServoControl Sketch on Sparkfun.

Raspberry Pi Physical Gmail Notifier

June 29, 2012 - 2 mins read

This tutorial will demonstrate how to easily turn your Raspberry Pi into a physical Gmail notifier, in only 10 lines of python! If the configured Gmail account has unread messages, the LED will be illuminated, otherwise dim. The project was inspired by the Arduino/Mac version by J4mie adapted for use on the Raspberry Pi. Here is a diagram of the wiring of the LED with a 330 ohm resistor in series (created with Fritzing):