Fried Circuits–Great Customer Support

 

I recently purchase some items from the Tindie store of Fried Circuits and was grateful for their awesome support.

 

Their store front is located here: https://www.tindie.com/stores/FriedCircuits/ and they have some good maker/hacker items worth a look.  So I ordered a USB Tester 2.0 and 2 VA Tester Scratch & Dents, when they arrived I looked them over and found that the VA Scratch & Dents were actually USB Scratch and Dents.

The items that came to me.
[Notice that the purple ones have the soldering pads for USB connections]

I then contacted them through the Tindie Support mechanism and William responded to let know know that they were out of the USB S&D, but after I sent him a photo of what I received he recognized the error.

The updated items.
[These purple boards have the 2-pins holes on each end for those blue screw terminal blocks]

 

So, after letting me know he would send replacements, another email came that he’d actually send the 2 of the regular products, I.e. non-Scratch and Dent!  I was floored there’s about a $10 difference between the 2 and I gracefully accepted.  About 5 days later they arrived and soldered them up.  They work great and Fried Circuits deserves Kudos for the great customer service that I am sure you will get too.

Raspberry Pi Tips and Tricks and AlaMode Setup - [Part 1]

Tips for the Raspberry Pi

I have been using my various Pis for going on 2 years now and have done some projects that worked and some that didn't.  I have found some tips that I thought I should pass on.  First off is organizing your SD cards, these little beauties were found at ACE hardware during a sale for a buck each, just $1.

The regular SD cards fit fine and just enough room to slide out when you tip the case over a bit.

Above you can see the size comparison with my Pis in the Coupe cases by Pimoroni. I really like these Pi cases mainly because they allow full access to the GPIO headers and all the ports and look great!

Another Tip for you is if you have several SD cards for your Pis and there isn't room to label them with what you might be doing with each one, I create a "Projects" file on the desktop of each one so I can quickly look at it to see what is installed and what I had planned for it.  I use 'Abiword' for mine but you can use whatever you choose.

The Alamode Board

The Alamode is a board that adds an Arduino MCU to your Pi and allows you to program it with the Linux version of the Arduino IDE.  It's even on sale right now through the MakerShed.com website.

Now to adding the Alamode to the Pi, it just plugs into the GPIO header of the Pi just like a HAT would.

I am just using my Model B but the Alamode is compatible with the B+ and 2 B.

There are steps to get Raspbian setup for the Alamode that can be found here: http://bit.ly/1UCap1b

It is quite lengthy so I won't re-hash the whole thing here but it should not be too difficult to figure out.

Part of those steps is to install the Arduino IDE for Raspbian, version 1.0.1 to be precise.

Even though it's an older version is still functions just fine for everything I have thrown at it.

Next time:  I will visit the Seeed Electronic Brick Starter Kit and compiling some lessons from a PDF related to the Brick set using the Alamode and the Pi.