It’s time to take a bite out of a different kind of raspberry, the Black Raspberry. I have been running Raspbian Wheezy for a little while and I decided I wanted something a little more dark and tasty. I have decided to run Adafruit’s Occidentalis v0.2, a distro derived from Raspbian Wheezy with a little extra something . They named it Occidentalis after the scientific name for a black raspberry, which is Rubus occidentalis. This particular distro has enabled the Raspberry Pi to be a lot more user friendly for a hardware-hacker. This distro comes with hardware such as SPI, I2C, one wire and WiFi support for wifi adapters. They also have included sshd when you startup which has key gen on first boot.
The black raspberry also includes the needed kernels modules for PWM/Servo control on GPIO #18. Occidentalis really hits the mark for those of us that are looking to play around with robotics and breadboard projects. If you want to download and install the Occidentalis v0.2 visit the link: here and follow Adafruit’s great tutorial!
Want a FREE Raspberry Pi? For limited time and while supplies last – Adafruit is including a FREE Raspberry Pi in all orders over $350 (not including shipping).
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Stop breadboarding and soldering – start making immediately! Adafruit’s Circuit Playground is jam-packed with LEDs, sensors, buttons, alligator clip pads and more. Build projects with Circuit Playground in a few minutes with the drag-and-drop MakeCode programming site, learn computer science using the CS Discoveries class on code.org, jump into CircuitPython to learn Python and hardware together, TinyGO, or even use the Arduino IDE. Circuit Playground Express is the newest and best Circuit Playground board, with support for CircuitPython, MakeCode, and Arduino. It has a powerful processor, 10 NeoPixels, mini speaker, InfraRed receive and transmit, two buttons, a switch, 14 alligator clip pads, and lots of sensors: capacitive touch, IR proximity, temperature, light, motion and sound. A whole wide world of electronics and coding is waiting for you, and it fits in the palm of your hand.
Have an amazing project to share? The Electronics Show and Tell is every Wednesday at 7pm ET! To join, head over to YouTube and check out the show’s live chat – we’ll post the link there.
