RasPipe: A Raspberry Pi Pipeline Viewer Using the PiTFT #piday #raspberrypi
The other day I was thinking about how I could use a Raspberry Pi for a practical demonstration of some Unix shell basics. At right around the same time, I was using a neat little shell utility called pv, for pipe viewer.
What pv does is sit in the middle of a pipeline and display a progress bar, so you can have some idea of whether a long-running process is actually processing, and how much longer you’ll have to wait for it to finish. It’s great for things like copying big disk images to SD cards.
So ok, I thought, I have this PiTFT display. What if I made a pipeline viewer out of the Pi and stuck it on top of my regular monitor?
Here’s Part 1 of the resulting guide. It covers the basics of doing visualizations with the Pygame framework, which turns out to be a really fun little toolset for this kind of project. Part 2, demonstrating how to pipe data across the network to this visualizer using tools like Node.js, netcat, and Flask, should be finished soon.
Adafruit publishes a wide range of writing and video content, including interviews and reporting on the maker market and the wider technology world. Our standards page is intended as a guide to best practices that Adafruit uses, as well as an outline of the ethical standards Adafruit aspires to. While Adafruit is not an independent journalistic institution, Adafruit strives to be a fair, informative, and positive voice within the community – check it out here: adafruit.com/editorialstandards
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.
