Minishift on Raspberry Pi
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Well, that was a fight and a half.
I've finally got the Minishift that I was building connected to the Raspberry Pi and working. This turned out to be a lot less trivial than I expected. One of my strongest beliefs is that the best way to learn stuff is to try and do things. I've sure learned a lot this time.
You can put items into the Minishift in a variety of ways. It supports SPI (Serial Peripheral Interface), so you can just connect an Arduino (or probably a Raspberry Pi) directly and it should just work. However, it is supplied with a rather spiffy USB-SPI interface and so I thought I'd use that instead. It looks neat.
So I plugged the board into my Pi and up popped a new HID (Human Interface Device) in the dev folder. So I thought all I'd have to do was install the Minishift Python program and I'd be good to go.
Wrong. Wrong, wrong, wrong.
What I had to do (from memory, there may be steps I've forgotten) was to:
- Update everything
- Upgrade everything
- Install missing things
- Install python-dev
- Install pip
- Install minishift
- Install Cython
- Install libusb
- Install udev
- Install hideapi
- Remember to run Python as super user so it could see the device
Anyhoo, it now works fine and the hardware looks great. The next step is to get a perspex case for the Pi and then make a little mounting bracket so I can put the Pi and the display on the wall somewhere and have a clock/RSS feed reader/weather forecast thing going.
The MiniShift is great fun to build. You can find it on Tindie.
