2016-08-20

BitScope, Blade & Raspberry Pi at the Sydney Maker Faire!

We had a ball exhibiting BitScope Mini, BitScope Micro, BitScope Blade and full range of accessories at the recent Sydney Mini Maker Faire held at the MAAS Powerhouse Museum in Sydney last weekend.

During the course of the faire we were visited by makers, students, children and their parents, teachers and engineers.

We were impressed with how engaged visitors were with many expressing a keen interest in how electronics and computing can be used together to solve problems.

We used Raspberry Pi 3 to demonstrate BitScopes in various configuration as well as part of the Blade exhibits themselves.

We used our low cost compute platform built with Blade Uno and Raspberry Pi 3 to create workstations with which visitors could interract and control BitScope Micro and BitScope Mini scopes connected to various real-time exhibits.

From guitar playing to mixed signal electronic circuits on breadboards and cluster of Raspberry Pi crunching the numbers, we did our best to cover the full range of BitScope products and software.

Thanks also to our friends at element14 for helping with materials and offering three Raspberry Pi Starter Kits to match three BitScope Micro which we're giving away to three lucky visitors next week. Read More...

2016-05-27

Physical Computing with BitScope, Blade and Raspberry Pi.

Bruce was invited to present a seminar about cluster and physical computing with BitScope Blade and Raspberry Pi at the Sydney Linux User Group meet up at Google last Friday. It was a good talk followed by a solid Q&A session.

Bruce introduced BitScope Designs and our history in test, measurement and mixed signal data acquisition solutions.

He explained our work with Raspberry Pi which saw the launch of BitScope Micro, our smallest mixed signal oscilloscope tailored for use with Raspberry Pi and available globally via element14.

The first half of this seminar explains what BitScope Blade is, where it came from and how to use it to build low cost physical & cluster computing solutions.

Starting with Blade Uno, Bruce explained how BitScope Blade scales to two or four nodes with Blade Duo and Blade Quattro and all the way up to a 40 node 160 core compute clusters in compact racks.

Bruce then presented a wide range of computing solutions that can be built with Raspberry Pi and BitScope Blade.

Our thanks to the Sydney Linux User Group for the invitation to speak and Google Sydney for hosting the event. If you're in Sydney (which does not always look like this but it does at the moment due to Vivid :) and you're interested in Linux, open source software or systems and solutions like the ones we presented here, we recommend you join this user group. Read More...

2016-03-16

Building servers with Raspberry Pi and BitScope Blade

Mythic Beasts managed the online launch of Raspberry Pi 3 in part by hosting it on Raspberry Pi itself !

It was an impressive example of eating your own dog food and Raspberry Pi 3 rose to the challenge for quite a while.

Check out Raspberry Pi's latest blog to learn all the details but suffice to say we think Raspberry Pi 2 and now Pi 3 are an excellent choice for building servers.

In the interests of "dogfooding", we have been running our office on Raspberry Pi 2 with a Duo Pi blade board for six months now and it operates flawlessly!

Using a cheap 4-port switch and HDD extracted from a Bruce's ultrabook (when he upgraded it to use an SSD), we've run our DHCP, DNS, WiFi AP and local file servers on these two Raspberry Pi 2 with a wall mounted Duo Pi. It's been running since September without a single crash. The key to its reliability is the stability of the power supply provided by the Duo Pi and the fact that we run the main server from the HDD (and not the SD card which boots the server only). Read More...

2016-03-07

Raspberry Pi Model 3 unboxed & reviewed with Duo Pi.

Bruce unboxed a brand new Pi3 prior to the official launch. He mounted the Pi3 on a Duo Pi beside a Pi2 to compare these two models.

Check it out his short video to learn the key differences between Pi3 and Pi2. You can also learn how he used a Duo Pi to power and mount both side by side and connected the Pi3 to the TV in his hotel room.

Blade is BitScope's industrial power and mounting solution for Raspberry Pi.

Originally designed with Raspberry Pi 2 in mind, Blade systems can be built using either model. The built-in wireless connectivity in the new Pi3 means that in many cases wired Ethernet connections are not required and the faster 64-bit quad core CPU means more powerful compute clusters and private cloud platforms can be built using Blade Packs. Read More...

2015-12-03

Physical Computing with Raspberry Pi and BitScope!

We love the Raspberry Pi and have long supported it to build a low cost oscilloscope solution with BitScope.

BitScope is also used for a wide range of test and measurement purposes beyond just as an oscilloscope and we're often asked for low cost scalable solutions for data acquisition, sensing and control.

It made sense to see if we could leverage Raspberry Pi for all this as well. Turns out we can, so we created BitScope Blade!

We've long offered network connected T&M solutions like BS445 but BitScope Blade makes these models redundant.

Instead we can now offer comprehensive industrial quality, highly reliable solutions using Raspberry Pi. You can build very flexible and scalable test, measurement and data acquisition systems using low cost BitScope Micro and BitScope Mini and BitScope Blade. It works with other solutions too, like Sense HAT.

It doesn't end there. BitScope Blade is also well suited for stand-alone servers and workstations, cluster computing and cloud hosting infrastructure, remote sensing, general physical computing and education. Read More...