12 COOL RASPBERRY PI PROJECTS
■
The complete channel one temperature monitor and alarm project
■
The Raspberry Pi softball camera
■
The Raspberry Pi karaoke machine
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The Drinkmotizer: a Raspberry Pi drink mixing robot
■
New Year’s Eve countdown timer with fireworks launching ability
■
Raspberry Pi remote fish tank controls: AKA Project Goldie
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The scary door
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RaspiWatt: discover power consumption using a Kill-A-Watt & Pi
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Build your own Gertboard experimenter kit
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Raspberry Pi enabled Christmas lights
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Ultimate Raspberry Pi bundle security system
■
Pumpkin Pi project for Halloween and a second helping of pumpkin Pi
www.element14.com/raspberrypiprojects
Overclocking
The processor at the heart of the Raspberry
Pi is designed to run at 700MHz. That
is, perform 700,000,000 operations
per second. Of course, ‘designed to
run’ doesn’t mean ‘has to run’. You can
increase this speed. However, doing this
will increase the power consumption,
which in turn increases the amount of
heat generated. If it gets too hot, you’re
liable to have a smoking pile of silicon
rather than a functional processor.
Fortunately, Raspbian includes a tool to
help you ramp up the speed while also
keeping a careful eye on the temperature.
And because this is an official tool,
using it won’t void your warranty (unlike
earlier unofficial methods). Overclocking
your Raspberry Pi is simply a matter
of running
sudo raspi-config
and
then selecting ‘Overclocking’.
There are a few options to choose from,
depending on how brave you’re feeling.
If you find that your Pi becomes unstable,
reboot with the
Shift
key held down to
disable overclocking, then change the
option in
raspi-config
. The maximum
setting should give you a whopping 50
per cent extra speed, which we found
makes a real difference to the desktop user
experience, especially for web browsing.
If you want to keep an eye on your
core temperature, you can add the
Temperature widget to the LXDE panel.
However, your Pi will automatically turn
off overclocking once it reaches 85°C.
■
Overclocking will
increase the amount
of power that your Pi
draws, and so may
become less stable if
running a number of
USB devices.
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