Raspberry Pi

[Dryden]

Ordered one last night to tinker around with. Anyone have one?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raspberry_Pi

 

[Deety]

I know someone who asked if I could rig a space heater strapped to a Roomba and program it to follow her around... :p

These look very cool, but I have no idea where to start with actually doing anything with one.

 

[CentralMOBuck]

I haven't used a raspberry pi yet, but I took a class last year where we used arduino's. There were some cool projects that came out of our class. I'm going to work on creating a garage door opener at my parents house that you can control from a cell phone.

Edit: This is similar to what I want to do. There's a raspberry pi version as well.

What are you planning using the raspberry pi for?

 

[Dryden]

What are you planning using the raspberry pi for?

World domination.

Or Internet porn.

 

[OCBucksFan]

I have one on order, played with one when I was last in the states. They are pretty bad ass, you can do a lot with them, I have seen media centers, desktop environment, radius/ssl wifi security, all sorts of stuff. There was an article from a guy a while back who setup a 10 person office network all ran on them, from server to desktops, so really it's up to you. Most common thing seems to be people who want to run XBMC on it and use it for playing downloaded videos over the network, me, I haven't really decided, Asia is sort of the land of the media center, I go to simlim every day and it's filled with hundred of em... I'll probably look at using it more for a low powered linux server at the house.

 

[Dryden]

Greetings from my Pi.

 

[Dryden]

Here's a photo of the entire computer. I slipped a blank CD under it for perspective.

 

[Deety]

That is awesome.

 

[exhawg]

Is this thing actually powerful enough to run something like MythTV? I'm not much of a Linux guy and I'm probably too lazy to spend the time to learn. Eventually the old broken screen laptops that I have connected to my TV's are going to die and I don't think I'm going to want to spend the $200-300 to replace them with another Windows box.

I'm in the process of ripping my DVD collection to MP4's so I would need something that could play movies over my hard wire or wireless network.

Hell my Droid Bionic has an HDMI port so I could probably use that as a media streamer if I was smart enough.

 

[Dryden]

Is this thing actually powerful enough to run something like MythTV? I'm not much of a Linux guy and I'm probably too lazy to spend the time to learn.

[ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mk9Sa51xNNg"]xbmc pvr mythtv on raspberry pi - YouTube[/ame]

This is really simple to setup since there is already an 'official' RasPi XBMC image for SD cards. You download the XBMC RasPi SD image, download Win32 Disk Imager for Windows, and copy the card image over to an SD card via any media connector option your PC recognizes with the imaging software. Take the SD card over to the RasPi, boot it up, configure it once, and after that it'll launch right into XBMC (which can run Myth within it via a plugin).

The UI is slow so this is not optimal; I'd say it's not quite ready for prime time yet, but I think it could get there eventually. The Pi really was not designed to do this, but it can, which is pretty amazing for something with horsepower comparable to a 700Mhz Pentium II.

I've had mine running for over an hour now with an FTP server and Lighttpd server enabled. A headless server. It draws 4 watts.

 

[BIATCHabutuka]

I know someone who asked if I could rig a space heater strapped to a Roomba and program it to follow her around... :p.

Not an awful idea. Probably in line to be developed after the electric blanket snuggie.

Still nothing compared to my solution to home heating. I think we can solve the gas cirisis, create jobs, and save the post office all in one move.

Basically my invention is a junk mail fired water heater / home furnace.

You get junk mail for free. Sign up for everything and maximize your freely delivered BTUs.

The post office needs the volume to pay out all those government benefits. Win win there right.

We chop tons of trees down for the paper / fuel / junk mail. We need to replant those and that is jobs cutting them down and planting them in. Two bites of the apple so to speak. Damn this stimulus shit is easy.

Don't think I would go for an arduino or a raspberry pi to control it, a simple PID temperature controller would do.

On the only serious note of the post, if you were interested in custom machine building and automation (greenhouse, homebrew, stuff like that) would you go for a raspberry pi or arduino to learn on or does the thought process demonstrated here justify an investment in those mechanical legos instead?

 

[Dryden]

On the only serious note of the post, if you were interested in custom machine building and automation (greenhouse, homebrew, stuff like that) would you go for a raspberry pi or arduino to learn on or does the thought process demonstrated here justify an investment in those mechanical legos instead?

http://brewpi.com/

If you want to play around with Lego Mindstorms NXT sensors, the Pi can do that too.

http://www.dexterindustries.com/blog/2013/01/31/raspberry-pi-and-lego-mindstorms-sensors/

 

[OCBucksFan]

xbmc pvr mythtv on raspberry pi - YouTube

This is really simple to setup since there is already an 'official' RasPi XBMC image for SD cards. You download the XBMC RasPi SD image, download Win32 Disk Imager for Windows, and copy the card image over to an SD card via any media connector option your PC recognizes with the imaging software. Take the SD card over to the RasPi, boot it up, configure it once, and after that it'll launch right into XBMC (which can run Myth within it via a plugin).

The UI is slow so this is not optimal; I'd say it's not quite ready for prime time yet, but I think it could get there eventually. The Pi really was not designed to do this, but it can, which is pretty amazing for something with horsepower comparable to a 700Mhz Pentium II.

I've had mine running for over an hour now with an FTP server and Lighttpd server enabled. A headless server. It draws 4 watts.

There's a lot of people using the XBMC setup, I am working on building a MAME bartop machine for the house with mine, there's been a few done and even a PiMame image that is still in beta but getting some nice feedback.

One of the more popular ideas seems to be to run owncloud on it, but I already have ssl vpn into my house so I don't really need anything like that.

Here's some of the stuff people have done with it: http://arstechnica.com/information-...s-that-show-how-amazing-the-tiny-pc-can-be/3/

Also, I didn't figure that the UI was going to be great, that's really there just for people who don't really know command line instructions, what will be interesting to see is how it all evolves. Arduino, Beaglebone and Raspberry Pi give low end programmers the ability to make large scale projects and with stuff like Kickstarter there I foresee a lot of great ideas in the future.

 

[Muck]

Ordered one last night to tinker around with. Anyone have one?

I picked up two of them awhile back. The plan is to stick one on the back of an old touchscreen LCD & mount it in a shadowbox/frame hung in the kitchen. It'll be used as primarily as an electronic cookbook & media center, when not in use it'll be the usual electronic picture frame.

I have no idea what I'm going to do with the second one yet.

BTW there are AllWinner A10 based Android mini-pcs in the same ballpark now for those looking for something else to fiddle with. Some of them have hardware specs that are far more compelling than the pi (multi core CPUs etc).

Lilputing

 

[OCBucksFan]

Almost gone one of mine working and a DLNA renderer so I can stream music all over the house wirelessly, with it's low power and us having a synology NAS, it's a pretty ideal scenario and a much cheaper alternative to some of the DLNA capable speakers out there right now.