*** WARNING - STILL VERY MUCH UNDER CONSTRUCTION ***
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| Raspberry Pi - a not exactly credit card-sized compute |
I first heard about the Raspberry Pi (RPi) towards the end of 2011 and I placed an order for the Model B version with Farnell in February 2012. Having been brought up with the BBC Micro and, after buying a Model A in 1982 which I then spent six months wishing was a Model B before I could afford to upgrade it, I decided not to mess about with the budget version this time. The reason why I chose Farnell was simply because they were offering a free Element 14 tee-shirt with a RPi logo on it for pre-orders!
I received my RPi in May 2012 and immediately set about getting it to work as a media player using the Raspbmc software. I used the charger from my HTC HD2 phone and my Sony LCD TV as an HDMI monitor. I also used a wireless USB keyboard and mouse combination which only uses one USB port for the receiver and so keeps the other USB port free.
First Steps:
My first task was to create a Linux operating system SD card 'disk' to boot the RPi and this was a learning curve in itself. A variety of OS images are available from the Raspberry Pi Foundation Website's download page, and the first recommended image was called Debian Squeeze. So I downloaded the image and then had to hunt for the procedure to burn it to an SD Card using an iMac. At the time, information was quite scarce and the authors of many websites obviously thought everyone knew what they were talking about without specifying every detail - not so in my case.
The first problem was finding an SD card that would work, as I have many of them ranging from 1gb to 16gb and I was determined not to buy a new one. Eventually, and after much testing, I found only 2 out of 10 or so SD cards I had would work reliably - they were both 8gb San Disk Class 2 SDHC cards. At first I thought I must be doing something wrong when building the cards on my iMac, but I've since learnt that the RPi is just very fussy about what it likes.
This is the procedure I now use on the iMac:
- Attach a USB SD card reader and insert a 4gb SD card
- Type df in a terminal window to determine the device ID which is nearly always disk2s1
- Unmount this disk with: diskutil unmount /dev/disk2s1
- Type: sudo dd bs=1m if=raspbian.img of=/dev/rdisk2
- Eject the disk properly with the eject command
- Put the card in to the RPi, connect the power and watch it boot
As mentioned earlier, Raspbmc was my media player of choice as I already have experience of using the open source XBMC (on which Raspbmc is based) to stream music and video from a FreeNAS server on my home network to my 42" Sony HDTV in the living room to an old Xbox. Unfortunately XBMC is stuck at version 8 and is no longer supported on the Xbox, primarily because it can only handle 720p video and not full 1080i HD video and so I was hoping to use my RPi to run later versions of the software and have full HD video too.
Initial Problems:
- Understanding how the build procedure worked - ethernet connection needed!
- Sound output from audio jack
- Colour Output from the composite jack
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| Controlling Raspbmc from an Android Phone |
The latter problem is solved by editing the config.txt file.
- Using an Android phone as remote control - amazing
- Using CEC with the TV's own remote control - even more amazing.
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| Yes !!! |
Remote Access to the RPi:
I soon realised that it was going to be a pain using the RPi with the only HDMI TV in the house and so I set about finding out how to use it 'headless' i.e. without a monitor or display.
- Setting up SSH to run at boot
- Configuring VNCserver for remote desktop access
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| Edimax USB WLAN adaptor |
Wireless Connectivity:
- Edimax USB wireless LAN adaptor - another Yes !!!
