Got Pi of the Raspberry persuasion?

[Balance]

@handsomeharry

Am I reading that to have something like a true computer from this, you will have to build your own, at more expense? In other words, this is just a hard drive or a motherboard, and if you want to have any functionality, you have to do your own work, and add peripherals, etc…IOW, you can 'add all you want…at a cost, of course"?

What do you mean by “true computer”? The Pi is not intended to be used as a desktop machine (though you could do so, after a fashion, I suppose). It’s a platform for building stuff and experimenting with software. Many applications for it don’t involve stuff you’d recognize as “computer peripherals”. They don’t use a monitor, keyboard, or mouse. They don’t store enough data to require an actual hard drive (a micro SD card holds the operating system and application software).

You can make something useful with just what comes with it, like a webserver, but the real fun is building machines around it. You can make it water your plants, turn your lights on and off, or shoot giant jets of flame in time to your music.

[Musicat]

@handsomeharry

Am I reading that to have something like a true computer from this, you will have to build your own, at more expense? In other words, this is just a hard drive or a motherboard, and if you want to have any functionality, you have to do your own work, and add peripherals, etc…IOW, you can 'add all you want…at a cost, of course"?

You might want to add a keyboard, a display screen, connect to an Ethernet network, insert an SD card, plug in a mouse, power supply, and other USB devices.

Let’s see what I can use from my junk box.

1…2…3…yep, got 'em all, right here. Additional cost? Zero.

Steve Ciarcia has been designing gadgets like this for decades. I imagine Steve is going crazy with new ideas right now.

[eltro102]

If you have a smartphone and are planning to use the Pi as a media center, then you don’t even need a keyboard/mouse or a separate hard-drive for it, you can just stream things over your network and use the XBMC app to control the pi.

[Musicat]

@Musicat

Steve Ciarcia has been designing gadgets like this for decades. I imagine Steve is going crazy with new ideas right now.

Yep:

I encourage Circuit Cellar members to tell us what they think about Raspberry Pi once their receive their orders. We’ll be happy to review project articles for publication in print or online.

If you hackers out there aren’t acquainted with Circuit Cellar, I would like to turn you on to your kind of genius. I wonder what Steve will come up with next.

[Mangetout]

@Musicat

Is there a practical use for it, or is it just for a tinkerer who didn’t live thru the 1970’s when most computers had to be soldered together and programmed by hackers?

There are plenty of potential practical uses; robotics, media playing, mobile computing, monitoring systems, etc. I will probably use mine for some long-term data/image capturing project where I don’t need to be scared about the power consumption of something left switched on constantly.

But apart from the target market, yes, they’re for tinkerers - both those who do and those who don’t remember the 1970s/80s. In the former category, there’s a nostalgia component to the motive.

[emacknight]

@Musicat

Is there a practical use for it, or is it just for a tinkerer who didn’t live thru the 1970’s when most computers had to be soldered together and programmed by hackers?

I’ve had one for a while. It’s fun but has no real practical use other than as a little hobby toy, for most automation projects Arduino is better suited since it can read analog inputs.

I will say that there is a lot of fun if you get one of these. Crack open the remote and solder some connects to your GPIO. Then you can load WEBIOPi allowing you to control outlets over the internet.

In most case though you’re better off buying a used laptop in the $200 range since that’s about what you’ll spend after getting the sd card, mouse, keyboard, wifi dongle, powered usb hub, monitor and hdmi cable. If you already have all those you might as well get a used desktop in the $100 range.

Hopefully within a year Chrome and Android will have a better OS for it other than Raspian.

[amanset]

I have two and an very happy with both. One of them is a media player running Openelec (I found Raspbmc to be almost comically unstable right up to the release before 1.0). I use the iPad to control it so all there is sticking out of it is an ethernet cable, a power supply and an HDMI cable.

The other one is my mail/sabnzbd/web server that I also connect to from work to run IRC over ssh. It performs the job admirably and, as I am not using it in a way that requires a screen, it has even less connected to it, just an ethernet cable and a power supply. One really handy thing is that it is trivial to back it up. Poweroff, insert SD card in my MacBook Pro and then a quick (for example):

dd if=/dev/rdisk3 bs=1m | gzip > ./raspbian20130218.img.gz

And a wee bit later I have a compressed backup of the entire SD card. Currently that takes about 2.6 GB for a 32 GB card, which is small enough for me to copy to my Dropbox. I do that once a week or so.

Oh, if anyone is planning on doing a similar thing, I found that it is important to zero all free space otherwise it doesn’t compress as well (due to the way storage works, with things being flagged an unused rather than wiped). I run this script before powering off, adjusting the size of the blank file to be (free space in GB -1):

#!/bin/bash

echo ''
echo Creating File

#1GB
#dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/scripts/delete.me bs=1M count=1024

#2GB
#dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/scripts/delete.me bs=1M count=2048

#8GB
#dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/scripts/delete.me bs=1M count=8192

#25GB
dd if=/dev/zero of=/root/scripts/delete.me bs=1M count=25600

echo ''
echo File creation completed. Results:
ls -lh /root/scripts
df -h

echo ''
echo Removing File
rm /root/scripts/delete.me 

echo ''
echo Running Sync
sync

echo ''
echo Power Off
poweroff

Obviously the biggest advantage is the incredibly low power usage. Wonderful for something that is left on 24/7.

[emacknight]

@amanset

Obviously the biggest advantage is the incredibly low power usage. Wonderful for something that is left on 24/7.

Is it actually low power? I guess compared to a traditional desktop or laptop. And have you noticed any problems with heat? I’ve gotten the ARM chip pretty hot on occasion.

[Mangetout]

@emacknight

Is it actually low power? I guess compared to a traditional desktop or laptop.

Definitely - assuming it’s not in turn powering something like a USB hard drive or scanner, the Pi requires less than 2W - that’s a worthwhile advantage for something left on 24/7.
That might not be as frugal as a PIC-based device, however, the Pi enables amateurs to easily use ordinary USB peripherals in their projects.

For the device’s intended purpose (education), it may also be an advantage that it can run an OS with a GUI - making it possible to write and execute programs on the same single device (and if necessary, do research on the internet too - all on the one machine).

[amanset]

@emacknight

And have you noticed any problems with heat? I’ve gotten the ARM chip pretty hot on occasion.

Not that I’ve noticed, but I don’t keep it on my desk. The few times I have touched one whilst being on, for example to show it to a friend, it has hardly been warm at all. I don’t overclock them and there have been no strange crashes. Well, at least not with Openelec nor Raspbian. Raspbmc was a different matter but I feel that was software-side (the exact same Pi has no issues with Openelec), maybe related to my use of AFP shares on a Linux machine (I’m guessing that is one fo the less common ways Raspbmc users share their media).

[AaronX]

I’m looking for something to copy USB memory/cards. Ideally, I should plug in 2 cards, 1 master and 1 slave, press a button, a copying light lights up, then a completed light lights up. Can Raspberry Pi do this? I looked at Arduino, but I heard it was very slow at USB transfers.

I know Raspberry Pi can do this, I mean: can it be automated? I don’t want to use a monitor, keyboard and mouse to boot into the OS and manually transfer files. Can I write a program that will run when it starts, and start copying with a button? All the uses so far (media centre) seem to require a monitor.

[si_blakely]

Certainly achievable - you would need a hub as the Pi only has limited USB ports. I’m not sure about performance, I don’t think it is great but I am pretty sure it will be faster than Arduino. You would want to rig up a button/LED off the GPIO ports and most of the programming could be done in Python.

[AaronX]

I think the B model has 2 USB ports. If possible, it would be about half the price of this $99 device: http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B003N4D7BE?ie=UTF8&force-full-site=1&ref_=aw_bottom_links