Alright, I’m interested.
Any suggestions for getting started in the world of Raspberry Pi?
I’d like to monkey around with GPS signals, and build a sort of fire-and-forget GPS receiver that collects and stores RINEX data on a micro-SD card, probably splitting data up into folders, maybe 2 hours at a time. I would think that would be something that would be doable.
The OS is stripped down to just do the basics to run Kodi. So nothing wasting cycles running in the background or taking up memory.
In addition, there are a lot of tweaks that can be applied in such a limited use situation. So many internal OS settings are optimized just for this that are not reachable from the Kodi settings menu. (And are a pain to do it yourself.)
I’ve got a Pi running Pi-Hole “A black hole for Internet advertisements”
The admin/stats page shows 25-35% of DNS queries get munched for the household. Pages load much faster. Just a fire and forget personal DNS server.
My Arduino project will be to equip one with a vacuum sensor in my central air unit to text me when it’s time to change the filter.
I built a 3d printer with an Arduino for a controller, and a raspberry pi running Octoprint to control the Arduino and give it a wifi interface.
All of these are awesome. With the flipdot display, the first thing I thought was that I’d probably get GoL to run on that… 
Thanks. I think I’ll try and see whether I can get things running stable enough on Raspbian, since I primarily want to build the NAS, and if not, maybe get another Pi and run LibreElec on that one. Unfortunately, it seems like there’s no stable OSMC built for the Pi 4 out yet…
Join up here.
Then, buy a Pi 4, a few SD cards, and download an OS, and you are on your way…
Thanks, I’m beginning the journey!
Well, I just received my Raspberry Pi 3 B+ kit a few hours ago.
It took me an hour put it together and to install Raspbian and download all of the updates.
I then fiddled around for an hour to get it to automount one of my NAS shares from my Drobo at boot time.
Finally, just for fun, I installed Plex Server and configured it to serve up the media from my Plex folder on the Drobo.
Now I unplugged the keyboard, mouse, and monitor and stuffed it into a cabinet. When I need to tend to it, I ssh in from my Mac.
This is way too cool–a Plex server the size of a pack of cigarettes that I can leave plugged into some handy network switch somewhere in my house.
I’m certain it wouldn’t handle heavy transcoding needs, but it seemed to work just fine when I brought up Plex on my iPad and started watching 2001.
The poor little Raspberry Pi is probably in tears right now thinking it’s never going to what it was made for. That will come soon enough. Just having a super lightweight Linux box that I can run stuff on is plenty neat for now, but at some point I’ll start messing around with the I/O pins.
Build a Stratux next…
Umm, that is what I did build
Brian
heh this guy in Sweden has everyone beat MSN
give it a minute because the seems slow to start, and yeah i can get the emulators and games for almost nothing but man talk about doing something with style …
I hooked an Arduino up to two stepper motors, and mounted it on a board with an Etch-A-Sketch so that the stepper motors turn the knobs.
Never got the results I was hoping for. I fear the manufacturing tolerances of the Etch-A-Sketch are not all they could be. And there’s a bug in the code I need to fix one of these days.
I remember years ago the first time I ran a computer without KVM. It seemed unsettling. Now when I’m done setting up Pi Zeros it’s off with their heads! (One thing I’ve enjoyed is plugging in a Zero to a USB port on my PC and accessing that way. Hey, I’ve got a Linux box hanging off my computer.)
There’s a bit in Cryptonomicon about this. There was a server for the crypto company. Someone needed a monitor and took the server’s since it wasn’t being used. Another person realized that a machine with a keyboard and mouse and no monitor was a bad idea so took those.
My Zero has never even seen a keyboard or screen—you can set it up entirely headlessly, just place a file called ‘ssh’ in the root folder, and add a configuration file with your WiFi-details; then switch it on, wait for it to connect, and ssh right into it. You really only need to touch the Pi to insert the SD card and connect the power.
Please accept my apology. I was drunk on pre-thanksgiving gravy. Where I meant to go with that was to build a 1090ES and 978UAT receiver to feed adsbexchange.com. And thinking about that project got me back to thinking about the Stratux. And down the wrong road I went!
In a striking bit of irony, I completed my Seeburg 1000 restoration project today while simultaneously turning my little Raspberry Pi into a Seeburg 1000 emulator.
Here is the finished real machine: Seeburg Background Music System
(I’ll post a thread about this some day, since it was one heck of a project).
The original case of the BMC1 is an ugly thing, so I built a custom enclosure from wenge, machining custom brass corners and creating a custom nameplate. The machine is not that big, but it was built like a tank; it weighs about 45 pounds.
In addition to building the case, I spent a month or so refurbishing the mechanism, renewing all of the idlers, lubricating everything, removing countless dents from where the capstan was left resting on an idler and so on.
It plays beautifully–it will play all 25 records top-and-bottom, then it restacks them and starts all over. It really is an amazing machine to watch. (those are special 9" records that run at 16 2/3 rpm and hold 20 songs per side).
Then, on a whim, I whipped out my Raspberry Pi, loaded a few thousand Seeburg background music songs on it in MP3 format, and installed mpd, mpc, and ncmppcpp.
After a few tweaks to get it to automatically launch on startup and play one gigantic playlist made of all of the songs, it is now a perfect copy of the machine, in a tiny box.
That took about an hour.
So, I can either run the audio plug of my amplifier to the real Seeburg 1000 or the fake Seeburg 1000. The fake one sounds better since the files were likely cleaned up and tweaked.
…but the real one is light years ahead in cool factor.
On Sunday I did the first test of the Steer-By-Wire system I want to make, ingredients: one Arduino Nano, one DC motor driver, two magnetic encoders and a geared motor. I 3D printed parts to make a dial for one encoder and an adapter to mount the other on the motor output shaft. The code is simple but it was the first time I used magnetic encoders and PID motor position control, it took a few hours of head scratching but I got it working, although the motor and gearbox are crappy and without enough reduction so it doesn’t move very accurately.
The main issue is that I’m using the sensor in analog mode and by default it has a large deadband between the minimum and maximum values (i.e. when it moves past one full turn), so I need to connect it by I2C to the Arduino to both access the raw numerical output and change the value of the deadband; however this particular sensor has a single, fixed I2C address so an Arduino can only connect to one at a time, which is fine because the idea from the start was to have one control module and two separate actuator controllers mounted remotely (the idea is to steer the rudder mounted motors of a catamaran boat).
After that is working the real fun part begins when I’ll try to do a thrust vectoring system so that the boat can move in any direction, kind of like a helicopter, except not up or down obviously (although down is always an option for a boat, I guess). Back & reverse and the normal steering is clearly a doddle, but with two independent, pivoting motors it’s possible, for example, to make the left motor push in the 9 o’clock direction, which would make the rear move to the left and rotate the boat clockwise, but if the right motor pushes in the 12 o’clock direction with the right amount of thrust it would cancel the rotation and the resulting motion would be sideways straight to the left.
Another somewhat related thing I did last week is I finally got around doing tin electroplating of a PCB, I use a CNC machine to engrave circuit boards so I thought it would make sense to tin blank PCBs before engraving them. After a little research I found out how to prepare the chemicals and do the electroplating, only two ingredients are needed, Hydrochloric Acid, Tin metal and water… three! three ingredients are needed, Hydrochloric Acid, Tin, water and of course a regulated electric power supply… FOUR ingredients are needed. I’ll go out and start again…
The process if very simple, dissolve 12 grams of Tin in 50cc of acid, mix the solution into one litre of water and that’s it. The electroplating is also very easy, connect the PCB to the negative conductor, positive goes to a Tin sheet electrode, put them both into the solution and set the power supply to 3 Volts and 10A per square meter of copper surface area (although I fiddled with the current) and in about 30 minutes the plating is done.
Or you could just use this, which works great.
I’ll riff off your PCB tangent…
…I’m more of an old-school kind of guy who worked in a traditional PCB shop using optical methods as a teenager (I’m sure I lost 5 years of my life breathing in the air there).
I needed to create a custom nameplate for my Seeburg project, but don’t have any CNC gear at my disposal, and I figured my regular nameplate service would balk at reproducing the Seeburg logo.
So I tried one of those “it can’t possibly work” ideas from a YouTube video: I printed my design in mirrored and negative format onto a shiny page from one of my wife’s Vogue magazines using a laser printer. I then placed the printed magazine page on my brass plate and passed the sandwich through a laminator several times. A few minutes under running water removed the magazine page, leaving a perfect mask for etching–20 minutes in acid did the job, followed by painting and then sanding the high parts.
Wow, that worked like a charm. It seemed too silly to actually work.
Back to Raspberry Pi…
…I’m going to continue with my baby steps. Right now I think RPI is a good motiviator for me to get started using Python. As a software engineer at work, I have noticed that many of the cool kids are doing their work in Python, while us greybeards are using Java. My shiny new Pi is a perfect place to start dipping my toes into Python.
I know, but the problem with that is that, AFAIK, has a relatively short shelf life and I think there may be troublesome to ship it overseas; I bought the stuff to make the tining solution at a school supplies shop not far from home.
Besides, DIY is more fun. 
I’ve heard about the laser print method, but haven’t tried it yet
Before I was using a photosensitive film with printed masks to make PCBs, it works very well but printing the masks was always a bit fiddly, either the ink was not opaque enough or it would crack and cracks would end up as open circuits in the PCB traces the past.
I’ve found that for one of’s or prototyping making them with the CNC machine is much less of a hassle since there is practically no preparation work required and the “etching”, drilling and board cutting operations can be wrapped up into one.
Either way beats the heck out of how I used to make PCB way back then, literally drawing the circuit on the copper with a permanent marker and a ruler.
