Because I forget...

I have a new toy, but because I forget to say anything about it, I have not yet posted. So here it is:

It's a Raspberry Pi. Got it from Adafruit a month or so back. More specifically I got:


Armed with these goodies and a spare Dell 17" LCD monitor we had I started setting up. I grabbed and erased a spare 4 gig SD card & grabbed a copy of Wheezy and an imager from the Wiki. Adafruit, of course, has some awesome tutorials on the subject as well.

One annoying thing about it was that I couldn't get the thing to display on my old Dell 17" LCD. I had some newer LG monitors it was fine with, so I knew it was working. There is a config file you can set on the SD card from any other computer prior to boot up that sets a variety of initial state items. One was an HMDI boost setting which did the trick.

Some time after getting it initially setup I made a pilgrimage to MicroCenter and purchased an Asus Wi-Fi USB unit and a USB hub. 

One thing I'd noticed was if I tried running both a keyboard and a mouse on the Rasberry Pi it would shut down. I think the wall wart I was using to run it just didn't have enough juice & the Rapberry Pi wisely decided not to push it. Hence the purchase of the USB hub.

The USB hub, in turn, had another surprise - it powers the Raspberry Pi. Or the Pi decides to take power from it, not sure. Nifty anyway!

The Wi-Fi thumb-drive thingy was also a little difficult to setup. Drivers for that particular model of Asus WiFi thingy were already on the Pi; something I discovered after attempting to re-install them. My attempts to configure the Wi-Fi from within the shell failed miserably, but running startx and the WiFi config tool was much easier & worked.

At this point I am not sure what I want to do with the thing. I've considered using it for XBMC device due to it's HDMI quality video, relative smallness and cheapness - and now wireless. But to be honest there are a lot of devices out there that do just as well, cost only a bit more, and are better setup and supported. Still, might be fun to try at least.

The other thought I had was to use it as a weather station. We had Brookstone weather station that recently died. When it did I started wondering what level of effort (and cost) it would take to cobble together one of my own. I'd likely use an Arduino and various bits an pieces outside and then transmit info via some wireless means (Xbee? BlueTooth?) to the RasPi and have it collect and store the data, ideally to my server in the basement. But the Pi could also serve as a display unit showing a page of current temp, wind speed, pressure, etc. 

Dunno. Lots to try and as usual not a lot of spare time. Still, I'll at least get some basic blinky and other sketches running & post more as I do.

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