Yesterday I got my shiny new “RasPiCam” Raspberry Pi camera module about half an hour before I had to go out and teach. Being a good boy scout (although I never was one) I was ready for it and had it up and running within five minutes of it coming through the letterbox. But when I got back from school, I shot some test videos that I wanted to edit and publish. You know how it is. You have to publish something on day 1 or it didn’t happen, right? :) I knew there must […more…]
Recipe for auto-reset Pi. Take one Rev 2 Raspberry Pi, a few carefully selected slices of fresh Python, one GPIO port (’25 vintage, preferably), one relay (a twin pack is OK, but not AA), one Darlington array (leave the spikes on), a sprinkling of mixed wires and arrange it all carefully with a breadboard. It should end up looking something like this… I decided to take the P6 reset header one step sillier further. Just for fun. ;) The idea here is to use one of the Pi’s own GPIO ports to switch a relay […more…]
I went to the 4th Milton Keynes Raspberry Jam on Sunday. Now the thing with Raspberry Jams, is that you never know whether there’s going to be enough monitors to go round (some don’t have any at all). Last time I got one, this time there were not many laid out. I expect I could have had one if I’d have asked, but there was no need. I was prepared. I had one of these… This is a USB to serial adaptor, which enables you to connect your Raspberry Pi serial port Tx (white) and […more…]
I recently bought a 2 terabyte Goflex Home network drive to run as a media server and file server on our local home network. So I figured I’d see how to connect it to the Pi. After searching around various forums, I found a solution that worked. Over the weekend, someone on the Raspberry Pi forums asked how to do this, and so a new “How To” was born. Pre-requisites for Hooking up goflex drive the drive is already installed on your home network it’s fully up and running You have a userid and password […more…]
Last week I published a blog and video of watching a DVD in Raspbian using omxplayer. At that time, as far as I could make out, nobody had managed to watch a commercial encrypted DVD, with the DVD drive attached to the Pi, but I figured it was only a matter of time. I ended that blog with… There is a way to watch encrypted DVDs in linux, but I haven’t sorted it out on my Pi yet. Hopefully a future video will detail that process. Well, I tried a few different things but was […more…]
If you want or need to be able to access and control your Raspberry Pi from outside your local area network (LAN), it’s a very good idea to disable password logins. This prevents hackers from being able to use/guess your password. In order to do this, we need to set up a public/private key pair and enable it for ssh login. This will make it almost impossible for a hacker to get into your Pi via ssh. The flip-side of that is the minor inconvenience of having to install your private key on any machine […more…]
In the last week in August (2012), the Raspberry Pi Foundation started selling MPEG2 codec licenses for the Pi. Basically without this you can’t do anything worthwhile with MPEG2 – the DVD file format. Although it’s an old codec, a lot of people have media libraries with MPEG2 files in, and some TV is still broadcast in MPEG2. You can use this license code to unlock the hardware decode functionality (for MPEG2) of the Pi’s GPU (Graphics Processing Unit). The Pi’s GPU is 95% of the main chip. It’s a real powerhouse for its size. […more…]
Using two Pis at once I recently started using two Raspberry Pi’s on the same network. On top of that, I had a nicely developed and updated image of Raspbian, so I made an exact copy of the SD card for Pi #2. (see: how to backup an SD card image here | how to write an SD card here). But there were issues, and it took me some time to figure out why Pi #2 was crashing. Pi #1 (RS) is the one I’ve used since May. Pi #2 (Farnell) arrived a week later […more…]
pifind.py A week or two ago, the illustrious Jim Manley ran a Raspberry Jam – a meeting of people interested in the Pi. Unfortunately someone walked off with his Raspberry Pi. A bunch of us were chewing over ideas, on the Raspberry Pi forums, for how to add security features to make it possible to locate a stolen Pi. The whole thing reminded me of a fabulous book I used to love as a kid: The Great Pie Robbery by Richard Scarry Except the pies in the book were cherry, not raspberry. Someone else (rurwin) […more…]
Why do I need to know how to write a raspberry pi disk image to SD card with win32diskimager? Even if you bought a ready-prepared SD card with your Raspberry Pi, sooner or later a newer, better version of the operating system (OS) will be released. Unless you know how to make a bootable SD card from the downloaded OS image file, you won’t be able to take advantage of the improvements (and believe me, there will be lots of them as time progresses). There have already been three versions of Debian since I got […more…]