Raspberry Pi

Anybody ever mess around with it before? It seems like it's just a small mobo running linux from an sd card with no casing. As a person with a linux background, it seems like It'd be a waste of time for me but if the goal is to teach computer science to kids and non-tech people then I could see myself getting this as a gift for somebody.

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earonw49

I also am curious as well! Thanks for bringing this topic up. It seems like such a cool, convenient little device!

MrAgent

I have one, but mine has a case around it. I put kali on it, and had intended on using it for learning more about pen testing. Its really not fast enough to do that. So now it just sits on my desk.

kohr-ah

I have one and use is as a NES. Have a USB conversion jack that goes in the side and two original Nintendo controllers plug into it and I play NES games on my TV

My friend is more useful and is programming his to text when his sump pit is getting too full.

EngRob

kohr-ah wrote: »

I have one and use is as a NES. Have a USB conversion jack that goes in the side and two original Nintendo controllers plug into it and I play NES games on my TV

That sounds like a perfect use for it. What OS and NES emulator are you running? I was toying with running several emu's on mine; most likely NES, SNES, Sega, Sega Megadrive, MAME, ZX Spectrum, and Commodore 64.

kohr-ah

I run RetroPie - The RetroPie Project | petRockBlog

It has the emulators already on it.
Version 1.9 of the RetroPie SD-card includes emulators for the following systems:

Amiga (UAE4All)
Apple II (Basilisk II)
Arcade (PiFBA, Mame4All-RPi)
Atari 800
Atari 2600 (RetroArch)
Atari ST/STE/TT/Falcon
C64 (VICE)
CaveStory (NXEngine)
Doom (RetroArch)
Duke Nukem 3D
Final Burn Alpha (RetroArch)
Game Boy Advance (gpSP)
Game Boy Color (RetroArch)
Game Gear (Osmose)
Intellivision (RetroArch)
MAME (RetroArch)
MAME (AdvMAME)
NeoGeo (GnGeo)
NeoGeo (Genesis-GX, RetroArch)
Sega Master System (Osmose)
Sega Megadrive/Genesis (DGEN, Picodrive)
Nintendo Entertainment System (RetroArch)
N64 (Mupen64Plus-RPi)
PC Engine / Turbo Grafx 16 (RetroArch)
Playstation 1 (RetroArch)
ScummVM
Super Nintendo Entertainment System (RetroArch, PiSNES, SNES-Rpi)
Sinclair ZX Spectrum (Fuse)
PC / x86 (rpix86)
Z Machine emulator (Frotz)

Hypntick

I was using mine for RaspBMC for a little while, although i've got a first gen so the memory isn't quite what i'm looking for. May end up buying a second one, really neat device though.

DevilWAH

I have a few. One sits under my tv, acts as a media player, torrent client, upnp server and NAS box with a 1tbyte drive for storage. Another one runs as a upnp render attached to the upstairs stero so I can listen to my music where I want, and it can be powered of the stero USB port so turn on stero and the pi powers on with it.

And my my latest project is for work making a SMS gateway using a pi and a gsm modem. Currently is can accept put or get requests and will send a SMS text, but also working on email requests as we'll.

oh and the other thing I must finish is a laser star field generator, I have a pearl script that can generate >2000 random orbiting stars, one day must invest in a laser scanner or laser projector and finish it off.

A Nice thing about them is the Gpu can decode HD and play back in real time, I just need to get the encoding working to so I can get it working as a web video streaming server.

On the old emulators can you get any of the micro machine games? I would get one running them just for this

EngRob

@kohr-ah - You rock!!

the_Grinch

I tend to think these are some amazing things. I generally see them being great for home entertainment and automation. For 35 bucks you really can't complain and there is so much that could be done with them.

antielvis

It's basically a mini computer that runs Linux compiled for ARM chips as far as I understand. Mine has Raspian Linux and it's decent but the browser needs work

Where I really see these being of benefit is in countries that do not have the money to buy modern computer hardware. If you ran an NGO in a 3rd world nation, you could (in theory) teach kids Linux & programming on $35 dollar computers.

kohr-ah

Our local high school uses these to teach kids programming. It is part of the class

They seem to enjoy it more because it is more than just a compiled program on a screen it is now on their own mini computer.

antielvis

Do they buy the PI as part of the class (like you would a book)? The school could supply the keyboard, mouse and monitor & you buy the PI and carry it from class to class. $35 bucks well spent & gold to inner city schools which don't have budgets.

Now someone needs to design a PI tablet. The potential with tablets is huge but they're simply too expensive for the average guy to buy each of his kids one for school.

kohr-ah

Yup they just pay for the Pi and it comes with a case and power cable. They then hook it up in class, do what they do, take it home so they can work on it more etc.

DevilWAH

antielvis wrote:

Do they buy the PI as part of the class (like you would a book)? The school could supply the keyboard, mouse and monitor & you buy the PI and carry it from class to class. $35 bucks well spent & gold to inner city schools which don't have budgets.

Now someone needs to design a PI tablet. The potential with tablets is huge but they're simply too expensive for the average guy to buy each of his kids one for school.

well there releasing a 9 inch screen for about £70 which is high def, sadly not touch screen but I am sure it won't be to long. Keep meaning to look at Google Crome OS for the pi.

antielvis wrote:

It's basically a mini computer that runs Linux compiled for ARM chips as far as I understand. Mine has Raspian Linux and it's decent but the browser needs work

.

i have never booted one in to the GUI, is it that responsive?

tpatt100

This reminds me of the Timex Sinclair I had when I was a kid, a really crappy entry level computer to get kids interested in computers and programming. Except the Pi would absolutely crush my Sinclair.....

antielvis

@DevilWAH. It's not blisteringly fast but a viable option for simple stuff like surfing though I can't say how it would handle web sites with a ton of stuff embedded. For $35 bucks US$ it's pretty decent.

Bryzey

I set one up as an xbmc with an external hdd as a file server so I just download on my laptop and SSH videos to the xbmc server over WiFi to watch on my TV.

When I get some free time I would eventually like to create my own arcade machine if I can pick up the wiring etc..

Other projects that really interest me are capturing my homes electricity usage or automatic grass watering..

exampasser

I have 3 now, 1 for a mail server, another for a web server, and a third for a SAMBA server and experimentation.

It is entertaining every now and then to look at the apache logs and see the pathetic attack attempts. I've blocked a lot of IP prefixes from China which cuts down the attacks a bit.

DevilWAH

I am currently trying to get a perl script to output to the HDMP port, I need to learn about [FONT=Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif]kernel framebuffer without X.... [/FONT]

[FONT=Helvetica Neue, Arial, sans-serif]So if any one can tell me how I can remote in to my Pi over the network, and then run a script that will out put a full blank screen to the HDMI port and plot 3 - 4 points on to it I would be great-full. never played with GUI before.

it was suggest to either use frame buffer and avoid X altogether, or start the script from with in X. Either way I am lost

, and to many things on to really search around to sort it out at the moment.

So if any one good with graphic perl scripts in Linux wants to give any suggestions that would be nice.. [/FONT]

jibbajabba

btw devil, just saw a post about the touchscreen ... These ones are quite cheap :

Lilliput UK · Monitors · Specialists in 7 inch monitors, 8 inch monitors and 10 inch monitors

DevilWAH

I was thinking of an in car system would be a good use for a Pi, small USB HD, Pi, Sound card (on board is crap), GPS dongle, and touch screen.

exampasser

For car use, I would opt for an SSD over and HDD(or possibly a high capacity flash drive or SD card) as they can handle shocks a lot better.

DevilWAH

exampasser wrote: »

For car use, I would opt for an SSD over and HDD(or possibly a high capacity flash drive or SD card) as they can handle shocks a lot better.

USB HD was used in a generic term USB HD = USB Storage

dbrink

I have one that I use on our playroom TV. I have one SD card that runs RetroPie for game emulation and another SD card run RaspBMC. I have a dual-tuner card in my main PC that I intend to record over the air TV on and then watch the shows on the Rasp Pi. I am running ServerWMC right now on my main PC to handle the recording but haven't setup RaspBMC yet to stream live TV.

YFZblu

Since moving to Win8 on my desktop, my Raspberry Pi is the lone dedicated linux box I have at home. At this point I use it as a 'dev' environment to create/store my Python projects on.