Raspberry Pi - Who's gonna have a dabble?

[J4CKO]

Well, bought my first Pi yesterday, the Pi2 and got it set up last night with Retropie, was actually very easy and I was up and running in no time, the Pi will be mounted in,

http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/121829480577?_trksid=p20...

A broken Atari 2600 I bought for twenty Quid, have ordered various extension cables to mount the USB, HDMI and Power to the case and it will have pride of place in my man cave for retro gaming, Atari Space Invaders on a 55 inch screen is pretty good fun, initially you think, what and old pile of crap, then you start playing it and realise how fiendishly difficult and addictive it is, played "The Empire Strikes back as well" which makes a nice comparison with Battlefront on the Xbox one to show how far things have come, I downloaded every rom for the 2600 in a pack and just copied across the five games I used to own, the two mentioned plus Pac Man, Smurf and Defender.

Will get some other stuff set up, managed to get Outrun running but it was a bit glitch when a lot going on, want to try and see if Power Drift will run as well, oh and Golden Axe.

Have ordered a Bluetooth dongle and will try and get wireless Xbox or PS3 controllers set up.

This makes a good little Christmas hol project, have come close to buying a 2600 before but originals you have to have the carts and realistically they don't do anything else where this can run Kodi or whatever plus you get the original machines box, which is all part of it, best of both worlds.

Any pointers gratefully received

[boxst]

Tuna said:

This is what we did with a Pi in the office (plus a lot of plastic cups and some LEDs)

https://youtu.be/XKPwc8NM2ks

Internet connected snowman!

What does the Pi do? Make the patterns with the LEDs?

[Tuna]

boxst said:

What does the Pi do? Make the patterns with the LEDs?

Yep. You can upload images and they scroll across. Or we've got a few general rainbow fades - all written in Javascript and run using Node.js

[SystemParanoia]

yes, using the GPIO pins

[Monsterlime]

I've had a few Pi's for a while now, and use one for RasPlex and the other for the odd bit electronics work or running as a secondary DNS server.

What I have always wanted to do with it though, is to make it a "mobile" storage/compute box. However, due to USB2 limitations, power etc, it was never going to work quite right.

But, I just backed this - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1815752970/mu... on Kickstarter that pretty much promises to fulfil those dreams. I'll get a case for, it some battery packs (rechargeable), and possibly a small LCD screen for status info, but this should be rather nifty.

I might also configure it so I can plug it into the car as a car computer once it is done for extra usefulness.

[SystemParanoia]

the bananna pi has an E-sata connector that is pretty quick at file transfers as it doesnt saturate the shared eth/usb bus

[13aines]

I've recently learnt how to use MATLAB. I don't have a Pi as I found something else for Kodi in the end.

Can a newb do anything cool/engineering-y with MATLAB and a Pi?

[SystemParanoia]

Here's a start
http://uk.mathworks.com/help/supportpkg/raspberryp...

[Tuna]

My colleague has successfully written a video decoder for our internet connected snowman. It turns out films in 5x10 pixels with no sound are a bit hard to interpret.

[RizzoTheRat]

Surely that's just a reason to build a bigger snowman?

[loudlashadjuster]

Tuna said:

My colleague has successfully written a video decoder for our internet connected snowman. It turns out films in 5x10 pixels with no sound are a bit hard to interpret.

Stunning pointless. Bravo!

[gpb1]

Just finished my latest project. Took a Pi Zero, USB wifi dongle and a cheap wireless doorbell and now I get notifications on my iPhone when someone rings our doorbell.

[Dave.]

gpb1 said:

Just finished my latest project. Took a Pi Zero, USB wifi dongle and a cheap wireless doorbell and now I get notifications on my iPhone when someone rings our doorbell.

Tease!

Instructions/Walkthrough/Guide?

[spants]

This (£6.30 !) 3 port usb hub with rg45 ethernet adapter with a micro usb cable works with the PiZero without needing external power.
Tested by me!. Works out of the box with RaspPlex and I guess most/all other distributions (no additional drivers required)

http://www.aliexpress.com/item/OTG-3-port-Micro-US...

[Dave.]

Dave. said:

gpb1 said:

Just finished my latest project. Took a Pi Zero, USB wifi dongle and a cheap wireless doorbell and now I get notifications on my iPhone when someone rings our doorbell.

Tease!

Instructions/Walkthrough/Guide?

Just bought a kit from here, slightly cheating...

http://tri.co.uk/collections/project-kits-for-rasp...

[gpb1]

Dave. said:

gpb1 said:

Just finished my latest project. Took a Pi Zero, USB wifi dongle and a cheap wireless doorbell and now I get notifications on my iPhone when someone rings our doorbell.

Tease!

Instructions/Walkthrough/Guide?

Bought a cheap set off of eBay (http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/161880410933?_trksid=p2057872.m2749.l2649&ssPageName=STRK%3AMEBIDX%3AIT) The receivers work off 2 AA batteries, so one can be run off of the 3.3v pins on the Zero by soldering a couple of wires onto the battery terminals in the receiver. I also wired a couple of extra wires, one to the ground battery terminal and another to the cathode side of the LED on the receiver (I use the LED lighting up as the trigger for the notification). These I connected to a ground GPIO pin and the cathode wire I connected to GPIO 18.
You need to set up an account at Pushover.net and download the free app on your phone. This is a great service for any notifications you want to use in Pi scripts. Register an app and get the user and app keys to put into your doorbell python script (code below). Set it to run an startup (I use cron for this) and your away.

import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
import time
import os
import httplib, urllib

push_token = 'xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx' ## API token/key
push_user = 'yyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy' ## API user key

buttonPin = 18
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setup(buttonPin,GPIO.IN)

def alert_action(channel):
print('Signal detected on GPIO %s'%channel)
if channel == buttonPin :
conn = httplib.HTTPSConnection("api.pushover.net:443...
conn.request("POST", "/1/messages.json",
urllib.urlencode({
"token": push_token,
"user": push_user,
"message": "Doorbell rung",
}), { "Content-type": "application/x-www-form-urlencoded" })
conn.getresponse()

GPIO.add_event_detect(buttonPin, GPIO.RISING, callback=alert_action, bouncetime=3000)

try:
while True:
time.sleep(1)

finally:
print('Cleaning up ports')
GPIO.cleanup() # this ensures a clean exit

[Dave.]

Cheers, I was doing some searching last night and could only find info in video/photo enabled stuff, whereas I just wanted the wireless button on the door, with the pi stashed away elsewhere.

Not sure whether to get a pizero for the doorbell kit, or buy a new 2b for messing with and use my original pi for the bell...

[gpb1]

Dave. said:

Cheers, I was doing some searching last night and could only find info in video/photo enabled stuff, whereas I just wanted the wireless button on the door, with the pi stashed away elsewhere.

Not sure whether to get a pizero for the doorbell kit, or buy a new 2b for messing with and use my original pi for the bell...

Only real drawback with the Zero is having to solder the GPIO pins onto it. I just soldered the 4 I needed for this project.
Total cost including the Zero, doorbell, sd card, wifi dongle is about £15. Was less than a 2b on it's own. The zero is perfect for little projects like this.

[GSE]

Monsterlime said:

What I have always wanted to do with it though, is to make it a "mobile" storage/compute box. However, due to USB2 limitations, power etc, it was never going to work quite right.

But, I just backed this - https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1815752970/mu... on Kickstarter that pretty much promises to fulfil those dreams. I'll get a case for, it some battery packs (rechargeable), and possibly a small LCD screen for status info, but this should be rather nifty.

I might also configure it so I can plug it into the car as a car computer once it is done for extra usefulness.

That looks very interesting. I'm running a pi in the car used as a media server/hd player. It runs volumio software to play music via a hifiberry HD dac into the aux in on the car headunit. Its battery backed up and will run independantly from the vehicle battery. Also has a wifi hotspot and link to my home network via a TP link mini router. The system can be remotely powered up and down via a 433 mhz keyfob.

I managed to fit all of the components (2TB HDD/433MHZCTL/5&12vPWR/TPLINKROUTER/RASPBERRYPI/DAC)into a relatively small case but it would be great to have all the functionality together in one pi 'brick'.

I've just bought a pimodules upis intelligent supply UPS.

http://www.pimodules.com/_pdf/UPiS%20Module.pdf

So as I can move my current battery back up facility (a small 12v battery & charger in the boot of the car)to the pi itself. Has anybody on here used it? It seems to work fine but I'd like to know how to custom configure it.

Edited by GSE on Sunday 20th December 19:19

[Fetchez la vache]

Tuna said:

boxst said:

What does the Pi do? Make the patterns with the LEDs?

Yep. You can upload images and they scroll across. Or we've got a few general rainbow fades - all written in Javascript and run using Node.js

Crikey, that snowman is awesome!
Been toying with getting a raspberry pi, and separately toying with learning node - didn't realise you could use one with the other - sold!!
What hardware is the pi using for the lights do you have a pic of the naked snowman (i.e. minus cups)?

Do I wanna build a (headless) snowman? Hell yes!
I now want to make something like the snowman to be an alarm that someone has broken the build...