Raspberry pi

[biggytitbo]

the $5 cost was very important to them. can't you see the attraction in that? i mean, a computer for the price of a pint of beer!? fucking incredible really.

Yeah, nobody would be impressed by a $6 computer would they?


The thing is, once you stick wifi on it, the need for the miasma of other cables and connectors is massively reduced.

[Blumf]

but how many of those things do you already own?

i'm not a techy person at all, but i've got all of that stuff (apart from the wifi adaptor thing) lurking about.

Really? You have a solid, 2+ amps, won't fry your RPi, USB power adapter? Are you sure? And the adapter dongles? Is that a common household thing lying around?

Personally, I've got several old PCs lying around, so I don't even need the £4 for the RPi. But I'm thinking of the average household, I think they're more likely to have an old computer knocking about rather than the miscellany of dongles etc. that the RPi needs to run.

[mook]

Yeah, nobody would be impressed by a $6 computer would they?

i'm going to say that they wouldn't be quite as impressed. the actual monetary difference between 5 & 6 dollars it quite literally a fucking dollar, the idea of a computer for that £5 is just cool. 

& Blumf, i don't know without looking if any of the many, many power adaptors i've ended up with over the years does the "solid, 2+ amps, won't fry your RPi," i'm guessing maybe. but that's not the point of the thing surely, it's not trying to be a replacement laptop for whatever price you said on the previous page. it's a nerdy little cheap toy that you could imagine lots of people having fun & learning to use on a wet weekend.

[Blumf]

& Blumf, i don't know without looking if any of the many, many power adaptors i've ended up with over the years does the "solid, 2+ amps, won't fry your RPi," i'm guessing maybe. but that's not the point of the thing surely, it's not trying to be a replacement laptop for whatever price you said on the previous page. it's a nerdy little cheap toy that you could imagine lots of people having fun & learning to use on a wet weekend.

It's a fragile piece of electronics with very questionable education value being sold to gullible parents and schools, when better and cheaper alternatives not only exist, but are probably already owned by said groups.

Sure, for an adult with a bunch of electronics tools (including oscilloscopes), I'm sure it's great fun. But so is a box full of random microchips and some breadboard.

[mook]

ok... so can i assume from that that you're not going to buy 20 quids worth then?

[biggytitbo]

You can already buy a usb stick computer more powerful than this with wifi and bluetooth for £30-ish. Plug it straight into a telly and all you need is a keyboard and mouse. Probably work out cheaper in the end.

[canadagoose]

We've got two, and one of them is currently in use as a sort of NAS server, and it seems to work pretty well - the transfer speeds are about 100Mbps over WiFi, which isn't too bad, IMO. My boyfriend tried setting it up previously as a Minecraft server but it wasn't quite powerful enough for it and kept falling over.

I think it would do fairly well as a system for torrenting - if you install Raspbian on it and then install a BitTorrent client it should be pretty straightforward. You could go for a cheap laptop instead, or something, but it wouldn't be as silent as the Pi and would use a bit more power. Let us know how you get on!

[Still Not George]

We've got two, and one of them is currently in use as a sort of NAS server, and it seems to work pretty well - the transfer speeds are about 100Mbps over WiFi, which isn't too bad, IMO. My boyfriend tried setting it up previously as a Minecraft server but it wasn't quite powerful enough for it and kept falling over.

There's a stripped-down build out there specifically made for the Pi 2. It definitely falls over a lot but you can screen script that problem away with a bit of poking.

[Al Tha Funkee Homosapien]

I've got one for dicking around with (Raspi 2). Currently set up as a Plex Media Server and headless torrent device. Started going down the route of using it as an automatic media torrenter, but I have loads of stuff I haven't watched yet so adding even more would just make the situation worse. To be honest using it as server/torrent box is a pretty boring thing to do with it, but it's fun to poke around on and and I've learnt a great deal about SSH and networking stuff which I wouldn't have known about otherwise.

[Too Many Cochranes]

Tip: if you're running Raspbian headless, SSH into it and run sudo raspi-config. Then configure it to boot straight to the command line. It should save you some overheads and make it do the server stuff better since it's not running X on boot.

[Still Not George]

Tip: if you're running Raspbian headless, SSH into it and run sudo raspi-config. Then configure it to boot straight to the command line. It should save you some overheads and make it do the server stuff better since it's not running X on boot.

Got ours booting from the command line but running VNC server. Particularly good for Little Madam, that.

[Too Many Cochranes]

Yeah, VNC is nice too. I use it on my server when I can't be bothered to actually sit at the machine to do stuff (my server isn't headless like my Pi).

There's a package called x11vnc which you can install and then invoke during a SSH session if you don't want to have VNC server running all the time. I just SSH into the server, run x11vnc and leave the SSH terminal running while I connect to VNC using a client. As soon as you disconnect the VNC client the x11vnc server terminates.

There's also forwarding X over SSH, which I tried when Blumf or MojoJojo mentioned it on here. It's mental. You open a graphical program from the command line on the host and it pops up in a window on the client instead of the host. Looks really weird when an XFCE window suddenly pops up in the middle of a GNOME session.

[Too Many Cochranes]

Looks like there's a 64-bit Raspberry Pi killer on the way:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/pine64/pine-a64-first-15-64-bit-single-board-super-comput

[doppelkorn]

Moved from here, re. the Mini NES

I know it's no better than a Raspberry Pi Zero and an SD card with every game you could ever want for every retro system ever, but damn I want this.

Nintendo are the only company I have any sort of brand loyalty for. I never want to not support Nintendo. And it looks so cute!

Twed you're new and like technology, so peep this: Do you have a RasPi? I read up on them extensively but never found a use case for me. There have been a couple of threads, where I don;t hink anybody admitted to actually doing anything useful. Could we use one to host CaB?

[THREADJACK]

Too slow as a host unfortunately, and you'd have to put it in a datacentre to give it a connection which would cost money.

I have two of them, one is attached to the TV to play videos from my Plex server and the other I'm using as an ad-blocking DNS (https://pi-hole.net/).

Now that Pi Hole thing looks just the ticketcool. I guess by network ad blocking it means on iOS, Android, everything basically? And doesn't throttle bandwidth?

[Twed]

Yeah. It's not like a browser plugin ad blocker - it doesn't remove the ad elements from the web pages, it just prevents ad-serving domains from being resolved. It does have the unfortunate side effect of giving YouTube videos a ten-second blank screen before playing, as Google do something clever to make you sit through the space where they WOULD be an ad.


These are today's ad-blocking stats. They're basically those percentages every day.

It's something that pairs well with in-browser ad blocking.

[MojoJojo]

Presumably that percentage "traffic" is % DNS requests?

What hasn't been mentioned is that the Pi's not great for any high bandwidth networking stuff since the ethernet port goes over the USB bus. Which does screw up quite a few potential applications.

[Twed]

Yeah, presumably DNS requests.

You're right about the bandwidth issue. It fits this use well since DNS requests are low-bandwidth.

[doppelkorn]

I think I'll try it. Adblocker as a browser plugin is great because it blocks YouTube video ads as well with no significant lag, but I need an excuse to mess with learning SSH and stuffffffffff.

[Uncle TechTip]

Use as a telly in the kitchen. If you have an old, maybe broken laptop with a working screen, you can buy adapter cards that will allow you to plug in most laptop screens and accept hdmi, composite inputs. Kodi formerly xbmc for videos and films, comes with interesting streaming plugins. Plex through a browser though I may be tempted to run the server portion elsewhere. Can the pi handle it? I see that even the mighty mythtv will run as a front-end on a pi2 now. You'll need speakers and some form of input device.

[madhair60]

How can I put all of the retro games on a Raspberry Pi then plug it into my fucking telly? How is possible? Tell.

[Puffin Chunks]

EmulationStation will do just that

[Twed]

And https://retropie.org.uk/

The two might be related. Not sure.

[doppelkorn]

But you have to (illegally?) download all the ROMs (which means the games) to play them. It's about as hard as illegally downloading an mp3 though.

[Twed]

Yeah, it's technically infringement. You're fine with that though. Just grab 'em all in a big torrent.

[madhair60]

I already have all the roms.

Which of course I legally own the cartridges for.

[Twed]

Nintendo wouldn't let you off the hook even if you did: http://www.nintendo.com/corp/legal.jsp

[Twed]

God I'm such a bloody tedious know-it-all today. Sorry.

[Jerzy Bondov]

This is what I've done to my Pi:


Obviously it's not finished. Might do a boast thread when it is. People who aren't cack-handed have made far more attractive cabinets. But I've had my fun, and that's all that matters. It's not on the tumble dryer any more, it's on a work bench. I'm going to make a plinth for it. One day...

[bomb_dog]

Above the fridge - nice. Have you wired up track and field to a full-spin cycle?

I've had a full-size old empty Jamma cab with a (now un-necessary) full PC with mame and roms and that on it since about 2002, but nowadays you can do the same thing for virtually nothing with a bit of woodwork, a Pi, micro-SD and quick torrent. Wouldn't swap my Pi out in it just yet though, it's not quite powerful enough for Rez on DC and the like.

Top work.

[AsparagusTrevor]

This is what I've done to my Pi:

That's a clever way of including a rumble feature.