Raspberry pi 3

[dennis]

CPC have 1100 of them in stock if anyone wants one.

[The Natural Philosopher]

If only they had high speed SATA interfaces

[Adrian Caspersz]

Some one commented elsewhere that this evolution is somewhere on the path to turning the Pi into a mobile phone ...

[HarpingOn]

Get a lemaker Banana Pi for that, I use one banana board for SATA based storage, and several Raspberry Pi for other tasks.

The lemaker board is okay. Software is a bit flaky and the community is tiny. But if you're okay with Debian then there's little you wouldn't be able to solve. Bananian is not as bad as some sbc operating systems.

[Lobster]

On 29 Feb 2016, dennis@home grunted:

Speaking of which...

My son has just bought himself a Pi, basically with a view to learning how to program it, but doesn't have any specific applications for it in mind as yet.

Does anyone have any Really Useful projects they can suggest, or helpful links to same?

Thanks

[whisky-dave]

I've been thinking of a self contained camera as you can get pi cameras without the IR the nior camera, be great to be able to go aound taking snaps in IR. Stored on the internal card. You'd need to run it withough a monitor and just have a shutter release for teh fist version later coupld be a monitoring screen and wifi enabled. I had mine working with my ipad but with all the leads for power, monitor keyboard+mouse and ethernet connect the whole kit is pretty useless.

Another project would be to make his own gopro/webcam type camera using the pi. with triggering via sound, movement light or a web site like you can get with pet and baby monitoring.

be nice to be able to charge it from a solar panel too.

[Adrian Caspersz]

What could be useful is a camera ye could where around the neck that takes pictures every 5 seconds of items that ye touch and then places where ye leave them. Then in confusion you can replay the images, find the items and enjoy the time saved drinking beer...

[Tim Watts]

Front end to a HeatGenius central heating controller. HG has a very powerful app, but for something to fit to the wall, with a little capacitative touchscreen as a status/manual override, the Pi looks the biz.

HG has a JSON/RESTful API so that bit should be easy...

[T i m]

Yes please. I'll PM you my postal address. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[T i m]

Has he also seen tried any of the Arduino range? I think they can be a bit more friendly if he wants to be able to make stuff do stuff and quite easily (as a stepping stone to the RPi).

I've just installed Octoprint on Ubuntu on my Pi2 but for it to be 'use' he really needs to build a 3D printer first. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

[Adrian Caspersz]

Tinder swiping thing

[dennis]

[spuorgelgoog]

At the moment they're showing nil in stock, 21,478 will be available for delivery on Mar 9, 2016.

Owain

[T i m]

And one of those should be mine. ;-)

I installed Ubuntu 15.10 Mate on my Pi2 recently and whilst it runs it certainly isn't even 'nippy'.

I might go back to the OctoPi (OctoPrint 3d printing server pre installed on Raspbian) as I couldn't get the network connection when I first tried but that may have been an issue with my router (and DHCP).

If you just had a TV and wanted a tiny WP, basic web and email it would be perfect.

Cheers, T i m

[Dave Liquorice]

Depends what his interests are. I've one Pi that just sits as a media player (OSMC/Kodi) and runs get-iplayer to grab BBC content. Another Pi I had as a 30 second interval still frame webcam that also stuck each still frame together to forma timelapse. I say "had" as all the file processing etc is enough to "wear out" an SD card or memory stick in less than two months.

That Pi I've now started "playing" with, it's currently monitoring a relay closure and 1-Wire temperature sensor to see what the iffy storeage heater is up to. Whilst it's doing that I carry on playing with PWM control of a DC motor, then moved to a servo then couple of stepper motors(*) and H bridge drivers. The intention for that is to attach mirrors and fire a laser pointer at them, I have an idea that green laser pointer scanned up/down/across the trees outside would make an interesting variation on fairy lights at christmas.

In the meantime I've got distracted by wanting to log the data that the Resol controller on the woodburner spews out of it's vBus port every second or so. Resol vBus is RS485 but with an 8 V DC imbalance to power remote kit. I think I've managed to get one of the cheap MAX485 RS485 to serial TTL based boards to work despite that offset and not blow up the 3.3 V based Pi with it's 5 V output. On order is a 1-Wire thermocouple interface so I can also monitor the stoves flue pipe temperature. Not sure if a Pi (Zero, if they ever become not "sold out") will take over from the Resol controler or not, just need to add a SSR to PWM control the pump to do that.

This is "headless" that is the Pi just has power, an ethernet connection and breakout(*2) to a bread board I just use the command line over SSH.

(*) 5 for £3.17 as an Amazon "add-on", tiny things 1/4" dia used in cameras etc.

(*2) Adafruit T cobbler is a bit naff, the ribbon cable has to have a twist in it and fold back over the header on the Pi. DF Robot have a similar T breakout that doesn't have a twisted ribbon cable and provides 5 V to 3.3 V conversion on the GPIO's.

[T i m]

Wouldn't an Arduino be better at some of those things, especially with i/o as the Arduinos have 5V interfaces and PWM built in (I don't know if the Pi does as I've only used it as a micro 'computer' (because of the 3.3V i/o)).

Cheers, T i m

[Dave Liquorice]

Quite possibly but the times I've looked at Arduino the range of available boards just confused me. And AIUI they are just microcontrollers, plenty of digital and analog IO but no ethernet without another board. And being a microcontroller you can't have a nice friendly web interface to look at plots of logged data or alter config/parameters etc. And you write your programme in an IDE, "compile" it then upload to the Arduino then reboot it to get the new code running? All in all too messy and too steep a learning curve, just for fun and experiment.

IIRC the Pi has PWM in the hardware. I use IIRC becuase there are several PWM python librarys out there that impliment PWM in different ways. From bit banging a GPIO meaning the timing is a little irractic (a servo will continually twitch). Two others have stable PWM timing which is the reason I think there is hardware PWM. 1-Wire support is now in the kernel.

[T i m]

There are a few now, that's for sure.

There was one with built in Ethernet port but I think it's been discontinued (although there may still be one in the range).

Erm, I think I have had, looking at the status of various i/o ports etc?

Correct.

I thought that was the whole point. ;-)

FWIW I've driven servos from the Arduino (mostly Unos) and they drive smooth and fine.

Whilst I'm no (and never will be) a 'programmer' (I'm too right brained for anything that 'logical' ) I have been able to copy, paste and massage code found on the net to make stuff work on the Arduinos in a way I would never be able to have the patience for with

*anything* 'computer based'. I would get too bored, too fast waiting for an OS to boot up on a Pi between tests / mods etc.

Horses for courses of course. ;-)

Cheers, T i m

p.s. If you haven't got an Arduino yet they are so cheap that I think you should, just so you can see what they are like in the flesh. I'd start with a Uno with the full socket chip (that way you can replace the chip should you need).

(no connection or specific recommendation etc).

p.p.s. We are currently working on an Arduino based, semi intelligent, model railway controller, shuttling one of 3 trains (at a time) up and down a track between 4 different sidings (two each end).

[Martin Bonner]

But you don't have to do that. You develop the program *on the Pi*, so you can just run your new Python script as soon as you have saved it. No need for compile and link, no need for need for upload, no need for reboot. Just run it.

Well yes!

[Adam Aglionby]

Thats a huge advantage , lot of the boards will work with a Pi, modules that simply plug in , all sorts of pre built sensors ,displays and actuators with pre written libraries.

Think the Yun , which runs a version of Linux has replaced the ethernet only `duino

and MKR1000 , currently unobtainable, is the wifi version

There are several ethernet shields.

Can also monitor via USB

Learning curve is very shallow indeed, primary school kids can get things to work with things like Arduino

Several simulators and even GUI programming interfaces for them.

Servo driving, theres a libray for it, and can run quite a number of servos , smoothly from an Uno.

Agree there entirely, as a non programmer, bolting libraries and plugging boards together has enabled me to do things that would have been not feasible otherwise.