Dark Bit Factory & Gravity
GENERAL => General chat => Topic started by: Shockwave on May 27, 2012
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Been over Maplins today to buy some bits to get my Pi working.. I had to buy an SDHD card, USB Keyboard, USB Mouse, HDMI Cable, SDHD Card reader and a USB hub.
Some mistakes I made..
First of all I didn't check the ports on the board carefully enough before I bought my leads.. The HDMI lead you need is a normal HDMI to HDMI lead, NOT micro HDMI to HDMI (which is what I bought) - I had to rob the lead from the dvd player to get it working.
If you're going to use wireless to connect to the internet, be careful what dongle you get as they don't all work. There's a wiki over at raspberry pi site, connectig via ethernet is a lot easier but if you're unlucky like me then that's not an option and you'll need a usb hub as there are only 2 usb ports.
Be careful what hub you buy, the one I bought has the ports too close together which means that only two of them are actually any use.
Despite all this, I've managed to get the Pi working, although there are going to be a couple of bits going back to Maplins tomorrow!
Photos attached :)
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Nice! Want to buy one also, but I made the choice of an android tablet. Hope to get one soon. But I must admit that I have not place anymore for a "connected" computer full of cables :P
Did you get it for code stuff?
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Did you get it for code stuff?
Yeah, I'm really excited by the little gizmo too :)
It has a lot of things that appeal to me;
For the first time I can remember since the Amiga and ST, it's a static platform with thousands of users (only this time it has roughtly the same power as an Xbox).
Easy to transport to parties.
An excuse to learn linux :)
The Debian Squeeze image contains python and an IDE which I suppose I'll play with for a while but I fully intend to use it with QT and C++ for making demos and intros..
I hope that this device brings soime new blood to the scene :)
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Very Nice and cant wait to get mine ;D
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It's so cool :)
To continue the cheap theme I'm going to use the cardboard box it arrived in as a case..
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Awesome, hope to see more pics in all it's cardboxed glory! :)
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Sweet!
Mine arrived today. Time to dig out an SD card from my many boxes of "crap that might be useful one day".
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Its cool seeing people this interested in such a cheap piece of kit. Probably cost more for all the extra bits to plug into it than the unit itself, excluding the TV ofc which is bound to be more :D
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Its cool seeing people this interested in such a cheap piece of kit. Probably cost more for all the extra bits to plug into it than the unit itself, excluding the TV ofc which is bound to be more :D
I spent about £100 on bits for it but that's still cheap for what it is I think :)
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I bought the Raspberry Case and it is Lovely Blue ;D 8)
(http://www2.picturepush.com/photo/a/8360210/img/Anonymous/rpicase-blue2.jpg)
(http://www5.picturepush.com/photo/a/8360213/img/Anonymous/rpicase-blue3.jpg)
(http://www5.picturepush.com/photo/a/8360223/img/Anonymous/rpicase-blue4.jpg)
I havnt got my Raspberry Pi yet but I will soon :P
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i've had mine since last week.. no time to sit down properly yet, i tried to get raspbmc going out the box, next shot will be debian squeeze instead
oh and i was lucky enough to get one of the cool yoctopuce cases before they stopped making them
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For the first time I can remember since the Amiga and ST, it's a static platform with thousands of users (only this time it has roughtly the same power as an Xbox).
This.
If it can live up to its goals regarding education, the UK software industry will be looking pretty sweet in 10-15 years. It's all well and good getting it in to the hands of hardware geeks and established coders but if they can actually ship a good number of these to schools then things will start to get interesting.
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I have order mine and I have wait for 6 WEEKS but still....no rush because EURO 2012 Football is on Way :clap:
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It's all well and good getting it in to the hands of hardware geeks and established coders but if they can actually ship a good number of these to schools then things will start to get interesting.
Well, they've certainly generated enough orders to facilitate it and I've seen a fair few teachers over at the RaspPi community which gives me hope.
The Debian Squeeze installation is great, you can literally just image the SD card and boot it up and be coding in Python in only a couple of easy steps! Much easier than starting out coding in Windows.
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Is there some secret outlet where they still sell those? Official distros from the RaspPi website all show out of stock and the ebay sharks are selling them upwards of 200$ in some cases.
The moment this becomes in stock again, I'm buying three of them. One to develop on, one for a media center on the telly, and one to bring to work to help keep me sane while we're knee deep in crunch time (http://www.thesecretworld.com/)
I've been looking for something similar for a while, in fact ever since I've seen the Minimig. This however, is much much more fun as it has actual processing power.
I plan on building mine inside a large keyboard of some kind, bring me back to the days where a large keyboard meant a complete computer :)
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I've been stick in limbo a bit with mine. Having to keep stealing a monitor from my PC to use it is a pain, so I decided to get a new monitor. This has opened up a very big "ooh, a 3D monitor??" can of worms :)
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I've been stick in limbo a bit with mine. Having to keep stealing a monitor from my PC to use it is a pain, so I decided to get a new monitor. This has opened up a very big "ooh, a 3D monitor??" can of worms :)
Funny you should say that because I've had my eye on my sons television for the same reason..
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I've been stick in limbo a bit with mine. Having to keep stealing a monitor from my PC to use it is a pain, so I decided to get a new monitor. This has opened up a very big "ooh, a 3D monitor??" can of worms :)
Funny you should say that because I've had my eye on my sons television for the same reason..
Hehe, naughty :)
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I've been using Debian for some time and here are a few quick tips for those new to it.
1. Debian has less hardware support (especially for wireless devices) than some other distros such as Linux Mint or Ubuntu (which are BASED on Debian)
2. To install new packages (programs) you can use "apt" package manager as the root user.
First you want to update the system's listing of packages. This can be done with the following line as the root user: apt-get update
Once you have a fresh listing you can search for packages in the listing to see what is available: apt-cache search package_name_here
To install a package you can use the following code as root user: apt-get install package_name_here
Some packages everyone should install for programming:
gcc (The GNU C compiler)
g++ (The GNU C++ compiler)
python (Python is fast and easy to use for small programs)
python-tk (Allows users to make cross platform GUI programs in Python)
python-pygame (A cross platform game library for Python)
aaaand possibly Java, should you be fond of Satan.
I usually don't use an IDE, I prefer Emacs some prefer Vim or Nano. :)
You can get plenty of cross platform libraries for most languages offered. If you are really sick you can write a demo in Lisp or Fortran.
Just be sure to mention what packages the user should install first. This is preferred to those silly and redundant .dll files. :boxer:
I don't get mine for a week yet....
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Just confimed my Rapsberry-PI preorder .. expected shipping: LATE AUGUST ... can't wait!!!
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I got mine yesterday.
The graphics drivers have yet to be fully implemented.
So as it stands it just runs off off the CPU making it a bit slow.
You might want to select a lower resolution if you have a graphically intense program for now.
You don't have to stick with lxde either, I've installed Openbox, Awesome and Vtwm on mine.
These are less memory intensive but come at the cost of ease of use (no desktop just a window manager).
You may install multiple window managers in Linux by using a utility like slim which allows you to select your desktop at login.
For a really ugly work around you can create a file called .xsession in your home directory and simply call the window manager inside that file.
For those not used to the terminal, nearly every Linux program has a help page or manual.
If you type "man" followed by the command you wish to learn about, you get some handy documentation.
example:
man ls
Brings up help about the file listing command. Pressing the q key quits the manual page.
If you wish to search for a command you can try the apropos command.
Typing "apropos editor" brings up a list of text editors for example.
One last note, Linux is highly configurable so it might not hurt to purchase a little notebook for when you make low level changes to your system.
Also it is often good to make backups of your configuration files before you start editing them.
Now that was a bit long winded. Sorry. :whack:
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I installed Debian.
The very first thing I did was to resize the SD card partition
http://elinux.org/RPi_Resize_Flash_Partitions (http://elinux.org/RPi_Resize_Flash_Partitions)
using the instructions under "Manually resizing the SD card on Raspberry Pi"
The next thing I have done is upgrade everything.
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Then I followed the instructions here to download a far newer kernel and firmware:
https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update (https://github.com/Hexxeh/rpi-update)
That made my SD card (I got a 16GB class 10) run more than two times quicker and has fixed a raft of other bugs.
Then for good measure I ran these again
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
Because I'm in Australia I also had to futz with the timezone and keyboard layout:
sudo dpkg-reconfigure tzdata
sudo dpkg-reconfigure keyboard-configuration
and then finally
sudo setupcon
to stop the keyboard reconfiguration happening (very slow) on every boot
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Jim, what are you using coding wise? I take it your doing the development on the PI rather than on PC and copying it across?
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Emacs and gcc on the pi. looking at the github for the Windows hosted cross compilers which should mean you can do all the work on a PC and just use the pi as a target.
Early days.
Jim
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Thanks Jim.
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FINARRY!
They've come back in stock, so me and a friend put two on order. Damn things won't ship until they end of August apparently so that kinda sucks, but still: :D :D :D :D
Sad thing is, this thing is gonna be more powerful than my current machine. I might need to start looking into a desktop replacement soon :D
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Just upgraded to the newly released 'wheezy' image (http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads), which has proper support for the fpu on the soc. All the stuff I had to do manually (as above) is now in a config menu when the pi first boots, except the firmware rpi-update.
I also now have Linux Mint 13 64bit installed in VirtualBox (https://www.virtualbox.org/). I copied off (using samba, instructions here (http://elinux.org/R-Pi_NAS#Connect_the_RPi_to_a_network)) all the source I'd been working on directly on the pi and installed the cross compilers from github (of course, the cross compilers are for Linux 64bit, not Windows as I said above)
git clone https://github.com/raspberrypi/tools.git
So now I'm in a position to build exes in Mint and target them on to the pi.
Sadly the chromium browser's not available for wheezy yet, which means the god awful built-in midori will have to do, but frankly running X on the pi is too slow even with the fpu working properly to be much use.
Jim