Category Archives: Raspberry Pi

Let Raspberry Pi Make It to the Movies through XBMC

The Raspberry Pi is capable of HD video. Won’t it be great if you could playback your Blu-ray movie collection through Raspberry Pi on to your HD TV or monitor? That would be possible if you knew how to let Raspberry Pi run XBMC.

What is XBMC?

XBMC is a software media player and entertainment hub, and the best part is you do not need to pay anything to get it, as XBMC is free and open source (GPL). As a media player, XBMC has almost everything you will need, right from TV and remote controls, to support for digital media files from local and network storage media including the internet. You can play and view most digital media files such as podcasts, music and videos.

There is not much that XBMC misses. You get to play all your music files in mp3, flac, wav and wma formats. You can watch movies in all the main video formats including streamable online media. You can keep track of your progress of season views and episodes of TV shows. You can import pictures into a library for browsing as in a slideshow, and you can record live TV all from the nice GUI interface that XBMC has.

Step 1: Download XBMC

You will need to download an image of XBMC, which is available as “debian-xbmc-24-04-2012.zip” and you can get it here. Unzip the file to get to the image.

Step 2: Write the Image on to an SD Card

If you are on Linux or OSX, open up a terminal and navigate to the folder containing the downloaded image. To write to an SD card, you have to enter the following command –

dd bs=1m if=debian-xbmc-24-04-2012.img of=/dev/rdisk1

Note that ‘/dev/rdisk1’ depends on the type of PC you are using.

If you are still on Windows, you need the Win32DiskImager utility program to write the image to the SD card in the device box.

Step 3: Make Space on the SD Card

The image written to the SD Card will be about 2GB, leaving about 60MB free space. This is not enough for XBMC to operate properly. Use Gparted, which is the Debian partition editor to expand the free space. Assuming you have a 16GB card on which you installed the OS and XBMC, there is still 13GB space left over. Go into Gparted, and expand the Linux swap partition to cover the 13GB. That will allow XBMC to use the free space.

Step 4: Start Action

Plug in the SD card into your Raspberry Pi, and boot it up. At the command prompt, type –

XBMC

and you should be able to see the following –

Note that XBMC is still an alpha release, and is somewhat fragile. It might lock up or not start at all. This is expected and you may need to restart Raspberry Pi over again to get XBMC play properly.

Try out all your music, video and other programs including your favorite TV shows, and you will be surprised at the quality of the output from the combination of XBMC and Raspberry Pi.

The Emergence of BBB: the BeagleBone Black

Many a time we have wished our bulky PCs that occupy so much of the desktop space could somehow be magically squeezed into a portable unit. Although such systems are there including the new smartphones and tablets, their sky-high prices are very discouraging for most of us.

Despair not, for such a package has arrived and is well within the reach of an average person’s pocket. Moreover, if you are technically oriented, you could build one yourself. Texas Instruments has provided the core processor and BeagleBoard has provided the packaging. The result is the low-cost, low power, fan-less, single-board computer called the BeagleBone, a latest addition to the BeagleBoard family.

The low-cost, fan-less, low power, single-board computers from BeagleBoard utilize the Texas Instruments’ OMAP3530 application processor. This offers laptop like performance and facility for expansion, without the bulk, the noise and the expense that are typical of desktop machines. Within the OMAP3530, there is a 600MHz ARM Cortex-A8 Micro Controller Unit (MCU), which predicts branches with high accuracy and a 256KB L2 cache memory.

The on-board USB 2.0 OTG port serves a dual purpose; you can transfer data out from the board or allow the board to read data in from an external source. Although the board has a separate 5V DC power socket, power to the board can be supplied through the USB port as well. The board also has a mini-A connector, to which you can connect standard PC peripherals using a standard-A to mini-A cable adapter. A DVI-D connector allows a HDMI display to be connected using a HDMI to DVI-D adapter. The third connector is the MMC/SD/SDIO card connector. To give you the best graphics experience, the BeageBoard has a state of the art POWERVR graphics hardware, which will render 10 million polygons each second.

For people who were not satisfied with the power of the BeagleBoard single-board computer, BeagleBoard has added the BeagleBone Black or BBB. This is the newest addition to the BeagleBoard family, and continues the saga of the low-cost, low power, single-board computers. To provide the additional features, an advanced MCU, the Texas Instruments’ Sitara AM3359 has been used. This is an ARM Cortex-A8 32-bit RISC processor, featuring a speed of 1GHz, and gives BBB the power along with a 512-MB DDR3L 400MHz SDRAM and 2GB 8-bit eMMC on-board flash memory. This frees up the micro SD card slot for further expansions.

The 92-pin headers are Cape compatible, meaning the existing family of cape plug-in boards can be used as well. The on-board HDMI allows direct connection to monitors and TVs. External electronics circuitry can be controlled by the UART0 serial port. For connecting to the Internet, a 10/100 RJ45 Ethernet connector has been provided.

You will need the latest Angstrom distribution eMMC flasher to load the latest Linux distribution. This is a 4GB image, that has to be uncompressed using unxz and written to a micro SD card. Connect an HDMI monitor, and after plugging in the micro SD card in the slot of the BBB, you can power on your single-board Linux computer. Take care to hold the boot button on while powering, and watch the LEDs on the BBB flash and then stay on.

Raspberry Pi projects to inspire you!

In How Many Ways Can You Use Your Raspberry Pi?

Many of you who already have the tiny Linux PC – the RaspBerry Pi – affectionately also known as RBPi, are already using it in your own way to write and test code and to build controllers. The Raspberry Pi is a stripped-down Linux computer, running an ARM-Based CPU, with a graphics processor and many pins and ports, which you can use. We present here many extraordinary ways that owners have Raspberry Pi developed new projects.

Well, taken straight out of its packing, you can plug your TV into Raspberry Pi, connect a keyboard and try some of casual games, video streaming and word processing. All this must have become pretty mundane for Simon Cox after sometime, since he decided to build a supercomputer out of many Raspberry Pis. The computer engineer from UK’s University of Southampton tied 64 Raspberry Pis together. His 6-year old son built the rack for the supercomputer with his LEGO set!

Have you ever thought of mixing music, vegetables, wordplay and Raspberry Pi? Not likely, but Scott Garner has. On his BeetBox, you can play drumbeats on real beets when you touch them. He has used capacitive touch sensors for communicating between the beets and his Raspberry Pi. His only complaint is that the beets dry off and have to be replaced.

If Raspberry Pi is a Linux computer, surely it can be used as a palmtop. A similar thought must have prompted Nathan Morgan to build his Pi-to-Go Palmtop. Sporting a 640×480 display, a touchpad, support for HDMI, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi and a 64-GB solid state drive, it is a perfectly portable Raspberry Pi. However, some of you may not find it to be the thinnest or the lightest, but it is enough as a proof of concept to its maker.

Beer and Raspberry Pi may not be an obvious match, but that did not deter a company Robofun Create in making a QWERTY keyboard from 44 beer cans from a Prague-based brewery. If you are over 21, you are allowed in the bar and you can tap the tops of the beer cans to let Raspberry Pi produce the corresponding alphabets on a plasma screen overhead. Of course, the alphabets are also marked on the tops of the beer cans.

Movies such as “The Life of Pi” can also be inspiring. FishPi is planning to set Raspberry Pi adrift in a boat that will be crossing the mighty Atlantic. Raspberry Pi will not be floating idly, but has to control the boat’s navigational system. In short, Raspberry Pi will be the captain, navigator and sailor for the 20-inch long boat. Additionally, it has to collect scientific measurements for which it will be powered by a 130-watt solar panel. We wish Raspberry Pi all success on its solo sailing trip.

Like most people who buy nice things on impulse, such as an Raspberry Pi, are stuck for want of a suitable project. Jeroen Domburg had the same problem, until he came up with the Teeny Tiny Arcade. His is probably the smallest gaming cabinet built in an arcade style. Jeroen cut the plastic with laser to make his cabinet and it has a 2.4-inch TFT Display.

Let Your Raspberry Pi Take Pictures of the Earth

How About Letting Your Raspberry Pi Take Pictures of the Earth?

Many many years ago, before cameras came to be associated with lenses, people captured images on film using a pinhole on the camera. This technique is still in use today. It’s called heliography and it requires long to very long exposure times – sometimes as much as 24 hours to six months. The results are rather stunning, as you can see.

Unless you have photography as a hobby, you may not be able to spare much time and may not have equipment suitable for heliography. However, taking pictures of the earth is quite an exciting project, and since you have Raspberry Pi, why not let the tiny Linux computer do it?

That is exactly what Dave Akeman planned to do. He created the Raspberry Eye-in-the-Sky project that sent Raspberry Pi and a bunch of components out into the atmosphere where the weather balloons go and burst themselves. The payload consisted of a Raspberry Pi, a camera and a tracker, powered by a few AA batteries. The pictures, taken while the camera was in the sky, are spectacular and amazingly crisp.

Dave changed the regulator on the Raspberry Pi and modified it so the computer could work on 3V instead of 5V, to allow the batteries to last longer. He embedded the entire electronics in a foam replica of the Raspberry Pi logo, with the camera peeping out from the bottom. The foam was for softening the landing of the package when it hit the ground after the balloon burst. Dave also put in a parachute so the package would come down smoothly.

Dave had to take permission from the CAA for the Hydrogen balloon that would carry his Raspberry Pi camera payload into the atmosphere. He used the latest Pi camera software and changed the code to make it take three types of images each at about one minute interval. One small image is taken for the first radio channel, one medium image for the second radio channel and one hi-resolution image is stored on the SD Card onboard. Additionally, Dave configured the camera to work in matrix-metering mode instead of spot metering, as this gave better resolution images.

The balloon and its camera payload went up one sunny morning, near Tetbury, UK. People from France, Holland and Northern Ireland monitored the Raspberry Eye-in-the-Sky broadcast. The image quality throughout the 3-hour flight time was excellent. The flight path, with the wind guiding it, had quite a few changes of direction and some loops. The package went up to about 24.5 miles in height finally landed near the city of Swindon about 22 miles away from Tetbury.

As the launch was delayed by more than 2 hours, the Raspberry Pi package missed the original predicted landing spot, since the wind pattern had changed in the meantime. In addition, a resident of Swindon found the package as it landed near him, and took it home. He then called up Dave after finding his telephone number on the package. That solved the initial mystery as to how the Raspberry Pi package travelled to another location after it had landed.