Raspberry Pi creations | Hacker News Reader

Raspberry Pi creations

arstechnica.com

70 pointsReltair12 comments

I've been working on a small virtual CEO which is a large, plastic dummy wearing a suit, powered by a Raspberry Pi circuit.

Results haven't been great so far but I'm pleased to say it is better than Mark Pincus.

This article was worth it for wiringPi alone. As a software guy, I find it magical when I can connect custom hardware to my computer.

I'm off to connect some LEDs and relays and see if it can turn them on and off.

I have two Pis, one is a headless NAS and music player, near the amp. The other is a media center strapped to the back of the TV. None requires a mouse or a keyboard, as I control them from our handhelds. I never hear them, nor need to reboot them.

I think this is a future for computing: remote UI, ssh-able services machines.

But it is also a bit messy, because the NAS exposes files as Upnp, Dlna and smb.

Which software did you use for both setups? I presume Raspbmc for the media centre?

Not OP, but you could probably run the debian version created for the Pi, and then just install whatever packages (samba, webmin, etc) you needed on top of that.

We have 1 Pi at home running RaspBMC and it's great. The thing I like most about the Raspberry Pi is that you can swap out SD cards and reboot, and suddenly have a totally different machine, doing something totally different.

> swap out SD cards and reboot

That's something I was wondering about: is there some state inside the Rpi itself? If not, then a system backup/restore is only a matter of dding on the SDcard.

That's essentially it, nothing is stored anywhere else. You could theoretically just have a bunch of disk images sitting on your desktop and write to the the RPi SD card whatever image you wanted it to run.

Yes, RaspBMC for the media center.

Plain Raspbian for the NAS/music player, plus Samba, mpd, minidlna.

I am not perfectly satisfied with RaspBMC however. I'd rather build the thing myself, piece by piece, so I have only what I need and know what to change when my needs change.

This is awesome. I just got one for Christmas and the first project I wanted to do was create a miniature NES arcade system with the RPi and a 10'' screen hooked up into a custom wooden cabinet.

It's pretty easy to do! I've had one for a while, but I just now got to sit down and play with it for a bit. The RetroPie script makes things very simple, though you'll probably want to play with overclock settings for best performance. The biggest surprise for me was getting PSX games working decently.

I have a second one and I just recently picked up the Adafruit LCD kit for the Pi, so I'm hoping to have some more fun with that soon.

I wonder how much you could overclock the Pi if you had some proper air cooling in it. Probably a fair amount, considering it works totally off passive cooling by default.

Can't wait for mine to arrive !

Reply on news.ycombinator.com