Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Theodores | Hacker News Reader

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One of those two million is sat under my desk, collecting dust. I know a few others that are, and, I wonder what percentage of that 2 million are in the same situation?

Because you need a few bits and bobs to get your pi working there is a major disincentive to complete and finish whatever that hobby project was to be. Hence the situation with my pi - the wait for bits and bobs, a small bout of illness and the initial enthusiasm gone.

I think that the price of those extra bits and bobs is also quite a bit. Sure, everyone has spare power supplies and SD cards knocking around, but maybe not a spare video lead, keyboard, mouse, whatever is needed for the project. Just one of these parts missing from the misc. hardware drawer means a hurdle to getting started.

It is bit like buying a barebones car where you just need to put in a motor, a few seats, a few door panels, oh, and paint it yourself. You would learn a lot about auto engineering, for sure, but, it would cost more than initially expected.

What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug it into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever web/hardware development needed.

My RasPi is certainly collecting dust as well, but not for the lack of uses--It is connected to power, ethernet, and an external hard drive. I only ever access it over ssh and never need to touch it.

It runs a Time Machine backup server, a calendar/contacts server, and Bittorrent Sync. Really, one of the best buys I made in the last few years! I literally use it every day!

How's the TM backup treating you? I've set up netatalk too, and had the backup's sparsebundle get corrupted 3 times over the course of half a year leading me to abandon it. Now I just rsync to the NFS fileshare, which is less automatic.

We have two computers. One works flawlessly, always. One used to be terrible, with backups corrupting every two or three weeks. Both was true for the Time Capsule we used at the time and the Raspberry Pi we replaced it with. I since reinstalled the second one and it works well now.

My conclusion is that Time Machine over Wifi is inherently flaky--regardless of whether the Time Machine is running on Apple hardware or not.

The program you're looking for is 'duplicity'. It even supports ssh/scp so you don't need any special software on the storage server.

For those that don't know, duplicity handles incremental backups like TimeMachine, but will also encrypt your backups using GnuPG if you choose to do so. You can also configure it to store the backups to various different types of storage, e.g ssh or Amazon S3. I wrote up how I do it here: https://grepular.com/Secure_Free_Incremental_and_Instant_Bac...

I had the same issue and then concluded that time machine is not stable over the network. The use of the sparsebundle is basically a way of pretending that the network drive is actually a local disk and it will corrupt itself on network faults. You can probably make it work semi-reliably over a wired network but forget wifi. This is a failure of Apple's design and there's not much that can be done until they implement a sane network aware solution.

Hmm, never encountered this issue before. I've been using the TM/netatalk mechanism for at least 3 years now, and I'm still using the same sparsebundle from 3 years ago. I'm not using a raspberry pi though.

> What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug it into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever web/hardware development needed.

But it is. My Pi's are running headless and I access them over Ethernet. They suck less power than a VM running on a more powerful hardware and that's the point.

edit: I admit that it's easier for Web dev than for HW dev. I'd use Arduino for HW hobbies before a Pi if the project can be done with both.

its a good point about arduino being easier for hw dev than some of the other boards out there. Once you slap a full OS like linux on a device writing high level software is easier and very low level hacking becomes an exercise in operating systems and drivers etc etc and not a quick weekend long project controlling servos and whatnot.

I was particularly impressed with the approach of the Getting Started with Arduino book - for artists / non-electronics / non-programmers.

The Beaglebone / BB Black does exactly this - you can have it connected with a single USB cable.

Thanks for that - a very tempting option, not in stock right now with RS Components in the UK, but seems the price of a months hire for a VPS, give or take, and roughly the same spec - therefore perfect for dev work where performance needs to be targeted.

> What I would like to see is a raspberry pi that works like a 'hardware virtualbox', networking over USB, power over the same lead so you just plug it into your PC/Mac and you have something right there, ready for whatever web/hardware development needed.

This is actually how the BeagleBone Black works. Install one driver, plus it in via USB, and it's powered and networked to your computer, and a JS IDE with GPIO control is automatically loaded.

If you don't find a use for it, see if your local primary or secondary school has a computing course - they may be able to make use of it!

I've suggested this several times, to several different people, and their response is always an outraged, ``But it's mine!'' followed by various reasons why they won't donate something they never use.

That's the case with most people. I don't know any body around me who has gone anything beyond blinking LED's.

The main reason is any thing you can likely do on your RasPi you can also do on your Laptop. The need for a small form factor devices in production use cases always exists. But any kind of mass production requires serious application of effort to bring the price, stability and quality to a optimum point. And its an effort that spans months if you work full time.

That's too much for the ordinary web developers level of patience who expects to launch a fully functioning product over a weekend.

Mine runs the raspbmc distro of XMBC[1], the interface is a touch slow but 1080p videos play perfectly even with soft subs.

[1] http://www.raspbmc.com/

I got two from the first batch - one from each supplier. One runs 24x7 at home as XBMC (which is little-used by the family), a VPN server, a small file server, and to record audio from a couple radio shows I like to timeshift. The other is in a box with a BrickPi board, camera board, and a LEGO NXT robot platform that I intend to turn into a running vision-based robot if I ever get time. I'm ready to pick up another Pi just for demos and maybe a 4th for PiMAME.

I have two, both collecting dust while running.

The first runs as domain controller using Samba4 for that. This was a major hazzle to setup since I needed to compile Samba4 to get it working (the one in the Debian distribution is somewhat shaky). For obvious reasons I never touch this one.

The second one runs a GIT repository and serves generally as tinkering box, such as setting up Apache for authenticating against the domain controller.

As servers, I wouldn't like to miss them.

One of mine is operating as an HTPC. The other as an Internet streaming radio. I need to get a third so I can add network and OCR functionality to my printer/scanner. It might be a good idea to get a fourth to act as a backup domain controller. I could easily find useful jobs for more.

I came here to say just that, I wonder how many are just inactive examples of western oppulence.

Mine were at first but now I have two that are both in active use, a surveillance camera and a deaddrop.

If yours is collecting dust, cant you sell them for half price or something?

I think they should have wifi on board, then it would be much more usable.

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