Voice control of our home electronics was promised long ago, but it’s still one of those things that most of us don’t have. If you want to add little voice control to your home on the cheap, blogger Chipos81 shows off how to do it with a Raspberry Pi.
Read more here:
Add Voice Control to Your Home with LightwaveRF and a Raspberry Pi (Lifehacker)
There’s something exciting about crossing the boundary between the abstract world of software and the physical ‘real world’, and a relay driven from a GPIO pin seemed like a good example of this. Although a simple project, I still learned some new things about the Raspberry Pi while doing it.
Full article here:
Link: Raspberry Pi – Driving a Relay using GPIO (SusaNET)
Related artcle:
Tutorial: How to use your Raspberry Pi like an Arduino (Limina.Log)
I am happy to say that I am a backer of the Rigidbot 3D printer, (which you can pre-order already), I am expecting it to arrive in August. In the meantime, I have ordered a Raspberry Pi to play with and started visiting a local maker community known as XLN.
This led me to find a really cool project called OctoPrint, which lets you control 3D printers using a Raspberry Pi over a web interface, however people were not installing it on their Pis because there was no out-of-the-box solution. Today I am happy to announce that a solution is here! I give you Octoprint + Rapberry Pi = OctoPi. A raspberry Pi distribution which runs OctoPrint out of the box, with support for time-lapse video on webcams (there is also an experiential version in the works that supports streaming from a raspberry Pi camera).
Full article here:
OctoPi – 3D Printer Web Server Distribution for the Raspberry Pi (Guysoft’s Weblog)
Few things are better than kicking back on the couch and streaming your favorite album wirelessly to your stereo from your phone. It’s a remarkably easy thing to do with AirPlay, but if you don’t want to pay for Apple’s solutions, a $35 Raspberry Pi does the job remarkably well.
Full article:
Turn a Raspberry Pi Into an AirPlay Receiver for Streaming Music in Your Living Room (Lifehacker)
On Wednesday, July 24th Google launched the Chromecast. As soon as the source code hit we began our audit. Within a short period of time we had multiple items to look at for when our devices arrived. Then we received our Chromecasts the following day and were able to confirm that one of the bugs existed in the build Chromecast shipped with. From that point on we began building what you are now seeing as our public release package.
Exploit Package:
Our Chromecast exploit package will modify the system to spawn a root shell on port 23. This will allow researchers to better investigate the environment as well as give developers a chance to build and test software on their Chromecasts. For the normal user this release will probably be of no use, for the rest of the community this is just the first step in opening up what has just been a mysterious stick up to this point. We hope that following this release the community will have the tools they need to improve on the shortfalls of this device and make better use of the hardware.
Full story here:
Chromecast: Exploiting the Newest Device By Google. (GTVHacker)
Additional comment: These devices might be a lot more useful to some of us if someone could figure out how to 1) Add a wired network connection, 2) Add an optical audio output for those of us with older receivers (that don’t have HDMI connections) and TVs (that don’t pass audio from a HDMI port back to the receiver). They’re obviously selling these to the low-income crowd, so why would they not assume that you might want to connect this to perfectly good but slightly dated equipment that requires optical audio, or maybe even to a large screen computer monitor that doesn’t have any audio capabilities?
Additional additional comment: If the XBMC developers could create an add-on that would emulate the Chromecast device and in effect turn XBMC into a Chromecast receiver WITHOUT the need for the Chromecast dongle, that would make us VERY happy!
You will find that in order to add, store and remove data to a Raspberry Pi, you have three main options:
- SD/SDHC card
- USB flash drive
- USB hard disk drive
You can also use network drives, USB DVD-R drives and NAS devices (perhaps powered by a Raspberry Pi!) for additional storage, but those listed above should be considered your three primary options.
We’ll take a look at the three options in more detail, how they can be used most effectively and at any shortcomings or drawbacks.
How to Add USB Storage to the Raspberry Pi (MakeUseOf)
The links in this article are for informational purposes only. Please read the final paragraph of this article before you actually do anything based on these links.
If you have ever tried to connect a Nexus 7 tablet to an external USB device, such as a USB memory stick or a wired network adapter, you know that you need a special “OTG” cable and that the tablet will power the device. While you can purchase various kind of “OTG” Y-cables, which purportedly will allow you to use an external device (or even connect to a USB hub so you can use multiple devices) while at the same time allowing a charger/power supply to be connected, this doesn’t work with a stock Nexus 7. At best you can send power to the connected device, reducing the drain on the battery in the Nexus 7, but you cannot send power back into the Nexus 7 simultaneously, even though you can charge the Nexus 7 while you are using it if the charger is the only thing you have connected.
There is a way around this but it involves “rooting” the device. If you don’t know what “rooting” a device means, or the implications of it, you’ve come to the wrong place because we’ve never done it – the mere thought of turning our Nexus 7 into an expensive brick is enough to dissuade us from trying it. However, in the course of trying to research this, we came you with links that might be useful to Nexus 7 owners that are braver (or maybe bigger gamblers) than we are.
The key to this is “Timur’s Kernel” – if you remember nothing else from this article, remember “Timur’s Kernel”. As we searched for information on this, time and again, we were sent back to this message thread:
Timur’s Kernel – USB ROM – USB Host Power Management – USB Audio (RootzWiki)
SOMEWHERE in that thread, which as of today is 358 pages long and still growing, is the information you need. Actually, the meat of it is in the very first post on page 1, with additional explanation on page 7. If you don’t feel like wading through all of that (seriously, who reads a thread that long?), the following page pretty well summarizes what you need to know. Just keep in mind that you probably don’t have to make your own cable if you don’t want to; there is almost certainly a cable available at eBay or Amazon that would serve the purpose, although you might need to search that long thread to figure out which one(s) will work:
USB host mode power management extension for Nexus 7 (mehrvarz.github.io)
Oh, and if you have ever wondered why you need a special “OTG” cable to connect an external device, it’s because pins 4 and 5 must be shorted together at the micro USB connector — some folks have made their own (also see here), though we DO NOT recommend that because they are fairly inexpensive to purchase, and if you do it wrong you could damage your device. On some other devices, you can use a particular value resistor (which varies depending on the model) instead of a direct short, and that indicates that the device should both send data and allow charging simultaneously, but that doesn’t work with a Nexus 7. That’s why you need “Timur’s Kernel” — as we understand it, it basically bypasses the (non-existent in the Nexus 7) circuitry that detects the resistor, and acts as if the resistor were present, thereby allowing the Nexus 7 USB port to be used for charging and transferring data simultaneously.
We are not recommending you do this, nor are we attempting to discourage you, but if you don’t understand the implications of rooting your device then we suggest you don’t do this until you have read up on the subject of rooting an Android device, and fully understand and accept the risks of rooting. And if you decide to proceed, do so at your own risk, realizing that there is a very real chance you could turn your Nexus 7 into an expensive paperweight. If that should happen, don’t come crying to us, because we warned you!
If you actually do this and get it to work, please feel free to post a comment. If possible, please mention which cables or Y-adapters, etc. you used. Also, if you find any other particularly informative pages in that much too long thread, please feel free to post the links and mention why they are significant.
Sorry this is not a complete article, just a few links of interest for those who might be looking to provide power to a Raspberry Pi using alternative methods. We may add to this list later on if we find any more good resources on the subject.
How do I supply power through the GPIO? (Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange) — note that the short answer is, “you shouldn’t”, but the discussion is worth reading.
Troubleshooting power problems (from the R-Pi Troubleshooting page at elinux.org) — more information about how the Raspberry Pi is powered.
RPi 5V PSU construction (elinux.org) — for those that might want to build their own.
Running The Raspberry Pi On Batteries (Dave Akerman) — includes several tips for cutting power consumption.
Raspberry PI UPS (jkliemann.de) – an uninterrupted power supply for a Raspberry Pi.
The Raspberry Pi makes a nice compact platform to attach an indicator light to for all sorts of projects—weather notification, new emails, etc. Read on as we show you how to hook up an LED module to your Pi and set up some basic notifications.
Build an LED Indicator with a Raspberry Pi (for Email, Weather, or Anything) (How-To Geek)
People are using the Raspberry Pi for many applications these days, including as a VoIP PBX server based on Asterisk. One thing that many people forget is that you can only write to an SD card a limited number of times before it fails. Asterisk in particular likes to write a LOT of information to log files, and let’s face it, if you are honest and you are like 99% of Asterisk system administrators, you will admit you never read them unless perhaps you suspect there is a problem with your system. Yet every one of those many writes reduces your SD card’s lifespan by a small amount.
So with that in mind, here are links to a few threads that may or may not be helpful, in no particular order:
How can I extend the life of my SD card? (Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange)
How can I use a USB HDD to extend the life of my SD Card? (Raspberry Pi Stack Exchange)
Read/Write cycles of a SD card (RaspberryPi.org)
Extending the life of the SD card (RasPBX – Asterisk for Raspberry Pi/Sourceforge)
How to add ‘noatime’ to fstab? (AYK solutions)
Know of any other good links on the subject? Please leave a comment!
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