
Things I Do With My Raspberry Pi - autotravis
http://magnatecha.com/things-i-do-with-my-raspberry-pi/
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mhd
One thing that doesn't often get mentioned is that a Pi is a pretty decent way
to play around with Risc Os. Probably better than digging up some old
Archimedes/RiscPC or the overpriced replacement machines.

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lukeck
Risc OS is seriously underrated. It's so lightweight. Makes it super easy to
play around with low level hardware stuff. It was made at a time when a couple
of megabytes of RAM was huge and processor speeds were measured in low double
digit MHz so it absolutely flies on the Pi.

~~~
ekianjo
It's not that it's underrated, it's mostly unknown.

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jkldotio
I think the licence would make a lot of people skip over it; it seems to have
far fewer features than Linux as well. I'm not saying it isn't cool, but
reading their site and Wikipedia nothing is jumping out at me.

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AdrianRossouw
If you're going to use the raspberry pi to do file sharing type things, i
highly recommend checking out bittorrent sync.

it allows you to turn the pi into your own cloud server.

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voltagex_
I better check again, but the ARM build of btsync was very unstable, even to
the level of causing a kernel panic on one of my Pi boards.

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andrewmunsell
For me, I've never had any serious issues like that. BT Sync has been a little
finicky in some cases and it looks like some files don't get synced over, but
it does work relatively well.

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AdrianRossouw
I just finished setting up my raspberry pi as a personal router / firewall, to
redirect my internet traffic over a VPN to a server i set up in europe. I'm
building a chrome extension, and matching node.js app to allow to me toggle
the routing on the raspberry pi from within my browser.

I got sick of fighting my isp's throttling rules, which kicked in at the most
frustrating and inopportune times, like halfway through downloading linux
ISO's to play with on my raspberry pi.

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beagle3
But you're still throttled when you try to bring the data home...

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laumars
I read that as his ISP uses traffic shaping - so bittorrent connections are
uniformly throttled (when when the content is completely legal) yet VPN is
not. So he tunnels his torrents through VPN.

I have the same annoying problems - particularly as I like to offer up my
bandwidth for Linux ISOs and creative commons works (I don't always contribute
money to these projects (wife+kids usually see my wages before I do) so it's
nice to contribute something even if the net effect is minute). Yet HTTP/HTTPS
is completely unthrottled.

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kybernetyk
About audio:

The built in line out jacks have just horrible quality. (And I'm someone who
doesn't believe in gold cables so for 'audiophiles' it must be torture.)
Rather get a USB sound card and hook it up to your pi.

Also try out MPD (Music Player Daemon) if you want a juke box. MPD clients are
widely available for any platform - you can sit on the couch and control your
pi's MPD with a client running on your phone.

~~~
laumars
_> The built in line out jacks have just horrible quality. (And I'm someone
who doesn't believe in gold cables so for 'audiophiles' it must be torture.)
Rather get a USB sound card and hook it up to your pi._

The problem is much more likely to be the DAC rather than the audio jack.
However using a USB audio adapter may fix that as well as they'd have their
own DAC. Earlier in this thread I did discuss another issue with audio on the
Pi though:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5969424](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5969424)

 _> Also try out MPD (Music Player Daemon) if you want a juke box. MPD clients
are widely available for any platform - you can sit on the couch and control
your pi's MPD with a client running on your phone._

Funny enough I did address that in this thread as well:
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5967949](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5967949)

~~~
pja
IIRC the analogue audio out on a Pi is fairly low quality: It's a 1-bit PWM
signal @ 100MHz. That's about 11bits of SNR for a standard audio input
supposedly.

Use the HDMI audio, or a USB audio device if you want decent quality sound out
of a Pi.

~~~
laumars
Indeed. Sadly HDMI audio isn't an option and any of the decent USB audio
adapters would either be too bulky and/or too expensive (ie the additional
cost renders the saving made by using a Raspberry Pi pointless).

As much as I'm an audiophile at times (less so now than I used to be), this is
only being used as an in-car MP3 / FLAC player. My car speakers are much worse
than the spec of the Pi's audio chipset. In fact they're not even balanced
right so my next job is applying some bespoke EQing to the output in real time
(hopefully the Pi will be powerful enough to perform this) to lessen the
harshness of the heavy top-end and complete lack of sound in the mid-range
frequencies (whoever authorised the inbuilt sound system in my car was clearly
death!)

Thankfully I can usually distract myself from the shit sound quality by
driving :P But sometimes (usually when really tired) it's too annoying to
bare. Which is a pity as I love most other things about that car.

~~~
pja
You can pick up a tiny USB sound device from eBay for £1.50 including postage
that will probably have better specs than the Pi analogue audio output. It'll
get rid of that annoying clicking as well.

If you're tight for space, then that might be a problem, but the cost of these
things is negligible these days.

~~~
laumars
I take it you didn't read my post that you original replied to ;) (I jest
because I raised each of those points myself).

Sadly space is the issue. The one I bought (which was more along the lines of
£3) sadly pushes the dimensions of the device I'm building much too much. At
some point I'm going to have to re-investigate the issue though - as I plan on
adding voice control which means I'll need a mic in.

As for sound quality, that's really a non-issue given the it's going in a car
with crappy speakers. So there's no point wasting money on a decent audio chip
if I can't reproduce that sound accurately. (in an ideal world, I'd throw in
some zero frequency curve studio monitors and use my spare Terratec Phase 96
as the Pi's sound device - but then the price really starts to jump. So
instead I make do with what I've got)

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StavrosK
Things I use my Raspberry Pi for:

* Controlling my TV/AC/other infrared devices around the house: [http://www.stavros.io/posts/how-turn-your-raspberry-pi-infra...](http://www.stavros.io/posts/how-turn-your-raspberry-pi-infrared-remote-control/)

* Controlling my garage door/RF sockets/other RF stuff around the house (pretty good range on this, too): [http://www.stavros.io/posts/how-remote-control-rf-devices-ra...](http://www.stavros.io/posts/how-remote-control-rf-devices-raspberry-pi/)

* Writing an Android app to make HTTP calls to the Go server that launches the LIRC process, really low latency: [http://www.stavros.io/posts/how-turn-your-raspberry-pi-infra...](http://www.stavros.io/posts/how-turn-your-raspberry-pi-infrared-remote-control/)

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yardie
I was using my pi as an airplay receiver for my hi-fi. I'm not sure if they
fixed it yet but the analog out was pretty bad (8kHz mono at the tome) but I
know the audio quality could be better. So I stopped that then played
Minecraft, now I use it to SSH into my house and WOL my ESXi servers, get the
ipmi data from the servers and some simple Node stuff.

This is the Pi B v1 (256MB) I'm thinking about getting a v2 now.

~~~
laumars
I have a Pi B v1 and it's analogue out is definitely stereo. The problem I had
(which is persistent right across their range of boards) is the popping sound
that happens at the start of audio because of the voltage change on the chip.
There's been some workarounds to try and reduce the severity of the popping
(namely building a fast volume change at the start of clips and using an
"always on" sound server like Pulse. But annoyingly the only real fix seems to
be to using a cheap USB audio adapter. So I've now come to the conclusion that
the Raspberry Pi isn't the best development board for audio projects. However
for $35, I have no regrets in buying one (in fact I still bought a 2nd one
even after learning about the aforementioned issues).

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johnchristopher
Not of a great help for audio projects but Raspbmc has fixed that popping
sound issue in quite a transparent way.

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laumars
You can't "fix" the popping sound issue in software as it's a hardware issue.
What Raspbmc does is use is the PulseAudio workaround that I'd described in my
previous post.

~~~
johnchristopher
I understand, I just wanted to point out it was transparent to the user.

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laumars
Nice list. With regards to your choice of music player, I know you said you
just wanted something easy to set up, but you might be better off with _mpd_
as you can use a whole bunch of different front ends to it; from web front
ends and native binary GUIs, through to command line clients. There's even
smartphone apps, so you can use your phone or tablet as a remote control to
your hifi.

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stadeschuldt
I am using my Raspberry Pi to record temperatures and humidity in my
apartment. After recording I generate nice charts using the HighCharts
library: [http://thule.mine.nu/html](http://thule.mine.nu/html)

How I did it:
[http://thule.mine.nu/html/about.html](http://thule.mine.nu/html/about.html)

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bcl
I use mine as Minecraft consoles for my kids. The next step is to teach them
Python and the API and let them modify their games.

~~~
DanBC
I'm surprised No Starch or PeachPit haven't brought out "Minecraft Modding"
books. They'd make a freaking fortune.

~~~
agaricus
Minecraft modding is changing far too fast, by the time a book was written,
edited, and published, it'd likely be largely obsolete, by my judgement. In
fact just today the release of Minecraft 1.6 has pretty much obsoleted
"jarmods" (direct replacement of classes in the minecraft.jar) by Mojang's new
launcher, not to mention a brand new resource pack system obsoleting texture
packs, as well as a large amount of internal refactoring.

This pattern has repeated throughout Minecraft's release cycle. Though with
Minecraft 1.0 it is no longer considered in "beta", each major version has
brought incompatible changes. Mojang doesn't use semantic versioning, needless
to say. Had a book been written around 1.2, it would have undoubtedly focused
on the singleplayer/multiplayer split, and the steps needed for modders to
develop SSP-only or SMP-compatible mods, but this distinction was blurred or
eliminated in 1.3. 1.3 was mostly a dead zone for modding, only to come back
in 1.4. With 1.4 we saw the introduction of new server implementations or
administration mods, combining either analogous functionality or proper
support for both leading modding frameworks, Forge and Bukkit (including
MCPC+, BukkitForge, ForgeEssentials, etc.).

Modding toolkits come and go: about a mere year ago, you might be modding with
ModLoader, ModLoaderMP, AudioMod. Or pure Minecraft Coder Pack (MCP), with no
APIs. Or lesser-known custom APIs. Nowadays, Forge ModLoader has basically
taken over ModLoader, and many modders have been moving to Forge for
compatibility and other reasons. IndustrialCraft, BuildCraft, Mystcraft,
Forestry.. all leaders in the Forge modding world. But there are still
factions of modders sticking with Risugami ML, or even using raw jarmod edits
like Better than Wolves. Not to mention - server-only "plugin" development
using Bukkit is almost a completely separate community. You have the vanilla
original CraftBukkit server implementation, then performance-focused forks
like Spigot, or other forks with their own goals like SportBukkit, Libigot, or
the mod-compatible MCPC+.. each with their own benefits. Fortunately most have
similar plugin compatibility, but a few add new APIs, or otherwise change
Minecraft behavior..

Bottom line, Minecraft modding is a hodgepodge of often-incompatible rapidly-
changing frameworks, built on an unstable rapidly-changing foundation (which
is obfuscated and has to be reverse-engineered each release, nonetheless).
There have been advancements to streamline this problem, and it is getting
better, but we're not out of the woods yet. Even tutorials you can find online
for modding – such as on the Minecraft Forge wiki, are frequently outdated. A
book would even be more so.

Nonetheless, I think you're right, it would be very nice if someone could pull
it off, putting out an informative yet updated book on Minecraft modding.
Maybe things will settle down and stabilize after the infamous Mojang
modding/plugin API is released.

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BruceIV
I use mine as an always-on home print server. I might come up with another
good use case for it later, but I'm good for now.

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quackerhacker
RE: file sharing/local NAS

Do any of you guys experience a bottleneck on the RPi's 100Mbps nic?

~~~
tuananh
It's a known issue (!?)
[http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4592](http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=4592)

~~~
quackerhacker
Thanks tuananh, I was wondering this. I've been debating between an RPi or a
WD My Book Live.

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tocomment
My Hdmi doesn't seem to work on my pi anymore. Should I get a new one?

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someperson
There's plenty of uses for Raspberry Pi that doesn't need video output.
Install a SSH server and run it headless.

Alternatively use composite video out. Raspberry Pis are cheap, so getting
another Model B (or Model A) for HD video output isn't a big deal..

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grigio
I trid ZoneMinder on raspberry as security camera, but it lags a lot

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werkshy
Zoneminder grinds my dual-core Atom to a halt. Try 'motion' for a simpler
system (well, simple if you like config-file setup) with about 25% of the CPU
usage. Plus, the viewing interface is just 'cd /motion; ls *avi' rather than
the slow and clunky web interface of ZM.

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vardump
It'd be interesting if someone could hack together something like motion, but
takes advantage of hardware h.264 encoding. Even if just for still frames.

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AsymetricCom
Is it really a good idea to put your email on a device like a Pi?

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OGC
considering you can get a fail-over for another 30$, why not?

the pi is a just a tiny computer, the usual rules and best practices apply.

ffs, if you want, you can run a mail server on your _phone_ which has more raw
computing power than a pi and similar power consumption.

~~~
bennyg
That'd be an interesting project to further subvert the unlimited data that
carriers hate.

