Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again

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Paul MaudDib: May 3, 2006; TEAM NVIDIA:
FORUM POLICE

Amberskin posted:

Unrelated question: Do any of you guys have trouble feeding the Raspberry Pi B+? Mine is very picky with the USB cables, and does not work with two cables which feed other raspberry pi Bs without any problem. But the B+ does not want to work with those: it enters a reboot loop and never goes beyond the kernel loading (it reboots as soon as it mounts the root partition). Except if I use two specific cables (which are not special in any way btw).

Just to echo the crowd, I had my own power issues with the Pi. It's extremely picky about power quality and delivery. I also agree that the SD slot is garbage.

I decided to spring for something a bit nicer than the Pi as a media PC. I bought a prebuilt Zotac Zbox with a dual-core Haswell for $160 shipped. Gets you 2gb of memory (upgradable with 2 slots), an internal 64gb eMMC disk, a 2.5" internal bay, 4x USB 3.0 ports, gig ethernet that's not on the USB bus, and a Windows 8.1 license.

It's way more expandable, still only pulls 15w at load, and it'll also run Sonarr instead of just being a dedicated OpenELEC box. The Pi is a cute concept and throwaway hardware has its place, but I'm tired of dealing with underspecced and cheaply-built hardware. My new box doesn't poo poo itself if I pop a flash, it doesn't have mystery issues with power cords and flash cards, I can get data on and off it at reasonable speeds, and it's not a sealed black-box from a lovely OEM. It's just worth paying a bit more.

# ? Feb 13, 2015 21:53

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# ? May 9, 2024 21:27

PBCrunch: Jun 17, 2002; Lawrence Phillips Always #1 to Me

I wanted a Raspberry Pi 2, but got impatient, so I ordered an Odroid-C1 instead. I intend to use it as for console game emulation and for Plex access.

Then I ordered a RPi A+ just to mess around with. The first idea that came to mind was a system to alert my wife and I when the washer and dryer are finished. Is there an (cheap) ammeter I can connect to the GPIO pins and then wrap around the cords of the washer and dryer so the RPi will know when the machines are finished running (and then send an email, or better yet SMS)?

PBCrunch fucked around with this message at 17:42 on Feb 14, 2015

# ? Feb 14, 2015 17:37

Thanks Ants: May 21, 2004; #essereFerrari

Something like this?

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/11005

# ? Feb 14, 2015 17:53

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

Anyone know of a means of controlling Google Music via a web player? Most I've seen appear to just use your library. I want to attach my Raspberry Pi to my stereo and just use that to listen to music and control it via my phone.

# ? Feb 14, 2015 21:20

eddiewalker: Apr 28, 2004; Arrrr ye landlubber

YouTuber posted:

Anyone know of a means of controlling Google Music via a web player? Most I've seen appear to just use your library. I want to attach my Raspberry Pi to my stereo and just use that to listen to music and control it via my phone.

http://www.woutervanwijk.nl/pimusicbox/

# ? Feb 14, 2015 21:29

Nystral: Feb 6, 2002; Every man likes a pretty girl with him at a skeleton dance.

Paul MaudDib posted:

I decided to spring for something a bit nicer than the Pi as a media PC. I bought a prebuilt Zotac Zbox with a dual-core Haswell for $160 shipped. Gets you 2gb of memory (upgradable with 2 slots), an internal 64gb eMMC disk, a 2.5" internal bay, 4x USB 3.0 ports, gig ethernet that's not on the USB bus, and a Windows 8.1 license.

What model is this?

# ? Feb 16, 2015 03:52

wooger: Apr 16, 2005; YOU RESENT?

Paul MaudDib posted:

The Pi is a cute concept and throwaway hardware has its place, but I'm tired of dealing with underspecced and cheaply-built hardware. My new box doesn't poo poo itself if I pop a flash, it doesn't have mystery issues with power cords and flash cards, I can get data on and off it at reasonable speeds, and it's not a sealed black-box from a lovely OEM. It's just worth paying a bit more.

This sums up exactly how I feel for use-cases like this.

How quiet is this Zbox & what are you planning as a remote?

# ? Feb 16, 2015 19:01

nosl: Jan 17, 2015; CHIM, bitch!

I have a question for you all. I prefer compiling to binaries, for justifiable reasons. For this reason I use Gentoo as my primary distro. I was wondering if it's possible to convert CPU power across architecture to the pi so it can share compiling power via distcc? I know this is far fetched, that's why I'm asking. I just don't want to spend 5 months compiling xorg for example.

# ? Feb 16, 2015 19:50

mod sassinator: Dec 13, 2006; I came here to Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum,
and I'm All out of Ass

Yeah you can setup a cross compiler that's controlled remotely. It's a gigantic pain and there is really no benefit to compiling stuff yourself on the Pi though, since Raspbian is already quite optimized for the Pi's ARM11 architecture. OpenFrameworks has a good guide here though: http://www.openframeworks.cc/setup/raspberrypi/Raspberry-Pi-DISTCC-guide.html I never really got it working when I tried, but I've heard from other folks it can be done.

# ? Feb 16, 2015 20:01

Xenomorph: Jun 13, 2001

Could I have a Raspberry Pi run a script with a cronjob that cuts power to one of its USB ports?

Like, for something that just gets power from USB (no data), I want to simulate the unplugging of the cord, and plugging it back in.

I have something that I'd like to powercycle or reboot on a regular basis.

I saw this, which mentioned that newer kernels may not be able to cut power so easily:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4702216/controlling-a-usb-power-supply-on-off-with-linux

If I cannot get a script to cut power to USB, would rebooting the Pi be sufficient to drop power to the USB ports? I guess this one is simple enough for me to try on my own. I was just wondering if anyone else had done this already.

# ? Feb 16, 2015 23:13

sleepy gary: Jan 11, 2006

Xenomorph posted:

Could I have a Raspberry Pi run a script with a cronjob that cuts power to one of its USB ports?

Like, for something that just gets power from USB (no data), I want to simulate the unplugging of the cord, and plugging it back in.

I have something that I'd like to powercycle or reboot on a regular basis.

I saw this, which mentioned that newer kernels may not be able to cut power so easily:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4702216/controlling-a-usb-power-supply-on-off-with-linux

If I cannot get a script to cut power to USB, would rebooting the Pi be sufficient to drop power to the USB ports? I guess this one is simple enough for me to try on my own. I was just wondering if anyone else had done this already.

Not as far as I know, but you could use a GPIO to control a relay to accomplish that with some extra work.

# ? Feb 16, 2015 23:16

Captain Cool: Oct 23, 2004; This is a song about messin' with people who've been messin' with you

I need some perspective on which way to go for my first raspberry pi project. I need a super fast boot (1 second desired, 2 seconds max) and a few bytes of nonvolatile storage. I don't need video, networking, or usb. Would it be easier to strip down a kernel to get that boot time, or build up from bare metal to get sd card access?

# ? Feb 16, 2015 23:41

mod sassinator: Dec 13, 2006; I came here to Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum,
and I'm All out of Ass

Bare metal on the Pi is tough because you need Broadcom's magic closed source blob to make it boot. It's do-able but not fun: http://www.raspberrypi.org/bare-metal-tetris-duel/

You can try stripping down the Raspbian kernel, but I have a feeling getting a 1 second boot is going to be really, really difficult. If you're doing something with such strict timing demands you probably want a chip that's easier to run bare metal, like a ARM Cortex M series, Arduino, etc. and then maybe have a Pi talk to it over a serial connection once the Pi has booted up. I.e. let the dedicated CPU do whatever tasks demand fast and accurate timing, then let the Pi be the slow Linux machine that talks to networks, etc.

# ? Feb 16, 2015 23:47

Captain Cool: Oct 23, 2004; This is a song about messin' with people who've been messin' with you

I've seen people demonstrate three second boots with video. Do you really not gain anything by removing video?

I started off with an arduino but I couldn't add enough ram and the speed was really marginal for handling audio.

# ? Feb 17, 2015 00:09

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Captain Cool posted:

I need some perspective on which way to go for my first raspberry pi project. I need a super fast boot (1 second desired, 2 seconds max) and a few bytes of nonvolatile storage. I don't need video, networking, or usb. Would it be easier to strip down a kernel to get that boot time, or build up from bare metal to get sd card access?

1 second boot is the realm of starting from the ground up on an embedded linux build, and having a really good grasp of all of the components. We had a vendor in the office last year that specialized in making configurable, stripped-down linux builds, and even they were saying it would take some work to optimize everything for really quick boots. You'll also probably need a good understanding of the bootloader and the kernel to really get into the <1 second territory.

# ? Feb 17, 2015 02:17

mod sassinator: Dec 13, 2006; I came here to Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum,
and I'm All out of Ass

I would look at a Teensy if a normal Arduino was too small for you. They're fast (up to 96mhz) and have a lot more program space (256kb). There's even some DSP functions you can use if you're doing audio related stuff. Check them out here: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html

# ? Feb 17, 2015 03:20

Captain Cool: Oct 23, 2004; This is a song about messin' with people who've been messin' with you

Slanderer posted:

1 second boot is the realm of starting from the ground up on an embedded linux build, and having a really good grasp of all of the components. We had a vendor in the office last year that specialized in making configurable, stripped-down linux builds, and even they were saying it would take some work to optimize everything for really quick boots. You'll also probably need a good understanding of the bootloader and the kernel to really get into the <1 second territory.

All right, thanks. I'll start with bare metal instead.

mod sassinator posted:

I would look at a Teensy if a normal Arduino was too small for you. They're fast (up to 96mhz) and have a lot more program space (256kb). There's even some DSP functions you can use if you're doing audio related stuff. Check them out here: https://www.pjrc.com/teensy/index.html

I want to buffer up a bunch of audio, so I need 4 megabytes of ram. I would have tried it on arduino if I could find an sram chip in that size with parallel addressing.

mod sassinator posted:

Bare metal on the Pi is tough because you need Broadcom's magic closed source blob to make it boot. It's do-able but not fun: http://www.raspberrypi.org/bare-metal-tetris-duel/

I was planning on following this guide. Is there magic in the "bootloader 4" linked there or is there something else I'll need?

edit: nevermind, it must be bootcode.bin/start.elf that he tells you to grab from github.com/raspberrypi

edit2: Finally got this working. For the record, skip Cygwin and crosstool-ng; maybe some versions work but the current ones don't. Follow Baking Pi instead, with Yagarto and MinGW. Yagarto is deprecated but works better than its replacement. With MinGW's bin folder in your path you can build dwelch67's examples and go from there.

Captain Cool fucked around with this message at 04:42 on Mar 17, 2015

# ? Feb 17, 2015 05:00

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

If you just want to do embedded audio, consider forgetting at the Raspberry Pi and looking at some of Texas Instruments' DSPs. They have some cheap audio dev boards, as I recall.

# ? Feb 17, 2015 08:30

Kidney Stone: Dec 28, 2008; The worst pain ever!

So my Raspberry Pi kit just arrived about 20 minutes ago, and eventough I ordered a kit with the B+ model, the dealer sent me a 2 board

Looking at the invoice, it still says "Raspberry B+" - so, I'm not the one going to complain.

Can't wait to get home and get OpenElec installed (of course that has to wait until I get home from the garage where my car needs to have a MOT).

# ? Feb 17, 2015 11:09

Literally Lewis Hamilton: Feb 22, 2005

B+ Model.

I have a 2.5" 500gig HD from a laptop that I bought an enclosure for. It isn't being recognized and I can hear it clicking as if it isn't getting enough power. I've tried max_usb_current=1 & safe_mode_gpio=4 in the config.txt but neither work. It has a Y power cord and I've tried it with both commands and both plugs in, as well as removing anything else from the ports. I have a 2.1A solid USB charger.

What am I missing here?

# ? Feb 18, 2015 03:17

Haquer: Nov 15, 2009; That windswept look...

Bovril Delight posted:

B+ Model.

I have a 2.5" 500gig HD from a laptop that I bought an enclosure for. It isn't being recognized and I can hear it clicking as if it isn't getting enough power. I've tried max_usb_current=1 & safe_mode_gpio=4 in the config.txt but neither work. It has a Y power cord and I've tried it with both commands and both plugs in, as well as removing anything else from the ports. I have a 2.1A solid USB charger.

What am I missing here?

The Pi likely isn't giving it enough power, you'll have to use the Y splitter into an external power source to give it more juice, likely.

# ? Feb 18, 2015 03:29

Space Gopher: Jul 31, 2006; BLITHERING IDIOT AND HARDCORE DURIAN APOLOGIST. LET ME TELL YOU WHY THIS SHIT DON'T STINK EVEN THOUGH WE ALL KNOW IT DOES BECAUSE I'M SUPER CULTURED.

Bovril Delight posted:

B+ Model.

I have a 2.5" 500gig HD from a laptop that I bought an enclosure for. It isn't being recognized and I can hear it clicking as if it isn't getting enough power. I've tried max_usb_current=1 & safe_mode_gpio=4 in the config.txt but neither work. It has a Y power cord and I've tried it with both commands and both plugs in, as well as removing anything else from the ports. I have a 2.1A solid USB charger.

What am I missing here?

A powered hub.

The Pi isn't built to deliver substantial current over USB. 100 mA per port is a good safe limit - you can stretch that a bit, but not too much. At 1A or so you're just beating your poor polyfuses to death. The usb_max_current option is there for devices that misreport their power needs, and turning it on won't magically improve the hardware.

# ? Feb 18, 2015 03:30

Literally Lewis Hamilton: Feb 22, 2005

Space Gopher posted:

A powered hub.

The Pi isn't built to deliver substantial current over USB. 100 mA per port is a good safe limit - you can stretch that a bit, but not too much. At 1A or so you're just beating your poor polyfuses to death. The usb_max_current option is there for devices that misreport their power needs, and turning it on won't magically improve the hardware.

I've read a lot of folks are able to use an external HD on the B+ without problems. I realize it may not be ideal for the hardware but it seems doable.

# ? Feb 18, 2015 03:58

mod sassinator: Dec 13, 2006; I came here to Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum,
and I'm All out of Ass

It depends on your hard drive though, if it's trying to pull too much power then you'll need a powered hub.

# ? Feb 18, 2015 04:10

Captain Cool: Oct 23, 2004; This is a song about messin' with people who've been messin' with you

Slanderer posted:

If you just want to do embedded audio, consider forgetting at the Raspberry Pi and looking at some of Texas Instruments' DSPs. They have some cheap audio dev boards, as I recall.

I'll keep that in mind. Can you link some of them? I think my searches are turning up older dev kits.

# ? Feb 18, 2015 04:50

beuges: Jul 4, 2005; fluffy bunny butterfly broomstick

Does the Pi 2 have a separate OS image from the previous ones? I'd expect it would, since the CPU architecture is different, but the downloads page on raspberrypi.org doesn't seem to have different images for them. Is software built for the older boards binary compatible with the newer ones?

# ? Feb 18, 2015 09:34

Kidney Stone: Dec 28, 2008; The worst pain ever!

beuges posted:

Does the Pi 2 have a separate OS image from the previous ones? I'd expect it would, since the CPU architecture is different, but the downloads page on raspberrypi.org doesn't seem to have different images for them. Is software built for the older boards binary compatible with the newer ones?

The version of OpenElec on the Noobs selection screen is made for the Pi 2.

# ? Feb 18, 2015 09:55

Slanderer: May 6, 2007

Captain Cool posted:

I'll keep that in mind. Can you link some of them? I think my searches are turning up older dev kits.

I think I have the C5535 dev kit around somewhere, but they make kits for a lot of other chips in that line:

http://www.ti.com/tool/tmdx5505ezdsp
http://www.ti.com/tool/tmdx5515ezdsp
http://www.ti.com/tool/tmdx5535ezdsp

They also have an addon board for one of their cheap launchpad platforms:
http://www.ti.com/tool/430boost-c55audio1#1

Not sure how good the software libraries for any of these are, or if they are suitable for what you're trying to do, though

beuges posted:

Does the Pi 2 have a separate OS image from the previous ones? I'd expect it would, since the CPU architecture is different, but the downloads page on raspberrypi.org doesn't seem to have different images for them. Is software built for the older boards binary compatible with the newer ones?

I was wondering that too, and I just found it: On the download page, hit the "more info+" link for any of the downloads. It will then tell you whether each supports RPI 1 or RPI 1 + 2. I assume that Feb 2 / 3 release added RPI 2 support to a handful of them.

Slanderer fucked around with this message at 19:16 on Feb 18, 2015

# ? Feb 18, 2015 19:13

mod sassinator: Dec 13, 2006; I came here to Kick Ass and Chew Bubblegum,
and I'm All out of Ass

Yeah I read somewhere their image has two kernels, kernel.img (Pi 1) and kernel7.img (Pi 2), and the firmware picks the right kernel to load at boot. For all the programs I think they're still just compiled with the ARMv6 architecture and the Pi 2's later ARMv7 architecture is backward compatible.

# ? Feb 18, 2015 20:23

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

Finally had a chance to sit down and gently caress with my Odroid again. Installed Arch on it and have Kodi running in a standalone X session. Had a few problems with the X Session not recognizing keyboard or remote control inputs but some that was quickly rectified.

Incase someone else hits this roadblock here is the solution I had to use.

Add this to the 99-mali-c1.conf file in the /etc/xorg.conf.d folder

code:

Section "ServerFlags"        
Option          "AutoAddDevices" "False"
Option          "AllowEmptyInput" "no"
EndSection

After that I had a run in with Pulseaudio so I decided to say fuckit and just used ALSA. There is some rough edges going on that I need to look into; I added my TV Tuner as a source, when I boot Kodi up I get a some sort of error about Mac address failed. The tuner is functional so I'm not sure what the hell it's gibbering for. Mpeg2 hardware decoding works, unlike the Android build I was using and is my primary concern for any Kodi builds. All I have left to do is disable root login, generate some ssh keys and give the user permissions and poo poo and make Kodi autostart. Depending on how responsive the Electronic Program Guide is I may end up running MythTV behind this so it can feed data.

# ? Feb 20, 2015 04:16

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

What is the cheapest out the door price for a Pi 2.0 1GB? I am seeing $48 shipped on ebay, can anyone beat that?

# ? Feb 20, 2015 08:21

Silver Alicorn: Mar 30, 2008; 𝓪 𝓻𝓮𝓭 𝓹𝓪𝓷𝓭𝓪 𝓲𝓼 𝓪 𝓬𝓾𝓻𝓲𝓸𝓾𝓼 𝓼𝓸𝓻𝓽 𝓸𝓯 𝓬𝓻𝓮𝓪𝓽𝓾𝓻𝓮

Dave Jones covered the xenon flash issue on his vblog.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SrDfRCi1UV0

# ? Feb 20, 2015 08:24

RattiRatto: Jun 26, 2014; :I'd like to borrow $200M

:To make vidya game

Raspberry Pi, really nice slice of cake.
I have used it for many side projects, especially related to 3d printing. However the fact that it has a OS on it is sometimes a problem, that's why i'm still more an Arduino user

# ? Feb 20, 2015 10:13

JawnV6: Jul 4, 2004; So hot ...

Sometimes you need 100,000x the memory of a typical Arduino and the OS is a worthwhile price to pay.

# ? Feb 20, 2015 18:54

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

Now that people are writing assembly on bare metal pi, how far away are we from an arduino style bootloader with serial over gpio? That would be nearly the same as arduino but with a 1ghz processor and 1gb ram, and reading from SD instead of internal chip flash.

# ? Feb 20, 2015 19:22

Zero VGS: Aug 16, 2002; ASK ME ABOUT HOW HUMAN LIVES THAT MADE VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS ARE WORTH MORE; Lipstick Apathy

I picked up a Rpi 2 to experiment with as a guest terminal for our office.

- Is there an OS or shell that can make it as Windows-like as possible for my not-so-saavy users?

- What is the most feature complete flavor of Chrome I can run on this? I tried putting Chromium onto the NOOBS install using that repository thing, but it is pretty hosed up and can't display even the front page of youtube.

# ? Feb 20, 2015 22:43

FatUglyUseless: Dec 6, 2013

AdaFruit had the 2 in stock for an hour or so yesterday. By the time I got back home, they were gone.

# ? Feb 22, 2015 04:40

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

Zero VGS posted:

- Is there an OS or shell that can make it as Windows-like as possible for my not-so-saavy users?

Cinnamon is pretty close to a Windows experience. Also I believe ZorinOS was going for an almost identical look to Windows.

Try Epiphany for the web browser. The Raspberry Pi folks were working to make that use hardware video decoding for poo poo.

# ? Feb 22, 2015 04:52

Zero VGS: Aug 16, 2002; ASK ME ABOUT HOW HUMAN LIVES THAT MADE VIDEO GAME CONTROLLERS ARE WORTH MORE; Lipstick Apathy

YouTuber posted:

Cinnamon is pretty close to a Windows experience. Also I believe ZorinOS was going for an almost identical look to Windows.

Try Epiphany for the web browser. The Raspberry Pi folks were working to make that use hardware video decoding for poo poo.

I think Cinnamon and Zorin haven't been compiled for RPi and Epiphany seems to be balls-slow with a lot of stuff.

I think I might also nab a Odroid-C1 like I've seen a few people here do. It runs full Ubuntu and Android, either of which I could use to greater effect than Raspbian, and the C1 claims to have H.265 decoding which would be awesome to drive the 4K HDTVs we have.

Anyone know the cheapest place to source those right now without a long wait?

# ? Feb 22, 2015 06:16

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# ? May 9, 2024 21:27

Amberskin: Dec 22, 2013; We come in peace! Legit!

Zero VGS posted:

I think Cinnamon and Zorin haven't been compiled for RPi and Epiphany seems to be balls-slow with a lot of stuff.

I think I might also nab a Odroid-C1 like I've seen a few people here do. It runs full Ubuntu and Android, either of which I could use to greater effect than Raspbian, and the C1 claims to have H.265 decoding which would be awesome to drive the 4K HDTVs we have.

Anyone know the cheapest place to source those right now without a long wait?

I got mine from Korea, with one week transit time (and two weeks wait at the customs offices

). I live in Spain.

# ? Feb 22, 2015 12:27

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Serious Hardware/Software Crap > Raspberry Pi: yeah we're pretty much all on desktops again

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