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

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Zorak of Michigan: Jun 10, 2006

I've got a Flirc setup that integrated nearly into my existing Harmony universal remote setup. I prefer Kore for controlling Kodi, though, because being able to browse and seek on my phone works a lot better than doing so with the Harmony remote.

# ? May 24, 2015 20:53

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# ? May 11, 2024 14:07

Literally Lewis Hamilton: Feb 22, 2005

Zorak of Michigan posted:

I've got a Flirc setup that integrated nearly into my existing Harmony universal remote setup. I prefer Kore for controlling Kodi, though, because being able to browse and seek on my phone works a lot better than doing so with the Harmony remote.

I've got Flirc for at home with my Harmony as well. When I'm traveling I have a small keyboard/mouse combo device that allows me to do anything with XBMC and in a pinch use the keyboard for whatever OS I have set up on BerryBoot.

# ? May 24, 2015 20:57

redeyes: Sep 14, 2002; by Fluffdaddy

Hijo Del Helmsley posted:

The day I decide to make an emulator out of a rpi2, I come here, and this is the latest post.

Sweet, this is great news.

Totally just set this up as well, works great. Pretty nice for those times when I just want to play Super Mario 2 real quick to blow off some steam

# ? May 24, 2015 21:25

Pryor on Fire: May 14, 2013; they don't know all alien abduction experiences can be explained by people thinking saving private ryan was a documentary

37th Chamber posted:

Anyone have an experience with IR remotes for XBMC/Kodi? Any suggestions for receiver or remotes? Or are things like yatse for android still the best way to go.

The only answer to remote controls is HDMI CEC. It works so well and let me throw my a lovely HTPC IR remote in the garbage along with the stupid IR receiver hanging off my wall like a tumor so it's pretty great. I'm sure you already have an ok HDTV without CEC just uhhh use this as excuse to get a bigger tv with a nice panel and better color and CEC!

Pryor on Fire fucked around with this message at 22:02 on May 25, 2015

# ? May 25, 2015 21:59

phosdex: Dec 16, 2005

I use my tv remote too in hdmi cec but it only support a few buttons.

# ? May 25, 2015 22:10

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

I'm starting to explore c# mono on my B+ and I was wondering if you all have any opinions on whether I should go vi or Emacs. I know poo poo about either but I would prefer one with syntax highlighting and, preferably, the Intellisense-style autocomplete found in Visual Studio. I'm not a super-user by any means but I would prefer to write in C# if given the option since it is more popular than Python.

# ? May 25, 2015 22:43

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Don't pick languages based on popularity (within reason), and Python is incredibly popular with bindings for everything, basically.

But omnicomplete and Jedi and other completions are good. None are intellisense. You may be more comfortable with emacs, but vi is incredibly valuable because it'll be on every system you ever touch. Pick one and learn to love it.

Pick .NET if you want .NET for some reason (want static typing, managed memory, and OO but don't want Java, etc). Don't pick it because it's popular. Especially as a first-ish language. It's dramatically different from Python in almost every way without considering popularity, and one of those may be a good reason to pick it.

# ? May 25, 2015 23:25

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

Honestly I would go with neither. You'll be much more productive using Visual Studio on a PC and then copying the assembly over to the Pi to run. Coding on the Pi is still kinda painful with its low memory and speed.

For just making quick config file changes, etc. I like nano. It can't hurt to learn a few basics about vi/vim though, like how to get into insert mode and edit a document. Sometimes you might find yourself connected to a crazy old machine that only has vi so it does help to know some basic commands.

# ? May 25, 2015 23:26

My Rhythmic Crotch: Jan 13, 2011

When I have to do lots of coding on a remote machine, I make a network share (either samba or netatalk if you have a mac), mount that, and edit remotely. Then you can use whatever IDE you want. Of course you will still need to SSH in to run and/or compile but it's easily worth it.

My preferred text editor is still vim though if I do need to edit through command line.

# ? May 26, 2015 01:34

OnymousCoward: Feb 19, 2014

I use vim, it's installed on just about everything and composing commands is neat as hell.

Also comes with gVim, which is nice if you want to use it in a more GUI type environment (although I just run standard vim in a terminal).

# ? May 26, 2015 02:11

UncleBlazer: Jan 27, 2011

I'm a huge fan of vim (definitely use vim over vi) but emacs will do the job too. It all comes down to personal preference as they're two different beasts.

As for C# mono over Python? Hmmm. I don't know. C# is a very nice language but I just don't get on with mono, Python is definitely more of a first class citizen on Linux and I'd say the reverse for windows.

# ? May 26, 2015 16:57

durtan: Feb 21, 2006; Whoooaaaa

evol262 posted:

Don't pick languages based on popularity (within reason), and Python is incredibly popular with bindings for everything, basically.

But omnicomplete and Jedi and other completions are good. None are intellisense. You may be more comfortable with emacs, but vi is incredibly valuable because it'll be on every system you ever touch. Pick one and learn to love it.

Pick .NET if you want .NET for some reason (want static typing, managed memory, and OO but don't want Java, etc). Don't pick it because it's popular. Especially as a first-ish language. It's dramatically different from Python in almost every way without considering popularity, and one of those may be a good reason to pick it.

I actually started on C but C# drew me in with its lack of pointers and lack of malloc. I currently have some servomotor software I made in Python which allows me to control Arduino through a GUI on the Pi and I thought it'd be fun to try to convert it to C# in order to learn the language and because I was having issues with my Uno behaving properly through Python and the nanpy library I was using.

mod sassinator posted:

Honestly I would go with neither. You'll be much more productive using Visual Studio on a PC and then copying the assembly over to the Pi to run. Coding on the Pi is still kinda painful with its low memory and speed.

For just making quick config file changes, etc. I like nano. It can't hurt to learn a few basics about vi/vim though, like how to get into insert mode and edit a document. Sometimes you might find yourself connected to a crazy old machine that only has vi so it does help to know some basic commands.

I figured I'd write the code in VS2013 and just do copy paste magic since, as you say, the Pi is slow. But Linux is turning out to be quite interesting so I thought I'd build my Linux repertoire and I have no idea what's available out there. Visual Studio is incredibly sexy and it's hard to go to an editor like gedit after experiencing it. I downloaded both Vim and Emacs so I'll see which one sticks first.

# ? May 27, 2015 11:02

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

durtan posted:

I actually started on C but C# drew me in with its lack of pointers and lack of malloc. I currently have some servomotor software I made in Python which allows me to control Arduino through a GUI on the Pi and I thought it'd be fun to try to convert it to C# in order to learn the language and because I was having issues with my Uno behaving properly through Python and the nanpy library I was using.

There are comparatively few languages that let you manage your own memory these days, so that draw is all over the place.

One of the downsides you may find is that Python is very popular on Linux, and C# is... not. I was concerned that tooling support would be limited, but it looks like someone's on that.

durtan posted:

I figured I'd write the code in VS2013 and just do copy paste magic since, as you say, the Pi is slow. But Linux is turning out to be quite interesting so I thought I'd build my Linux repertoire and I have no idea what's available out there. Visual Studio is incredibly sexy and it's hard to go to an editor like gedit after experiencing it. I downloaded both Vim and Emacs so I'll see which one sticks first.

VS is a great editor, but it's also a huge crutch. .NET is, like Java and C++, far too large for anyone to keep inside their head, and it's pretty verbose. Visual Studio takes most of the pain out of doing it, and even makes writing C# comparatively easy. But learning to use a native editor is always a good idea.

# ? May 27, 2015 15:18

Jamsta: Dec 16, 2006; Oh you want some too? Fuck you!

evol262 posted:

far too large for anyone to keep inside their head

Trigger warning: don't make me white knight .NET boyo!

# ? May 27, 2015 16:05

Mr. Bubbles: Jul 19, 2012

Time-sensitive support needed!

So I made a photobooth-esque thing for a wedding this weekend. I have a raspberry pi w/ camera connected via HDMI to a small monitor with speakers. Everything is working as expected, except the shutter sound that is used to indicate that it is time for the next photo is delayed, such that the camera takes a photo, then it takes some time for the audio to be outputted via HDMI & monitor speakers. This is confusing for the people getting photographed. I'm thinking that instead of the shutter sound, I can do some kind of on-screen visual indicator (aside from the subtle cam preview pause when taking a photo).

Any ideas on displaying a temporary all-white screen (maybe with pygame?) just for a .25-.5 sec between photos?

Thanks!!

# ? May 27, 2015 18:18

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

Pygame is a pretty easy way to do it, here's a small script that would probably work (untested but I pulled it from something I did using pygame):

code:

#!/usr/bin/python
import time
import pygame

# Init fullscreen display and hide mouse cursor.
pygame.display.init()
pygame.mouse.set_visible(False)
size = (pygame.display.Info().current_w, pygame.display.Info().current_h)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size, pygame.FULLSCREEN)

# Fill screen with white RGB color.
screen.fill((255, 255, 255))
pygame.display.update()

# Wait 0.5 seconds.
time.sleep(0.5)

# ? May 27, 2015 18:29

Mr. Bubbles: Jul 19, 2012

That works great. You're my hero. Thank you

mod sassinator posted:

Pygame is a pretty easy way to do it, here's a small script that would probably work (untested but I pulled it from something I did using pygame):

code:

#!/usr/bin/python
import time
import pygame

# Init fullscreen display and hide mouse cursor.
pygame.display.init()
pygame.mouse.set_visible(False)
size = (pygame.display.Info().current_w, pygame.display.Info().current_h)
screen = pygame.display.set_mode(size, pygame.FULLSCREEN)

# Fill screen with white RGB color.
screen.fill((255, 255, 255))
pygame.display.update()

# Wait 0.5 seconds.
time.sleep(0.5)

# ? May 27, 2015 18:54

infinite99: Aug 9, 2006; ANY OF YALLS DICKS HARD??

Has anyone hooked up a load cell to measure weight? I've got everything working but it seems like the resolution I'm getting when measuring the voltage between weights is not high enough. I can see a change between large weight fluctuations but anything within a few grams doesn't seem to change the voltage.

I'm using a load cell from a kitchen scale, a 12 bit Analog to Digital converter (ADS1015), and an instrument amplifier (INA125P).

I'm not sure if I just have something hooked up wrong or maybe it's something in the programming that's not able to pick up the small changes in weight.

# ? May 27, 2015 19:28

BlackMK4: Aug 23, 2006; wat.; Megamarm

Well, what is the resolution from the original scale?

# ? May 27, 2015 23:50

infinite99: Aug 9, 2006; ANY OF YALLS DICKS HARD??

BlackMK4 posted:

Well, what is the resolution from the original scale?

3kg max, able to detect 1g.

# ? May 28, 2015 00:15

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

evol262 posted:

There are comparatively few languages that let you manage your own memory these days, so that draw is all over the place.

One of the downsides you may find is that Python is very popular on Linux, and C# is... not. I was concerned that tooling support would be limited, but it looks like someone's on that.

VS is a great editor, but it's also a huge crutch. .NET is, like Java and C++, far too large for anyone to keep inside their head, and it's pretty verbose. Visual Studio takes most of the pain out of doing it, and even makes writing C# comparatively easy. But learning to use a native editor is always a good idea.

Having a fantastic first-party IDE isn't really a crutch. There should be more IDEs that tie into their language really tightly, not less. There's a reason that all those Jetbrains products sell so well. I'm a big fan of Visual Assist X as well. Netbeans and IntelliJ are both pretty fantastic for Java.

Frankly I find C# to be a lot easier to keep inside of your head than Java just because it was designed more or less in a single attempt, so "stylistically" it's extremely consistent. I can guess where a class probably lives in the stdlib very easily, and I can guess what methods are probably on it. Java, on the other hand, was the pioneering attempt at this game and has thus accumulated 20 years of stylistic differences and inconsistent/deprecated behaviors that would require breaking changes to fix (and Sun/Oracle avoided breaking changes at all costs). Don't get me wrong, many classes in Java do have some rhyme and reason, but it's a lower percentage than C#. And C++/C are just monstrously large and inconsistent.

I do like the Java concept of checked exceptions but I think it does raise barriers to entry and complexity in some ways. It would be nice if methods could FORCE an exception type to be checked in .Net, but I do like that they're unchecked by default. Since performance of exceptions is kind of bad, the Java libraries that use exceptions as a standard procedure really bother me - there's no official equivalent of Integer.tryParse from .Net, you have to test integer-ness by seeing whether it throws.

I'm hoping Microsoft's open-sourcing of the CLR runtime goes well, it would be fantastic if it had more support/userbase on Linux.

Python is definitely the go-to in most Linux use-cases but it has a couple pitfalls. First off, unless you're using something that's compiled down into C code it's dogshit slow, and the Rpi is not an environment with an excess of processing power. For example when I switched from SABNZBDplus (Python) to NZBGet (C++) on my Rpi I had a >100% increase in performance. The other big limitation is the Global Interpreter Lock - only one thread is ever allowed to run on an instance of the Python interpreter at a time. This severely limits the use-cases of threading to situations where threads are mostly sleeping in parallel rather than working in parallel. The work-around is you launch multiple processes and do IPC but gently caress that, I'll just write Java instead. Python is great for small programs, scripting, and "glue" work, but in other cases it's pretty lovely.

Paul MaudDib fucked around with this message at 01:44 on May 28, 2015

# ? May 28, 2015 01:35

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Paul MaudDib posted:

Having a fantastic first-party IDE isn't really a crutch. There should be more IDEs that tie into their language really tightly, not less. There's a reason that all those Jetbrains products sell so well. I'm a big fan of Visual Assist X as well. Netbeans and IntelliJ are both pretty fantastic for Java.

Frankly I find C# to be a lot easier to keep inside of your head than Java just because it was designed more or less in a single attempt, so "stylistically" it's extremely consistent. I can guess where a class probably lives in the stdlib very easily, and I can guess what methods are probably on it. Java, on the other hand, was the pioneering attempt at this game and has thus accumulated 20 years of stylistic differences and inconsistent/deprecated behaviors that would require breaking changes to fix (and Sun/Oracle avoided breaking changes at all costs). Don't get me wrong, many classes in Java do have some rhyme and reason, but it's a lower percentage than C#. And C++/C are just monstrously large and inconsistent.

I do like the Java concept of checked exceptions but I think it does raise barriers to entry and complexity in some ways. It would be nice if methods could FORCE an exception type to be checked in .Net, but I do like that they're unchecked by default. Since performance of exceptions is kind of bad, the Java libraries that use exceptions as a standard procedure really bother me - there's no official equivalent of Integer.tryParse from .Net, you have to test integer-ness by seeing whether it throws.

I'm hoping Microsoft's open-sourcing of the CLR runtime goes well, it would be fantastic if it had more support/userbase on Linux.

Python is definitely the go-to in most Linux use-cases but it has a couple pitfalls. First off, unless you're using something that's compiled down into C code it's dogshit slow, and the Rpi is not an environment with an excess of processing power. For example when I switched from SABNZBDplus (Python) to NZBGet (C++) on my Rpi I had a >100% increase in performance. The other big limitation is the Global Interpreter Lock - only one thread is ever allowed to run on an instance of the Python interpreter at a time. This severely limits the use-cases of threading to situations where threads are mostly sleeping in parallel rather than working in parallel. The work-around is you launch multiple processes and do IPC but gently caress that, I'll just write Java instead. Python is great for small programs, scripting, and "glue" work, but in other cases it's pretty lovely.

I'm gonna take this with a huge "yes, but..."

The GIL sucks, and native code is faster by far, no dispute. VS being a first class editor isn't a bad thing, but it is a thing. C is very small.
(g)libc is not. Java is design by committee. But .NET still aped Java until 2.0 or 2.5, and that legacy remained.

It's easier to guess what namespace something is in. Buy .NET is huge. Not necessarily bad, but again, it is a thing to contend with. Someone writing entity framework, someone writing mvvc, and someone writing WPF+XAML are going to know mostly non-overlapping parts of .NET.

Java has the same problem, and .NET definitely improves in some places. I also hope .NET picks up steam. But it's huge, and sometimes unwieldy, and VS helps an awful lot versus needing to know what VS is introspecting or suggesting for completions. It's ok, but it's a real concern for a relatively new developer which can serve to counteract "C# is popular, why not use that?' argument. If you know what you're getting into and the pitfalls, great, but be aware of them

# ? May 28, 2015 03:57

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

infinite99 posted:

3kg max, able to detect 1g.

Check the range of values going into the ADC and make sure the change in weight isn't too small to be picked up by the ADC. For example if you're amplifying the load cell to 0-5V then the 12-bit ADC can detect changes of about 1mV (5/4096). Hook up a multimeter to the output of the amplifier and see if adding a few grams increases the voltage by less than a millivolt to confirm it's too small a change to pick up. If that's the case you probably want to change the gain of the amp so the range of input going into the ADC is lower, like from 0-1 volt. Also make sure the ADC has an external reference you can drive at 1 volt (IIRC the INA125P has a nice reference voltage output you can grab).

# ? May 28, 2015 04:55

Floor is lava: May 14, 2007; Fallen Rib

When the Raspberry Pi 2 displays a small rainbow square at the top right of the screen it is telling you it isn't getting enough power. Just posting this in case anyone else was wondering about it. Good to know if you're using retropie and things seem to be running too slow or causing issues audio.

# ? May 28, 2015 19:27

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

Actually that's what the GPU displays when it's booting up the kernel (since the GPU controls booting up on the Pi). So it might mean there's an issue with a corrupt SD card, bad kernel, etc. or perhaps not enough power to read the SD card and boot.

# ? May 28, 2015 19:43

infinite99: Aug 9, 2006; ANY OF YALLS DICKS HARD??

I think he's referring to when it's already booted up and you see the small rainbow square in the top corner. I think it has to do with when the OS has to access the SD card or like general I/O.

Also, thanks mod sassinator for the suggestions. I think right now I'm not getting the full 12 bit resolution from the ADC because I'm doing a single ended reading rather than a differential reading. I think I'm seeing a lot of noise too so I have to figure out how to wire the load cell up to get a differential reading which I'm not exactly sure how to wire up when there's the amplifier in the mix.

# ? May 28, 2015 20:23

Floor is lava: May 14, 2007; Fallen Rib

infinite99 posted:

I think he's referring to when it's already booted up and you see the small rainbow square in the top corner. I think it has to do with when the OS has to access the SD card or like general I/O.
...

I just switched to a powered usb hub and the square went away and games are emulating at full speed now. Maybe it's an all-around warning that something is wrong. Be it power or sd card.

# ? May 29, 2015 00:30

CheddarGoblin: Jan 12, 2005; oh

Huh crazy. I get the rainbow square thing sometimes during movie playing in openelec, but only when it's a gigantic file (like an AVC blu-ray rip). I figured it was indicating a chapter change or something, but it sounds like it's IO related? I wonder if switching from SMB to NFS share would help. It's hard wired.

# ? May 29, 2015 17:58

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

the nicker posted:

Huh crazy. I get the rainbow square thing sometimes during movie playing in openelec, but only when it's a gigantic file (like an AVC blu-ray rip). I figured it was indicating a chapter change or something, but it sounds like it's IO related? I wonder if switching from SMB to NFS share would help. It's hard wired.

Maybe. NFS is substantially faster than SMB.

# ? May 30, 2015 00:17

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

How about UPnP/DLNA as opposed to NFS? What has lower overhead? This would be serving out movies/tvshow via an Odroid-C1. Windows currently is a loving pain in the rear end to deal with and I think UPnP/DLNA would solve this issue.

YouTuber fucked around with this message at 03:22 on Jun 1, 2015

# ? Jun 1, 2015 01:35

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Do you mean DLNA?

# ? Jun 1, 2015 02:51

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

evol262 posted:

Do you mean DLNA?

Yeah I do, the language I used was rather clumsy in that post. Does running a UPNP/DLNA setup have a lower overhead than a NFS share? The Odroid-C1 seems to have no problems with NFS. However Windows has gotten lovely over it since Windows 7 and no longer has the service for NFS shares.

Presumably I'd use MiniDLNA for this task?

YouTuber fucked around with this message at 03:26 on Jun 1, 2015

# ? Jun 1, 2015 03:23

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

Maybe. NFS has very low overhead as is. The odroid is plenty fast. What interface is the drive on? I've run NFS off a sata ssd on a cubietruck, and my dlna server is virtualized with one haswell core over wifi to the roku/etc. What's your bottleneck? Are you sure it's NFS? CPU? Disk? DLNA isn't necessarily faster, though it might save you some bandwidth (hard to say without knowing exactly what your current setup is).

Also, unless you have serious objections to it, Plex is pretty much best in breed. You have to do a little javascript hacking to make it transcode on arm, but that's nbd

# ? Jun 1, 2015 04:57

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

evol262 posted:

What's your bottleneck? Are you sure it's NFS? CPU? Disk? DLNA isn't necessarily faster, though it might save you some bandwidth (hard to say without knowing exactly what your current setup is).

There isn't so much a bottleneck as an entire dam preventing NFS on anything past Windows 7 Ultimate. Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 don't have NFS capability and any hack to get it functional is usually some abandoned project that hardly works at the best of time.

My real question is whether a DLNA setup would spike my CPU and Memory to the limits when serving files, NFS doesn't seem to have much issue at all. I've used Samba to dole out media to the grognards but they keep forgetting their passwords and loving it up. A point and click solution is totally better.

# ? Jun 1, 2015 22:05

evol262: Nov 30, 2010; #!/usr/bin/perl

YouTuber posted:

There isn't so much a bottleneck as an entire dam preventing NFS on anything past Windows 7 Ultimate. Windows 8, 8.1 and 10 don't have NFS capability and any hack to get it functional is usually some abandoned project that hardly works at the best of time.

I wasn't sure if you were having performance issues like the other person. cifs is really close in speed anyway.

YouTuber posted:

My real question is whether a DLNA setup would spike my CPU and Memory to the limits when serving files, NFS doesn't seem to have much issue at all. I've used Samba to dole out media to the grognards but they keep forgetting their passwords and loving it up. A point and click solution is totally better.

Use anonymous cifs shares?

DLNA is fine on memory and CPU, mostly, but I've never looked at encode/reencode speed on cortex a5 or whatever's in the odroid. It may be way too slow, or it may work fine, or it may spike your CPU. Only one way to find out.

# ? Jun 1, 2015 22:17

Hughmoris: Apr 21, 2007; Let's go to the abyss!

The OP looks to be about 3 years old. For those interested in picking up a Rasberry Pi, is there any recommended packages or places to buy it? It looks like Amazon has a variety of Pi 2 kits, not sure if one stands out from the others.

# ? Jun 6, 2015 04:16

YouTuber: Jul 31, 2004; by FactsAreUseless

Hughmoris posted:

The OP looks to be about 3 years old. For those interested in picking up a Rasberry Pi, is there any recommended packages or places to buy it? It looks like Amazon has a variety of Pi 2 kits, not sure if one stands out from the others.

Depends what you're going to use it for. For most projects a Raspberry Pi 2 would probably be a better choice since the community is larger and has more development around it. If you're looking to make a downloading Torrent/Usenet box you'll want to get an Odroid-C1 since the USB and Ethernet port aren't fighting each other for bandwith.

# ? Jun 6, 2015 05:29

Hadlock: Nov 9, 2004

The A+ is interesting in that it only draws about 130ma which makes it plausible for solar powered projects, a 6v solar panel the size of your palm will happily power it plus the edimax WiFi nub in direct sunlight, and you get access to the great majority of Pi software, even if it does run slower due to less ram. I have two A+ "brained" battery powered robots.

# ? Jun 6, 2015 11:37

Crack: Apr 10, 2009

In other words, do you have any specific projects in mind? If not I'd go for the Pi 2, it has double the ram and a better processor, so even if you lose interest you can make a decent emulator or something. If Open Source is your thing and you are more interested in lots of pins, the beaglebone black is pretty good (I think the SoC is open and has documentation unlike the Pi, and I think the same networking things apply as to the Odroid-C1). If you want to hack the chip or something, this is definitely a good choice. Or if you have a super specialised project and are more interested in the electronics side of things, an arduino might be the answer (this is in certain circumstances, it can't run an OS but is great for certain things, and it's all open source!). That's not to say you can't have fun with the pins in the Pi. That's pretty much my only complaint about the Pi, it isn't open hardware (well, not only complaint, but the others usually trail back to closed Broadcom).

So, yeah, what're your plans for it? I would recommend picking one up anyway as it's a lot of fun and extensible. That should also control your decision on what kit to buy if any. I had everthing I needed except for a speedy sd card so I just bought the board, sd card, a case (not necessary but I am clumsy). I also got a powered USB hub (amazon basics) which can power the Pi and network advice notwithstanding some wifi cards on there too (some can act up on the built in ones, so I've been told). I recommend the TP-LINK TL-WN722N if you want to get up to some mischief.

Again, depends on what you want to do, but I recommend shunning the gui and in raspi-config set the ram option to minimum. The edimax adapter is good for sshing in.

# ? Jun 6, 2015 15:23

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# ? May 11, 2024 14:07

FatUglyUseless: Dec 6, 2013

Hughmoris posted:

The OP looks to be about 3 years old. For those interested in picking up a Rasberry Pi, is there any recommended packages or places to buy it? It looks like Amazon has a variety of Pi 2 kits, not sure if one stands out from the others.

If you have a microcenter near you, they have them on the shelf. Along with accessories.

# ? Jun 8, 2015 01:30

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

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