90 replies to this topic

[Brutus06]

<sup>Well I kept looking at all the pretty little gadgets that came with my Pi and decided to go a little different route.
While searching on Ebay I found these selling for $110.00 US with a couple of cables, a Wireless Dongle and a remote.
You can pick up the IR module and a remote for about $15.00 US but I'm just using my wireless keyboard and mouse for now to get things set up.

Mine is based on OpenElec not the RaspBmc OS as it is more compact and faster with some flexibility left.
You can do this for about $70.00 US with just the basics and a remote that actually cost less than the kits we won.
I started on my PC but soon migrated to the living room because that's where my cable modem and wireless router are.
Seems you need a hardwired ethernet internet connection when you first set it up so it will update itself (And it will do it every time if connected to the internet and restarted).

Was I ever surprised, TV, Movies, music - - anything you can stream from the internet is available with this little "Black Box" and your entertainment system.
Ha, I've got a Yamaha RX-V373 AV 5.1 Receiver, Klipsch 1000 series speakers 100 watts X 5 channels with a powered subwoofer capable of 450 watts RMS.
I don't want to sound mean but it will make Junior hide under the bed. Love my little buddy and would never cause him any harm.

Here are some pictures (Sorry about the quality on some, I had to install the Moto-X camera on my XT926 to get better quality):</sup>



Let me know what you think...

If you are using HDMI you may be able to use the TV remote to control your media center. I run raspbmc with an lg TV and have limited control but enough to comfortably use my pi with the remote instead of my tiny qwerty keyboard. The TV remote seems to have faster response time.

Sent from my XT1032 using Tapatalk

[Brutus06]

I have an LG Plasma and raspbmc. How did you make your remote work?

Sent from my XT1060 using Tapatalk

 

Mine worked "out of the box". it uses HDMI-CEC to pass the button press to the pi. You may need to upgrade your version of raspmbc, make sure you don't have a low quality HDMI cable or make sure the setting on the TV have CEC Enabled. I can't remember the exact name of the options on the TV. I will take a look when I get home. Ill post back in about 30 minutes with more info.

[Brutus06]

On an LG TV to have raspmbc controled by the Tv's remote you need to have SIMPLink option turned on.

Cec should be enabled out of the box on raspmbc if you have a new version. This link may help if you are having issues on the pi's side of things http://wiki.xbmc.org...x.php?title=CEC

I remember reading on some spots on the net while I was researching more into CEC that a low quality HDMI cable has given some people problems, idk if this is true or not though.

 

Also note that the amount of functionality passed to the Pi is decided by the TV vendor. For my TV I get fast forward, rewind, stop, play, directional buttons, ok and back.

 

I hope this helps

[dragonfly66]

I found out in the Engadet “what now” article that I can choose to install more than one OS on the same SD card and if I want to change my mind I can do a restore and install something different.  So I went ahead and installed Raspbian.

 

I am glad I was watching the screen because I would have missed important information had I let the install run with out watching.  It tells you the default username and password, and what is coming next, how to start the guy front eh command line, that you’ll have Scratch available to program with if you don’t have a programming language.  The install took longer than I expected, but not long in the real world, maybe 5-7 minutes. 

 

I realize when the install is finished I have no mouse connected, so I figure I can tab around on the keyboard.  I hit enter to continue and I get the config tool which I can get around with the keyboard.  So no mouse emergency yet.  I setup my hostname and other settings and then reboot.

 

This is where the trouble begins. After rebooting the screen is stuck on the splash screen.

 

 

I reboot several times and got different result each time, but for the most part I got a blank screen and couldn’t do anything with the RP.  I was able to see the screen where it says to hold the shift key down and I got the NOOBS screen again.  

 

 

I choose to install Raspbian again. While that was going on I searched the web for this problem because I’m sure I’m not the only one.  I found this troubleshooting guide, http://elinux.org/R-...er_.2F_Start-up and scrolled down to "Coloured splash screen” and found that this is a common issue and could be power related.  Apparently after booting it needs more power.  

 

NOTE: Why would you create a kit with a power supply that cannot power the basics (HDMI, keyboard, mouse) AND the  things in your kit (wifi USB, GPIO). So now it seems like if you plan to use USB devices, even the minimum devices to use the RP you have to get a powered USB hub. This is annoying.

So after reinstall, I don’t even get the config screen like I did on the first install. I get no display info coming from the RP.  So I unplug the USB Wifi (which I didn’t have to do before) and the device reboots itself.  I see the flash screen and then the boot traffic, then the config screen. I set my hostname and set it to boot into the command line and reboot.  Again no display, with only the SD card, HDMI and keyboard plugged in.  I tried another TV and I also tried with the RCA video out instead of HDMI.  NOTHING!  This doesn’t bode well for my future use of RP.  I am surprised it can’t reliably handle even the basic connections after installing the OS. We will see if a USB hub can overcome this problem. 

 

I have to keep telling myself that the point of the RP is to invent something around it, because as a computer, or a platform for coding and coding instruction there are better, more reliable options.

 

What I want to get to is integrating external hardware, which within the kit is the GPIO.  While Python seems to be the language of choice for RP development I am a Java developer and I want to code in Java.  I found this project that allows the use of Java for development, http://pi4j.com.  If I can get my RP up and running I'll give this a go.

 

[s3inks]

My RPI did something similar after first shutdown. Upon reboot I got no video out. I unplugged and replugged the power and the problem was resolved. The next day upon powering on, no video signal. I finally realized I wasn't getting the power cable completely plugged into the pi. There must have been enough power to boot because activity lights flashed bit that's it. From that day forward I've made sure the fully insert power cable and have had no problems.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[dragonfly66]

After looking through the troubleshooting page, http://elinux.org/R-...er_.2F_Start-up, I found a suggestion that wasn’t related to power issues.  Simply adding the line boot_delay=1 in the config.txt file seemed to fix the issue with the display. 

 

 

In some cases (Stuck on the Rainbow Screen), freezing at this point has been fixed by adding "boot_delay=1" to the config.txt file. This can be done from a Windows PC, which should show several files in the FAT partition on your SD card including bootcode.bin, kernel.img, and config.txt. You can open config.txt in wordpad or any text editor. Add "boot_delay=1" and save the file. Don't forget to 'eject' the card before removing it from the reader. If you are reading the SD card from a working Pi, you can edit the file with sudo nano /boot/config.txt

 

 

 

So I'm back in business now with the RP and will get to GPIO projects this week-end after getting the RP up-to-date. 

 

Though I plan to code in Java I do want and need to learn Python so I'll attempt some of these GPIO projects with Python and Java.

 

Simple GPIO project using Python, http://www.thirdeyev...m/pi-page-1.php & http://www.thirdeyev...m/pi-page-2.php

Another GPIO board, http://makezine.com/...ins-and-python/

And another, http://openmicros.or...gpio-and-python

[dragonfly66]

My RPI did something similar after first shutdown. Upon reboot I got no video out. I unplugged and replugged the power and the problem was resolved. The next day upon powering on, no video signal. I finally realized I wasn't getting the power cable completely plugged into the pi. There must have been enough power to boot because activity lights flashed bit that's it. From that day forward I've made sure the fully insert power cable and have had no problems.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

 

It could have been this too, I will keep this in mind if it happens again.

[GTIM2L8]

It could have been this too, I will keep this in mind if it happens again.

Yes, I noticed the same thing. The mini HDMI power connection isn't very good on some of these.
I just started unplugging the power supply from the wall instead.

You can get a USB power cable with a built-in power switch or use one of the button switches supplied in the kit and splice it into the original ac power supply.

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Xparent Red Tapatalk 2

[s3inks]

Yes, I noticed the same thing. The mini HDMI power connection isn't very good on some of these.
I just started unplugging the power supply from the wall instead.

You can get a USB power cable with a built-in power switch or use one of the button switches supplied in the kit and splice it into the original ac power supply.

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Xparent Red Tapatalk 2

http://www.amazon.co...3&robot_redir=1

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[dragonfly66]

Finally all setup.

 

I am still experiencing intermitent issues with getting stuck on the splash screen. It seems to happens anytime I do a reboot command as opposed to powering down and then powering back up. Sometimes powering down doesn't work either. Maybe I’ll try a 2 for the boot_delay value instead of 1.

 

Once I got the RP passed the splash screen I noticed that the content on the screen was off the screen where I couldn’t see it.  When I did the install I choose to boot to the command line because I didn’t have a mouse.  I couldn't see the prompt but was able to login and edit the /boot/config.txt file and uncomment these lines to force the screen to fit my TV.

framebuffer-width=1024
framebuffer-height=700

My next step was to update the RP, but before I can do that I needed to get connected to the internet.  I don’t have an ethernet drop close to my television where the RP is connected so I had to figure out how to setup wifi from the command line.  After a very short search I found out all I needed to do was update the /etc/network/interfaces file with 4 lines.  I first removed everything related to wlan0 and replaced it with the 4 lines below and then rebooted.

auto wlan0

iface wlan0 inet dhcp

wpa-ssid “<ssid>"

wps-psk “<pass phrase>"

Once connected to the internet I did the update, which took a while.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

Now it is on to the GPIO projects. I'll start playing with what is in the kit but I am already looking at expansion boards that can connect to the RP.  Here is a list (not sure how up-to-date it is) of the expansion boards that have been made for the RP, http://elinux.org/RPi_Expansion_Boards.  While looking around for expansion boards I also found other RP-like devices, BeagleBone Black and Arduino.

 

I'm trying to think of something interesting to build. I’m into music so I’ll probably come up with some project around music.  I have two small dogs and thought maybe I could build a game for them to get treats.

[GTIM2L8]

Yep, got kinda hooked on the RaspBmc setup with my original Pi.

 

It now resides on my entertainment center.

 

I just bought 2 more on Ebay.

 

I got 2 boards, 2 cases, 2 power supplies and 2 - 4gb SD cards to be shipped via USPS.

 

Looking at "Stacking" these and connecting them both together.

 

I should have them before the end of next week and I will post what I am doing with them.

 

BTW, anyone using RaspBmc tried changing skins yet?

[Brutus06]

I have. The light weight skins are nicer on the pi. It seems like the load times are less but you could loss some functionality like the mouse.

Sent from my XT1032 using Tapatalk

[s3inks]

I found an extra SD card so I'm going to load xbian on it and try the pi as an xbmc box while piecing together my brew setup. Speaking of that project, I got an arduino microcontroller and some temp probes this week to start playing with PID code. Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[GTIM2L8]

I found an extra SD card so I'm going to load xbian on it and try the pi as an xbmc box while piecing together my brew setup. Speaking of that project, I got an arduino microcontroller and some temp probes this week to start playing with PID code.Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

You may want to try Rasp BMC instead.
I found xbian to be laggy as OpenElec as well. Let us know how it works out.

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Xparent Red Tapatalk 2

[s3inks]

You may want to try Rasp BMC instead.
I found xbian to be laggy as OpenElec as well. Let us know how it works out.

Sent from my DROID RAZR HD using Xparent Red Tapatalk 2

Interesting. The info I found suggested otherwise. Openelec was listed as a lightweight xbmc only implementation. Lacking on functionality but more responsive. Rasbmc was explained as being built on top of the rasbian os giving it more Linux functionality but making it laggy and slower to boot. Xbian was supposed to be the compromise of the two.

I'll probably try all three as well at some point. SD cards are cheap.

Sent from my SCH-I535 using Tapatalk

[livinginkaos]

At my local Costco.....

 uploadfromtaptalk1396805951895.jpg   58.4KB   14 downloads

Sent From My DEV X

[Staf_in_Wah]

Nice!

Sent from my Unlocked GS3 that has somehow survived this long no thanks to me

[foxkat]

Do they sell the ingredients too? :-)

Sent from my XT1080 using Tapatalk

[livinginkaos]

Ha ha ha, no. They should though

Sent From My DEV X