Raspberry Pi

Well I finally did it! I broke down and bought my very own Raspberry Pi. No I am not obsessed with fruity confectioneries and yes I know how to spell “pie”. A “Raspberry Pi” is an amazingly powerful, amazingly full featured, amazingly compact and amazingly inexpensive computer. For $35 you can own a 3” x 5” PCB with built-on processor, 256 MB memory, RCA composite video, HDMI port, dual USB ports, SD card slot, audio port, and Ethernet LAN port. Using free utilities and one of several free open source OS options you place a bootable Linux on an SD card. The device then will boot from the SD card into Linux with the drivers all loaded and ready to use.

Beyond the obvious possibilities for general development and experimentation, I have two specific projects that I am going to work on. One cool thing about having the OS loaded on an SD card is that you can potentially work on multiple projects over the same development time by swapping out the various SD cards associated with each project.

The initial project that was the main driving force for buying the Pi was to function as the brain for an X10 smart home.  I have been working with X10 for a year or two including creating a set of PHP web pages to control various X10 enabled devices within the house. These pages can then be accessed from any internet web browser. I have a dream that this could someday become a business venture.

The second project is more just for personal use. I would like to have a media server that hooks up to our entertainment center. I have done this in the past using hardware that I had lying around. The problem was that said hardware was usually desktop class items. Using desktop hardware takes quite a bit more power than laptop or even smaller electronics. To get around this I tried to leave the media server shut down while not in use. We could then issue a Wake-on-LAN packet to start the PC up. This ended up being a pain and more than the other members of the family really wanted to deal with. I have enough spare laptop hardware to provide three systems for Tigermomma, myself and the Tiger Cubs. Plus spare parts to keep these three ancient units going. But I don’t have enough hardware to have a laptop server dedicated to media. So I had this great idea to use the Raspberry Pi as a media server. This would make a cheap and energy efficient solution.

I thought that I would document my Pi adventures in case they prove interesting to others. Let the fun begin……