The raspberry pi is basically a miniature computer. It is a credit card size board, that comes with: a processor, a GPU 512 GB RAM, a GPU, 2 USB ports, an Ethernet port, a HDMI & video (I.e. the yellow part of the three coloured cable) ports, and a micro USB power supply port. All for just over €30. It however, doesn’t come with: a hard drive, a Monitor, a keyboard, a mouse, an operating system (the thing that makes your computer run: i.e. windows or mac OS) or even a power supply. If you have a desktop, you will likely have most of the above requirements, you just need to transfer them from your desktop to your Pi. For an Operating System, you use Debian, a distro (sort of like a variation) of linux, and not unlike Ubuntu (another distro of linux), and for a hard drive, you use a SD card. If you don’t have a spare one lying around your house, an 8 GB class 10 SD card will cost you about €12. The SD card however, will NEED to be 4GB or over. For a power supply, any android charger will do, otherwise you can buy them with the pi on CPC. For laptop users (including myself), there is still (limited) hope. A mouse and keyboard are (relatively) cheap, and if you don’t want to buy them, you can get a loan of a friend’s for the initial setup and connect remotely You CAN use a TV as a monitor, as long as you have the appropriate cable to connect the two (HDMI, video connection, not sure about SCART however, you would need an adaptor, and whether you can get an adaptor, I don’t know). As it happens I don’t have a TV, so I had to borrow a friend’s monitor and keyboard for the initial setup. It is possible to run it completely wirelessly, but that’s very involved, and will be discussed later.
My project, is one that is extremely user-friendly, and one of the most useful applications of the Pi, to turn a TV into a smart TV. It does involve, however, installing a completely different OS on your Pi. The OS this time is called Raspbmc, and instructions on how to download it can be found on the website. It is based on Raspian, and supports FTP, SSH and HTTP by default. There is also wake on LAN support, which allows it to become inactive, and only turn on when it is requested by some other device. It also supports AirPlay, and AirTunes. To set it up, all you need to do, is install the OS, connect it to the TV via HTMI or any other suitable method, and boot. And there you have it, a Smart TV, no knowledge of linux is required, so it makes it easy to set up, however, if you want to mess around with the settings, there is extensive settings that can be fiddled with. And best of all, (this applies to all OS), if you brick the device, all you need to do is reflash the SD card, and reinstall the OS, and away you go.
I hope I have whetted your appetite, and I hope to be back with FAR more extensive RPi ideas, including streaming, and something along the lines of robots. The main website you will need is raspberrypi.org, you will get links off there to anything necessary. Cpc.farnell.com is also a handy website for ordering pi related products
I hope to be back next issue with more, interesting Pi ideas, including (hopefully) how to build a robot
Happy programming
Eoin Butler