One of the advantages of being (hopefully temporarily) unemployed is that you get a bit of time on your hands. Rather than spend my spare moments finding out what all the Breaking Bad-related fuss was about or recreating nostalgic childhood memories in Minecraft, I thought I'd try and do something a bit more productive.
As if almost by magic*, the kind folks at my old work saw fit to furnish me with one of these as a parting gift:
(*I may have given some hints.)
So, for the uninitiated, that's a Raspberry Pi, a kind of bare-bones, supercheap computer with which you can do all kinds of cool things.
As you can see though, it doesn't look much like your conventional laptop but all the basics in terms of the hardware are there, you're just missing the peripherals - screen, keyboard, hard drive etc. These can all be plugged in to the various slots around the unit: there's two USBs for mouse/keyboard/WiFi, an HDMI connector so you can plug it in to your TV and a slot underneath for SD cards (like you have in your camera), which serve as mini-hard drives. Once you've got all those plugged in, you're good to go.
While the use of the Raspberry Pi was originally intended as a cheap, risk free computer on which kids could learn to code, already in its relatively short lifespan it's been turned into all sorts of awesome things: a mini-Street Fighter 2 arcade machine, a quadcopter drone, cool music synths and even sent into space.
I think perhaps my ambitions for the Raspberry Pi lie a little closer to home though, so I'm going to start off trying to work out how to turn it into a home media centre, plugged into the TV, streaming music in from the internet and my other computers over the WiFi. Well, that's the plan anyway.
And if I get bored, who knows what geeky delights this might offer up:
Hi mate. Phil (off of Lolly and Phil) from Sydney here. Didn't know about the job, hope that's not too much of a pain in the arse and that you get something more excellent soon.
ReplyDeleteOn the RPi media centre front, I understand that the dedicated builds of XBMC for the Pi are the best / easiest way to go. I've been using mine recently at work but thinking of taking it home to repurpose it.
Here's a linky: http://wiki.xbmc.org/?title=Raspberry_Pi
Hey dude, good to hear from you!
DeleteYeah, I've got XBMC now but it seems to run really slowly and maxes out the Pi's processor constantly - can't work out why. Raspbian is also a bit slow, so I suspect that I've not got a powerful enough power supply as I'm also running WiFi on the Pi which is a bit of a drain.
Will keep you posted on success when I get round to getting a beefed up power source!