#1 General Raspberry Pi stuff
Posted: Wed Jan 24, 2018 2:23 pm
Welcome to the all encompassing Raspberry Pi thread. A collection of random stuff about the RPi.
Raspberry Pi's are great little things and as a few of us here are putting them to good use I thought it might be a good idea to share ideas and tips on how to use them, mainly so I can learn more from Jack(Nick)/Nick etc. And maybe encouraging others to find a use for them too.
One obvious use is as a music/multimedia player using a TopHat addon board IE:DAC etc to stream audio and video. There seems to be quite a few s/w choices available like volumeIO, Runeaudio, picoreplayer, max2play, mopidy, Moode etc.
I use max2play, it works as a squeezebox and can run LMS if required along with Kodi(XBMC) plus other neat stuff. I run a I2S feed from the RPi to my Arcam TDA1541a DAC board, upsampling it along the way, works a treat.
I have one as a DNS and DHCP server at home running pihole mainly because I no longer wanted to use BT's DNS servers and I wanted to block various tracking services...but BT wouldn't let me change (they have since introduced an opt out setting in my on-line account profile) putting a warning on screen about how they don't allow alternative DNS servers like Google or OpenDNS.
I have another being used as a simple 2x IP camera CCTV system with external USB storage using zoneminder as the controlling s/w. This one is an RPi2 as well and copes OK with 2 cameras at 10~12 fps any more though and it collapses. The RPi3 maybe better but I would limit the connections to 2 cameras anyhow.
More recently I've been using the latest RPi3B as a low powered desktop which is working out OK within limits.
As a desktop the RPi3B is way better than the previous 2B but it does fall short in a number of areas. It is still limited to 1GB of mem and you have to give some of that up to the GPU for the desktop plus it lacks a proper on/off switch, although there is a neat solution around that. Also, I'm not sure of the durability of SD cards in a desktop environment and maybe a USB SSD or mSATA drive would be better for longevity, there are mSATA tophat adapters available from Element14 I believe....
Raspberry Pi's are great little things and as a few of us here are putting them to good use I thought it might be a good idea to share ideas and tips on how to use them, mainly so I can learn more from Jack(Nick)/Nick etc. And maybe encouraging others to find a use for them too.
One obvious use is as a music/multimedia player using a TopHat addon board IE:DAC etc to stream audio and video. There seems to be quite a few s/w choices available like volumeIO, Runeaudio, picoreplayer, max2play, mopidy, Moode etc.
I use max2play, it works as a squeezebox and can run LMS if required along with Kodi(XBMC) plus other neat stuff. I run a I2S feed from the RPi to my Arcam TDA1541a DAC board, upsampling it along the way, works a treat.
I have one as a DNS and DHCP server at home running pihole mainly because I no longer wanted to use BT's DNS servers and I wanted to block various tracking services...but BT wouldn't let me change (they have since introduced an opt out setting in my on-line account profile) putting a warning on screen about how they don't allow alternative DNS servers like Google or OpenDNS.
I have another being used as a simple 2x IP camera CCTV system with external USB storage using zoneminder as the controlling s/w. This one is an RPi2 as well and copes OK with 2 cameras at 10~12 fps any more though and it collapses. The RPi3 maybe better but I would limit the connections to 2 cameras anyhow.
More recently I've been using the latest RPi3B as a low powered desktop which is working out OK within limits.
As a desktop the RPi3B is way better than the previous 2B but it does fall short in a number of areas. It is still limited to 1GB of mem and you have to give some of that up to the GPU for the desktop plus it lacks a proper on/off switch, although there is a neat solution around that. Also, I'm not sure of the durability of SD cards in a desktop environment and maybe a USB SSD or mSATA drive would be better for longevity, there are mSATA tophat adapters available from Element14 I believe....