Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Raspberry Pi Updates

A couple of interesting things came out since I bought my Raspberry Pi. (old post here)

A camera for RPi is now available.
It doesn't connect to the GPIO port (which most cases leave accessible), but to the connector located behind the ethernet port (which most cases do *not* leave accessible, sadly).

This case, the "OpenBox" (or a remix thereof), allows to plug in the camera module. Above is the "Sweetbox II", which is currently benig kickstartered. This is a case with an optional camera holder.
For future reference, here are some cool RPi projects I came across:

- RPi seedbox with LCD output of torrent status
- Getting a headless Raspberry Pi to speak its IP address on boot
- RPi as SNES emulator with Xbox 360 wired controller
- PiMAME, a pre-built RPi OS for gaming/emulation

Last but not least, some potentially useful info:

How to auto-mount an external USB hard drive on boot (found here):

For me, it came down to plugging my hard drive (named "BLABLA") in to the RPi (it got auto-mounted) and adding this line to /etc/fstab:
/dev/sda1       /media/BLABLA    ntfs-3g defaults         0       0
(my drive is formatted as NTFS. If it was FAT32, one would use "vfat" instead of "ntfs-3g")

How to set up OwnCloud on the RPi

Found a nice tutorial here, a tutorial video here and an all-in-one-install-script here. Setting up OwnCloud requires the installation of a webserver, PHP, a database and some configuration steps, so this all-in-one script is a welcome alternative. The author wrote a blog-post about the script here.

Can a Raspberry Pi be powered by a USB-hub?

Yes, it may, if your USB hub has its own power supply.
If it doesn't have its own power supply, then forget about it.
If it does, then check this list of peripherals and see if you can find your hub listed and what the notes say. I use a Belkin "4-Port Ultra-Slim Desktop Hub" (model # F4U040v) and it works great.

Can a Raspberry Pi be powered by the same USB hub that its peripherals are connected to?

Yes! (but also read the point above)
I'm currently powering my RPi from my USB hub and also have my wireless keyboard's dongle as well as a USB hard drive (USB powered) plugged in to the hub and it all works.

Friday, May 17, 2013