General Raspberry Pi thread...


 

RalphTrimble

TVWBB Diamond Member
Recently I pulled my Raspberry Pi out of my Heater Meter to experiment using it as a media center and boy was I surprised! I installed the FREE XBMC (app and OS bundled together in one simple image) on a spare SD card and she booted right up. Plugged right into my flat screen via HDMI and after configuring the network path(s) to my media it was playing flawless 1080P video with surround sound audio without a hitch! Incredible for a device not much bigger than a credit card! The only bummer was that my TV doesn't repeat digital audio from HDMI sources to the digital output so my surround sound receiver was left out of the loop. (it's a real pain that TV's do that) I've read that the rPi has a header that may be able to put out digital audio but I haven't figured that out yet.... At any rate, the rPi itself did a wonderful job as a media center PC and it was simple and fast to setup, oh, and FREE....

Next spring I have plans to setup a garden controller using a rPi that will retrieve the weather forecast online and water your garden accordingly, or allow you to log in through the internet and control your soaker hose or emitters manually. So no more guessing at the weather and setting a dumb timer before you take off for vacation only to come home and find your garden has been over/under watered. This happens to me several times each summer when I get away, if you screw up bad on the guestimate you can screw up your garden for the whole year... Next year I am done with that, I figure if my smoker is on the internet then my garden should be too....

So I thought I would start a general Raspberry Pi thread to share what I am doing with this neat little computer and hope to hear about some cool things the rest of your folks are doing with them, besides running your BBQ pits....
 
I've got 3 rPi's at the moment.

#1 is running Raspbian and sits in my basement as a small little utility server that monitors things like my UPS and my Nest thermostat and sends me event based tweets ie: the UPS sensed that utility power is gone or the furnace/AC went on/off

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#2 is running raspbmc, acting as a media player

#3 is my HeaterMeter
 
between receiving the Pi & getting the heatermeter board populated, i tried out RaspBMC & it worked well. I have 2 boxee boxes as my media players, but eventually will turn to another solution as boxee is dead. i've never really liked the XBMC interface & never took the time to tweak it to my liking.

After seeing what the Pi could do, I picked up a beaglebone for another project, but now that I'm working on it, the Pi could have served just as well and had more userbase to suck up knowledge from. Too stubborn to switch now.
 
So you've used the OpenSprinkler Pi then? What do you think? It looks pretty slick to me, but seems like the user interface might be a little lacking, though I haven't searched to see if perhaps there are better apps written for it yet...
 

 

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