I got a Raspberry PI

It arrived about a week ago. I’ve only found time to mess with it this past weekend and this is a basic overview of what I’ve managed to do so far.

Setup: 

Booting

I started with the Debian Squeeze distro image as I’ve got some experience with Ubuntu. I used the Win32 Disk Imager linked on the Raspberry PI site

http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-Burning/Win32-Disk-Imager.shtml

This utility provides the ability to both read and write images which is incredibly useful as the read function allows you to backup your current image before you attempt anything dangerous.

It booted without issue and picked up an IP via DHCP so I was online on the first try.

Remote access

The next thing I did was enable the SSH server as it’s much easier to work with a remote shell rather than switching monitor input and using another keyboard. I used Putty as the windows client as I’m sure everybody else on the planet does too.

Great tutorial.

http://fusionstrike.com/2012/setting-ssh-ftp-raspberry-pi-debian

Next thing was setting up VNC; another great tutorial below. TightVNC is my windows client of choice.

http://gettingstartedwithraspberrypi.tumblr.com/post/24142374137/setting-up-a-vnc-server

I’m impressed with the responsiveness over VNC. I expected it to be a little sluggish but the image was clear and the cursor responsive, I even got distracted for a while playing with Scratch. I managed to accidentally programmed a cartoon cat to somersault and fall on its face which was entertaining :)

Space

The Debian Squeeze image is preformatted to 2GB, most likely to cater for the lowest common denominator. I resized the image to use all 8GB with the tutorial linked below after using the Win32 Disk Imager to backup my remotely accessible image first. The tutorial video in the link is excellent and easy to follow.

http://elinux.org/RPi_Resize_Flash_Partitions

Purpose

I bought the Raspberry PI with the grand plan of building a video based hardware hack using stuff I’ve got laying around (watch this space…) so I was disappointed to find that UCV was supported off the bat in Squeeze image provided.

Firmware update

After a bit of googling I found somebody in the same boat as me and it turns out that this is a firmware update that enables Video4Linux.

http://blog.pixelami.com/2012/06/raspberry-pi-firmware-update-for-debian-squeeze/

Make sure you follow the tutorial exactly, performing the rpi-update twice with an ldconfig in-between is required.

Worked a treat and my webcam (Logitech C300) showed up. (using dmesg)

[ 135.398018] Linux video capture interface: v2.00
[ 135.428583] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device <unnamed> (046d:0805)
[ 135.469825] input: UVC Camera (046d:0805) as /devices/platform/bcm2708_usb/usb1/1-1/1-1.2/1-1.2:1.0/input/input2
[ 135.473582] usbcore: registered new interface driver uvcvideo
[ 135.473632] USB Video Class driver (1.1.1)
[ 135.901588] usbcore: registered new interface driver snd-usb-audio

It worked using uvccapture and I was able to product this shocking (or arty) saturated image of my dark smoky mancave.

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