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47 Articles

Welcome to Raspberry Pi

The Raspberry Pi is one of the most exciting things to happen to computer technology in recent years. As an educational tool, this tiny PC has reignited interest in bare-metal computing in schools and homes all over the world. As a platform for opensource software, it has also inspired millions of people to try Linux – many for the first time. Most exciting of all is the potential to incorporate the device into practical projects, as demonstrated by the tutorials in this new edition of Raspberry Pi The Complete Manual. Grab your Pi and start creating!…

Welcome to Raspberry Pi

While the Raspberry Pi has enjoyed years of success, there’s always been a couple of things a lot of users wanted. A slightly more powerful CPU that could handle day-to-day computing, more USB ports and maybe wireless to make connecting to the network easier. The Raspberry Pi 3 solves these problems. As it uses the same board design as the Model B+, it has four USB ports, as opposed to the two that were on the original Raspberry Pi Model B. More importantly, it has a much more powerful processor and more RAM, making it ten times faster than the original Pi. The Pi 3 has also added built-in wireless capabilities, which makes connecting to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth a cinch. The new BCM2837 chip is the heart of the Raspberry…

Raspberry Pi Model A+

While the Raspberry Pi Model B+ is a step up from the Model B with its four USB ports, the Model A+ is smaller than its predecessor, weighing just 23g (down from 45g) and wielding one USB port. It’s also limited to just 256MB of RAM on the SoC, compared to the 512MB enjoyed on the B+. But don’t think that all of this means that the A+ is inferior. Its 65mm length and lower weight is a clue as to how it can be used. The lack of an Ethernet port meanwhile, isn’t a weakness, rather an illustration of the fact that this Raspberry Pi is designed not for media centres and print servers, but for projects where weight is a factor. Perhaps you’ll mount it on an…

Raspberry Pi Model A+

Raspberry Pi Zero

Coming in at a size smaller than a credit card, the Pi Zero is certainly impressive to behold. However, its size does not mean a scale back in performance. The Zero’s 1Ghz, Single-core CPU and 512MB RAM has this board running 40% faster than the original Pi. To achieve such a small form factor and low production costs, the creators stripped back a lot of ports we have come to expect. With only space saving micro and mini ports remaining and no Ethernet in sight, adapters of various kinds will play a vital role in more demanding projects. By ensuring every component is justified in its existence, the Pi Zero is incredibly versatile. Its capability to run full images such as Raspbian, means jumping into a project is as…

Raspberry Pi Zero

The starter kit

In order to get the very best experience from your Raspberry Pi, you’re going to have to get hold of a few extras on top of the actual Raspberry Pi board itself. For example, you’re going to need a keyboard and mouse with which to enter commands and navigate. While it’s possible to do projects without a keyboard and mouse attached, you’ll need them for the initial setup. An SD card is also an important purchase – it’s where the operating system lives. Perhaps you’ll need a Wi-Fi adapter, or maybe just a length of network cable. Then there’s the basic electronics side of the Raspberry Pi, what would you need to start some of the beginner electronics and control experiments? Clearly, there’s more to the Raspberry Pi than some…

The starter kit

Set up your Raspberry Pi

While it looks daunting, setting up the Raspberry Pi for day-to-day use is actually very simple. Like a TV or a normal computer, only certain cables will fit into the specific slots, and the main job really is making sure you’ve got plugged in what you need at any one time. The Raspberry Pi itself doesn’t label much of the board. However, most good cases will do that for you anyway – if you decide to invest in one.…

Set up your Raspberry Pi

Set up your Pi Zero

So you’ve picked up one of the tiny yet powerful Zeros, but before the coding fun can begin you need to get more familiar with it. Don’t worry; we’ll walk you through the Raspberry Pi Zero, the required cables, how to prepare a NOOBS SD card, and how to solder the GPIO header onto the Pi. Once the Pi is working and booted we’ll show you how to get it working on Wi-Fi through the Raspbian user interface. You’ll need a USB hub for this, or even just to use a keyboard and mouse together. We’ll also show you how to prepare a Raspbian SD card for headless use (either VNC or SSH) with only a Wi-Fi adapter or USBto-Ethernet adaptor. What you’ll need… Raspberry Pi Zero Micro USB power…

Set up your Pi Zero

Install a distro

With its small size and cheap price, many people might be fooled into thinking that the Raspberry Pi is only usable for basic tasks, and learning to program on. While one of the primary goals of the Pi was to increase computer literacy at a lower level rather than just learning how to create Excel spreadsheets, the Pi has many other great uses. As the Raspberry Pi is essentially a mini PC, with an HDMI and analog TV output rather than a traditional monitor connection, it can perform many common tasks that a laptop or desktop is often used for. While it doesn’t really have the processing power or RAM to run the latest version of Windows, there are other options. There are a wealth of fully _edged operating systems,…

Install a distro

Command line basics

We’ve probably all been there with the Raspberry Pi. You’ve installed Raspbian or another Raspberry Pi OS to your SD card and you’ve rushed through the setup script or not quite done your research. You start the operating system and… you end up at a command line. The _rst step here is to not panic: this is perfectly normal. It may just be a bit of a foreign concept to you, only seen in _lms with streetwise hackers who want to bring down ‘the system’. The second step, at least in Raspbian’s case, is simply to type: That’s it. Raspbian will load up the desktop and you can start using the mouse again. Quick and painless in this case, and in that of many other operating systems as well. What…

Command line basics

The Raspbian desktop

It might seem a little alien at _rst glance, but using Raspbian is hardly any di_erent to using a Windows desktop. There’s a menu bar, a web browser, a _le manager and you’d expect, you simply open the Menu and click the applications you want to get started… “It might seem a little alien at first glance, but using Raspbian is hardly any different to using Windows”…

The Raspbian desktop

Master the Config tool

The ‘RasPi Config’ tool allows configuration of your system that would otherwise be trickier in the Linux environment and it’s the first thing you’ll see when you install Raspbian. Why? Tasks such as setting the date and time or regional settings for your keyboard are often done in a command-line interface with no dialogs, no additional help – for a new user, this is a nightmare. There are some further specifics for the Pi and Raspbian itself, such as: the ability to easily enable overscan for your TV; change the split of memory to the computer/graphics card or even overclock your system to make it a little faster; enable remote SSH access to the system; stop the system booting into the desktop environment among other things. The Raspi Config tool…

Master the Config tool

The easiest way to get online is to buy a Raspberry Pi Model B+, as it comes with an Ethernet socket. The Model A not only lacks the Ethernet port, but is handicapped by only having one USB port. That means you will have to buy a power USB hub in order to get online. Back to the Model B+ though and to get online, simply plug an Ethernet cable into the socket on the Pi and connect it to a similar port on the back of your internet modem/router. Turn your Pi on and launch the desktop, then double-click on Empathy and you should see the internet appear (main image). To check that it’s working, look at the lights on the Pi itself. The red power light should be…

Install and use packages

On its own, the Raspberry Pi is a near-perfect mini computer. It already contains a wealth of educational software, a few games, some programming utilities and a number of system tools. But, as with most computers, this is only the tip of the proverbial iceberg. By installing more programs, you can do much more. These programs, known as packages, are as wide and as varied as the developers who originally designed them. In Linux, if there’s a need for a particular program, then someone develops one. They then put it out to the world and make the source code freely available, hence ‘open source’. Once the program has been tested, it will eventually make its way onto one of the many remote servers for that particular Linux distro. These remote…

Install and use packages

Use graphical installations

If you’re new to Linux, you may _nd using its built-in Apt package management tool a bit intimidating and confusing. The apt-get command is used for installing applications through the internet, connecting to the remote servers – called repositories – which house the programs as packages. But it is used through the terminal command prompt, which can be daunting, so we need an alternative: a desktop_environment interface method of getting hold of packages. This is where Synaptic comes in. Synaptic is a friendly-looking graphical interface to the apt-get terminal command which allows you to manage your_application_installations, and removals, through the already familiar desktop environment. Think of it as a kind of online shop where you can pick and choose the programs you want and have them downloaded and installed onto…

Use graphical installations

GPIO port explained

What you’ll need… Prototyping equipment RPi.GPIO https://pypi.python.org/pypi/RPi.GPIO The general-purpose input/output (GPIO) pins on your Raspberry Pi are often central to the success of the projects you’ll find in this book. Without them you have no way of interfacing with the real world, be it to trigger lights, buttons or buzzers or read sensors. GPIO pins aren’t special to the Pi; they’re actually a standard designed to help control input and output behaviour with all kinds of integrated circuits. Usually you’ll find that any one GPIO pin has no particular use pre-defined and they tend to be turned off by default. Raspberry Pi GPIO The GPIO pins on the Raspberry Pi can be controlled and triggered in many ways. You can use them from the terminal directly and through Bash scripts,…

GPIO port explained

Top four add-on boards

PiTFT Mini Kit £30 This is a 2.8-inch capacitive TFT LCD touchscreen that’s been specifically designed with the Raspberry Pi in mind by the project gurus over at Adafruit. It’s capable of slotting directly on top of the Raspberry Pi and is about as big as the Pi is itself. There are numerous reasons why you’d want to add such a screen to a Raspberry Pi but they all generally come down to the fact that the Pi is very small and very portable and most monitors are not. While you could remote connect via VPN from a phone if you’re on the go, the screen is connected directly to the Pi and doesn’t involve awkward wireless networking. Also as a touchscreen you don’t need to bring along other input…

Top four add-on boards

Back up your Pi

While the Raspberry Pi is a very solid piece of kit, failure can happen, so it’s best to be well prepared and keep your files safe. The good news is that the Pi’s _les are all kept externally on the SD card. If your Pi breaks, everything will still be available on the SD card and accessible from elsewhere. The SD card is still susceptible to problems, though. There are a number of ways to back up a Pi. The methods can be broken down into two main categories: saving the important _les and creating an exact copy of the state of the SD card. The former involves having copies of _les elsewhere, while the latter has you create the same kind of image that you’d normally write to the…

Back up your Pi

Beginner’s guide to nano

If you have the itch to do more with your Pi, one of the skills you’ll need to learn to pull off many projects is the ability to edit system files. The command line text editor nano is definitely one of the best tools for the job. Text editors are very basic tools; the clue is in the name in this case. There’s no formatting or colouring or anything of the sort you would get in a word processor, but that’s the point. The kind of files you’ll be creating or editing will generally contain code – code which doesn’t require to be made bold or bulleted. nano removes all of these distractions, but still has a few of the more handy features you’d find in a graphical text editor.…

Beginner’s guide to nano

Gain remote desktop access

VNC (Virtual Network Computing) is a graphical desktop access and sharing system that allows a user to remotely control and use the desktop of another computer from their own system. It’s handy in many ways: to give you control over a remote system; to help out another user elsewhere; to allow a computer to remain powered on, but without the need for a keyboard, mouse or even a monitor. In our case, we aim to allow access to the Raspberry Pi desktop without it being hooked up to the aforementioned peripherals. This way, you can do everything you would normally do, but with just the power supply and network attached, thereby freeing up space and saving extra expense. In real-world terms, this means you could potentially access the Pi desktop…

Gain remote desktop access

Access your files with SSH

What you’ll need� Any Raspberry Pi distro www.raspberrypi.org/downloads Internet connection Second computer Did you know... SSH is the most secure method of accessing any machine remotely. It’s also quicker than VNC. While remotely logging into the full X environment is – as we demonstrated on the previous pages – very useful, it has its disadvantages. Firstly, it’s not particularly quick or convenient to do. The user experience can be slow and cumbersome too, but worst of all, it’s not as secure as we’d really like. If you want to take a more convenient and secure approach to accessing your Raspberry Pi from another computer, you’ll _nd that all well-versed Pi enthusiasts will use SSH. SSH stands for Secure Shell and is a cryptographic network protocol which is designed to ensure…

Access your files with SSH

Raspberry Pi plus Arduinos

The Raspberry Pi is a truly amazing single-board computer that gets used in lots of DIY projects. That has been the basis for this whole column and the previous several articles. While the Raspberry Pi has a GPIO and can communicate with sensors and actuators, you may have cases where you want to use your Raspberry Pi as the brains of your project and o_oad the interactions with the physical world to another system. This is usually handled by one of the many microcontroller boards that are available. In this issue, we will speci_cally use the Arduino board and see how to connect it to a Raspberry Pi and how to handle the communications between the two. As always, we will be using Python as the language of choice to…

Raspberry Pi plus Arduinos

PyFirmata can help even more

While you can write your own code to run on the Arduino, there are several projects that can be uploaded to it to make interacting a bit easier. One of these is the Firmata project, which includes a Python module to help you talk to the Arduino. The _rst step will be downloading the Firmata Arduino code and uploading it to your Arduino, most easily done with a desktop computer. The code is available at github.com/_rmata/arduino. There are a few di_erent versions available, but for these examples you should upload the StandardFirmata sketch with the Arduino IDE. There are client libraries available for many di_erent programming languages, including several for Python. The one we will look at using is pyFirmata. You can install it on your Raspberry Pi with: You…

PyFirmata can help even more

Program with Scratch

Would you like to delve into the world of animation and game creation? Do you want to bring your creative ideas to life without learning a software-development language? With Scratch you can do all this, and much more. Scratch 1.4 is already installed on the oficial ’wheezy’ Raspbian operating system image. If your Raspberry Pi doesn’t already have Scratch installed, don’t worry, just hop on over to the oficial MIT Scratch website to find the download and install instructions. To begin, all we need to do is open the Scratch Studio. Click on Scratch’s cat icon on the desktop, or find Scratch in the LXDE desktop menu. The Scratch Studio is a complete development environment. It’s divided up into a number of separate panels. Each panel has a specific role…

Program with Scratch

Use Scratch blocks and tools

Situated in the centre of the Studio is the Edit Panel. The panel contents relate to the currently selected sprite. Let’s start by selecting the jelly fish sprite, called Creature1, from the Sprite Collection area. At the top we have the sprite’s image and name, plus an indication of its current stage coordinates and direction. On the left are three animation control buttons. The top button will rotate the sprite, the second switches between left- and right-facing states, and the third turns animation off. Below are three Edit Panel tabs. The script tab is where block scripts are created. Here’s where we’ll drag and drop our blocks, snapping them together in various combinations. To change a sprite’s visual appearance we’ll use the ‘Costumes’ tab. Each sprite can have one or…

Use Scratch blocks and tools

Create a Snake clone in Scratch

Here, we will create a version of the classic Snake game where you move the snake around the Scratch stage using the arrow keys. You control the head of the snake and must avoid a collision with either the body of the snake or the edge of the stage. The snake body grows longer each time you eat an egg. You get points added to your score for eating good yellow eggs and lose points for eating bad black eggs. There are also bonus sprites to eat for extra points. By following this tutorial you will learn to create your own simple sprite graphics, send and receive broadcast events, use a list variable to store data, play sound e_ects, generate random numbers and use sensing commands to detect when a…

Create a Snake clone in Scratch

Check your mail

Since the Raspberry Pi is such a small computer, it gets used in a lot of projects where you want to monitor a source of data. One such monitor you might want to create is a mail-checker that can display your current unread emails. This issue, we’ll look at how to use Python to create your own mail-checking monitor to run on your Pi. We’ll focus on the communications between the Pi and the mail server and not worry too much about how it might be displayed. That will be left as a further exercise. To start with, most email servers use one of two di_erent communication protocols. The older, simpler one was called POP (Post O_ce Protocol), and the newer one is called IMAP (Internet Message Access Protocol). We…

Check your mail

What about sending emails?

In the main body of the article, we have only looked at how to connect to an email server and how to read from it. But what if you need to be able to also send emails ofiusing some code? Similar to poplib and imaplib, the Python standard library includes a module called smtplib. Again, similar to poplib and imaplib, you need to create an SMTP object for the connection, and then log in to the server. If you are using the GMail SMTP server, you could use the code This code asks the end user for their password, but if you aren’t concerned about security, you could have it hard-coded into the code. Also, you only need to use the login() method for those servers that require it. If…

What about sending emails?

Supercharge your Pi

Your Raspberry Pi is plugged in. Raspbian is installed on the SD card and you are right in the middle of setting up a wireless print server or building a robot to collect your mail from your doormat. But are you truly getting the most from your little computer? Perhaps you haven’t explored the full set of options in Raspbian, or you’re running the entire OS from SD card, something that can reduce SD card lifespan. Various tools and techniques can be employed to improve performance, from choosing the right hardware to overclocking the CPU. You might even maximise storage space on the Pi’s SD card or all but replace it with a secondary device. Use these tips and tricks to reconfigure your Pi setup and optimise software and hardware…

Supercharge your Pi

Monitor your local network with NagiosPi

Is your PC ofiine? Has your Linux box stopped serving Minecraft or Counter-Strike? If you’re out of the house, or even the country, there is no real way of knowing without trying to log in – something you probably won’t be able to do without being on the premises (unless you’re using remote desktop software). A far better way would be to simply receive notifications when your network devices are knocked ofiine, and this is why we turn to NagiosPi, a Raspberry Pi-built version of the popular open source network monitoring tool. NagiosPi is available as a full image ready to be written to SD card, with the real configuration taking place once it’s up and running. Let’s get started. What you’ll need… NagiosPi piimagehub.com/project/nagiospi Win32 Disk Imager bit.ly/L8JdYG Disk…

Monitor your local network with NagiosPi

Tether to an Android device

The portability of the Raspberry Pi is one of its most lauded features. Mini screens, mini wireless keyboard and mouse combos, portable batteries and more can get you out and about, but the internet is a stumbling block that you can’t easily fix with an accessory. What you do also usually have with you is an Internet-connected magic pocket box called a smartphone that, with a bit of know-how, you can connect the Pi to and steal some internet from. Over the next two pages we will impart this know-how to get you using your Raspberry Pi on the Internet when you’re on the go. What you’ll need… Android device USB cable The easy way 01Many smartphones have a Wi-Fi hotspot feature, which your Pi can easily attach to. First…

Tether to an Android device

Add a battery pack to your Raspberry Pi

Your Raspberry Pi’s mobility is usually restricted by the length of the power lead. Rather than limiting it to your desk or living room, however, you can use it for mobile projects as diverse as launching it into near-Earth orbit or monitoring and automating your garden. Of course, to do this you will need batteries, but adding battery power to your Raspberry Pi is simpler than you might have imagined. All that is required are six rechargeable AA batteries (or single-charge alkaline), a battery box with space for the batteries and a UBEC. The latter is a Universal Battery Elimination Circuit, a voltage regulator that will regulate the power supply and prevent damage to the Raspberry Pi, and can be bought for under £10. What you’ll need… AA battery box…

Add a battery pack to your Raspberry Pi

Draw circuits with paint

Playing with electronics and physical computing is a very rewarding task. For a beginner though, the mess of wires and components can become very confusing quite quickly and things like soldering can be a safety concern when children are involved. Bare Conductive has taken the joy of electronics and made it far safer, easier and more versatile with their conductive paint. You can literally draw wires on paper with a paintbrush, use it for cold-soldering or a conductive adhesive and much, much more. There are not a great deal of boundaries to what you can do. Pair this paint with a microcontroller board and you could be creating interactive art, clothing and projects in no time. What you’ll need… Bare Conductive paint (pen or tub) Male to female jumper wires…

Draw circuits with paint

Send an SMS from your Raspberry Pi

Text messaging, or SMS (Short Message Service), has become a staple of everyday communication. What began life as a 40 pence message service is now ofiered by most tarifiproviders as an unlimited service used worldwide. Twilio, a cloud communications company, enables you to send SMS messages for free from your Raspberry Pi to a mobile phone using just six lines of code. What you’ll need… hRaspberry Pi Twilio account “Create other communication programs, such as making phone calls, recording a call, and retrieving data” Set up your Twilio account 01The first step of this project is to register for a Twilio account and Twilio number. This is free and will enable you to send an SMS to a registered, verified phone. Once signed up, you will receive a verification code…

Send an SMS from your Raspberry Pi

Make a Pi 2 HTPC

We know people who just have a Raspberry Pi for XBMC, now called Kodi. It’s a great idea and a great use for the Pi – it works just well enough that you can easily play media locally or over the network. The biggest issue came with GUI response on the original Model Bs, and a lack of USB ports for connecting up everything that you want. While optimisation over the last few years has helped, the leap to Raspberry Pi 2 has basically solved all of these problems by giving you much more powerful hardware to play with. So if you’re looking to upgrade or finally take the plunge, this handy guide will help you create the perfect Raspberry Pi 2 HTPC. What you’ll need… OpenELEC openelec.tv HDMI cable…

Make a Pi 2 HTPC

Print wirelessly with your Pi

Wireless printing has made it possible to print to devices stored in cupboards, sheds and remote rooms. You don’t have to own a shiny new printer for this to work; old printers without native wireless support don’t have to end up in the bin, thanks to the Raspberry Pi. The setup is simple. With your Pi set up with a wireless USB dongle, you connect your printer to a spare USB port on the computer. With Samba and CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) installed on the Raspberry Pi, all that is left to do is connect to the wireless printer from your desktop computer, install the appropriate driver and start printing. CUPS gives the Raspberry Pi a browser-based admin screen that can be viewed from any device on your network,…

Print wirelessly with your Pi

Control lights with your Pi

The folks at Energenie have created some genius plug sockets that can be turned on and ofivia your Raspberry Pi. You can buy a starter kit which includes the RF transmitter add-on board and two sockets to get you started. The add-on board connects directly to the GPIO pins and is controlled with a Python library. Once everything is installed and set up, your Raspberry Pi can be used with the Pi-mote to control up to four Energenie sockets using a simple program. This tutorial covers how to set up the software, the sockets and how to adapt the program so that it can run on your mobile device. What you’ll need… Pi-Mote IR control board with RC sockets bit.ly/1MdpFOU Desk lamp Accessories Did you know… Every device on the…

Control lights with your Pi

Build your first web server

We’re teaching you how to code in many di_erent ways on the Raspberry Pi in this book, so it only seems _tting that we look at web development too. There’s a new way to use the web on the Raspberry Pi as well: internet giant Google has recently released Coder speci_cally for the tiny computer. It’s a Raspbian-based image that turns your Pi into a web server and web development kit. Accessible easily over a local network and with support for jQuery out of the box, it’s an easy and great way to further your web development skills. What you’ll need… Internet connectivity Web browser Google Coder googlecreativelab.github.io/coder/raspberrypi/sonicpi/teaching.html Get Google Coder 01 Head to the Google Coder website, and download the compressed version of the image. Unpack it wherever you…

Build your first web server

Build your own networked Hi-Fi with a Pi Zero

Take advantage of the UK’s online radio stations, Linux’s popular Music Player Daemon, and utilise a responsive web-server to control it all. The full-sized Raspberry Pis have two built-in audio outputs: audio over HDMI cable and a 3.5mm headphone jack that can sufier interference and noise. The Pi Zero itself has no audio jacks but Pimoroni has come to the rescue and built a high-quality DAC (digital audio converter) using the same chip as the Hi-Fi berry (PCM5102A). What you’ll need… Github repository http://github.com/alexellis/pyPlaylist pimoroni pHAT DAC Soldering iron, flux & solder Did you know… We wrote pyPlaylist with the Python fiask framework, which is an ideal starting point for simple RESTful websites. The front-end code saves the screen from completely reloading by using jQuery to update the song or…

Build your own networked Hi-Fi with a Pi Zero

Time-lapse camera trigger

You’d be forgiven for thinking that creating mesmerising time-lapse videos like those of Vincent Laforet (www.laforetvisuals.com) or John Eklund (www.theartoftimelapse.com) might be out of reach of the Average Joe. With the help of the Raspberry Pi and a sprinkling of Python code, though, that’s no longer the case. In this guide we’re going to trigger our DSLR camera to create pixel-perfect time-lapse imagery… What you’ll need… Latest Raspbian Image www.raspberrypi.org/downloads Breadboard Connectors Jumper wire DSLR camera Compatible shutter cable Set up the Raspberry Pi 01 For this tutorial we’re assuming you’re using a recent build of Raspbian. With the Raspberry Pi set up with a keyboard, mouse and monitor, open the terminal and type: Install the RPi.GPIO library 02 Next we want to make sure your development environment is set…

Time-lapse camera trigger

Get alerts with the Raspberry Pi baby monitor

While you’re settling down to enjoy a boxset, there’s always that nagging feeling at the back of your mind – is the baby okay? We need to rely on baby monitors, speci_cally video monitors, in particular those that display footage on an app or by opening an IP address in a mobile browser. Add in some motion detection and alert software, and you’ve got an incredibly useful tool – which, the Raspberry Pi can do for a fraction of the cost. All you’ll need is a Raspberry Pi (the newer the better), and a USB webcam or the PiCam (the NoIR infrared version is even more suited to nighttime use), and a device to view the streamed footage on. What you’ll need… Wireshark www.wireshark.org PiCam module or USB webcam Survey…

Get alerts with the Raspberry Pi baby monitor

Build an alwayson torrent box

Torrenting your open source software has a number of advantages – it can be faster, alleviates bandwidth and allows you to share back with the community. Distros, packages and more are available via torrents, and the Raspberry Pi makes for a great tiny, low-wattage, always-on torrent box to better manage your files. What you’ll need… A portable hard drive Raspbian www.raspberrypi.org/downloads PC with a desktop environment with Deluge www.deluge-torrent.org “The Raspberry Pi makes for a great tiny, low-wattage, always-on torrent box to better manage your files” Install Raspbian 01 Raspbian works just fine for our torrent box. Install the image on an SD card and go through the basic setup process, making sure to enable SSH in the advanced options and to disable the desktop. Remote access 02 Type ifconfig…

Build an alwayson torrent box

Stream Internet TV to your Pi

Finding the content you’re interested in viewing can take a while. Whether you’re looking for Internet TV stations, video podcasts, audio podcasts or shows syndicated online, taking the time to find and download them can be slow going, particularly if you have a busy lifestyle. You might even have no time to watch after you’ve waited for the download. Thanks to the Miro media management software, we can automate all of this, and with the software running on a Raspberry Pi, you can easily build a compact system for downloading and playing back shows that you have an interest in. We’re talking targeted TV on demand, which makes this project ideal for staying up to date with particular news and trends on a certain topic. What you’ll need… Raspbian Wheezy…

Stream Internet TV to your Pi

Make a Pi-powered digital picture frame

Digital picture frames that display a selection of your favourite photos were quite popular for a time, but are now seemingly available only as free gifts when signing up to magazine subscriptions. These tablet-like devices often made for interesting talking points, but were often let down by low memory, a poor user interface, or both. What you’ll need… Raspberry Pi 2 or 3 with Raspbian Jessie Wi-Fi dongle (if using Raspberry Pi 2) Display (official 7-inch Touchscreen Display recommended) Phillips screwdriver Frame and/or stand (suitable options for the official touchscreen display are available at Pimoroni and other dedicated Pi hardware and accessory suppliers) Scripts https://github.com/samuelclay/Raspberry-Pi-Photo-Frame We don’t have to worry about either of those problems with this project. Here we are going to set up a Raspberry Pi with some…

Make a Pi-powered digital picture frame

Build a Raspberry Pi-powered car

What you’ll need… A toy RC car with two channels (steering and drive) Adafruit PWM I2C servo driver Female-to-female jumper cables 5V battery power bank Estimated cost: £60 / $100 Components from www.modmypi.com Did you know… You can make this project work with just about any remote controlled car. Follow the guide for more details. Web technologies are moving forward at a huge pace, cloud technologies are bringing mass computing to individuals, and hardware has reached a perfect moment in time where sensors, displays and wireless technology have all evolved into eficient and afiordable devices. We truly are at a point where nearly anyone can take an idea from nothing to a working product in a week and at very little cost. Just like this project, which is fun, quick…

Build a Raspberry Pi-powered car

Control your Raspberry Pi-powered car

Now that we have our fantastic Raspberry Pi-powered car all wired, charged and ready to go, it’s time to make it come alive. We’re using the best web technologies that the JavaScript programming language ofiers, to harness the natural movement of your hand and wirelessly drive the vehicle. Each little movement of your hand will trigger an event that calculates what the car should do and then sends it over a socket connection. If all goes to plan you should have complete control over your vehicle. What you’ll need… A RasPi car, ready to go An internet connection A reasonably modern smartphone/tablet Pi car source code github.com/shaunuk/picar Did you know… Our code will send instructions to our car over twenty times per second. It will be very responsive to drive…

Control your Raspberry Pi-powered car

Xbox Zero arcade

The Raspberry Pi Zero is tiny, ridiculously tiny. It’s also small enough to be hidden in a variety of household objects in order to enhance their capabilities. Whatever you can find to fit it in, you can turn into some kind of smart machine. Take old game controllers. If you’re anything like us you’ve probably got a couple of boxes full of old computer equipment you just can’t bear to throw away – an Atari Jaguar that hasn’t been touched since the 90s, a Sega Dreamcast which you’re sure you’ll plug in again one day, an old Xbox that lies languishing since you picked up something bigger and better. Turns out it actually was useful to keep them around – it’s time to bring these old systems back to life.…

Xbox Zero arcade

Installing the RetroPie emulator

Right, so you’ve managed to get your Pi safely ensconced in a controller and all wired up – all you need now are some videogames to play. For this section of the tutorial we’re going to be using the RetroPie emulator. By the end of this tutorial, you’ll be able to play a number of games directly from your Raspberry Pi, provided that you legally own the ROM _les, of course. The whole process is as easy as installing the software onto your SD card and then copying across any games that you want to play. If you’ve already got Raspian installed on your Pi, you can install RetroPie alongside it – or you can dedicate the whole disk to the software if you’d rather. What’s an emulator? An emulator…

Installing the RetroPie emulator

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