Raspberry Pi - A credit card sized, linux based mini-computer for $30

The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard. It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

A lot of talk about this on Radio 4 this morning and apparently a lot of interest in buying them, if the claim of the websites crashing under demand is true.

Was there another thread where we talked more about this though?

I too am intrigued and would like to pick one up.

Just started following them on twitter and it seems that the sales websites did indeed crash and that demand has been rather unexpectedly high!

i want one

it needs a nice box. i think they'll do well with the geeks in the initial stages but to get the general public interested will take a nice box.

actually, saw these yesterday. scant on details, and more expensive by a factor of about 8, but...
http://www.gizmodo.co.uk/2012/02/worlds-smallest-pc-ready-for-pre-order/

I think kids are going to have to "learn programming" just to get it working.

They'll need to find a box, sure, but also a power supply, a WiFi adapter, software for the WiFi, a bootable SD card..

Though if I was able to navigate cassette tape file storage and programs written in BASIC, the above shouldn't be too difficult for the wunderkidzen of today

The sales websites did crash... Was trying to buy one and couldn't order one at all.. :-(

Just like the Kraftwerk tickets...

it'll run fedora and 'useful' things (open office did i see? web browsers). and doesn't it get power from the hdmi port it connects to? the early ones certainly did. (oh, micro-usb or gpio header it says on wikipedia)

I've decided that I'm going to buy one once the initial website-crashing furore dies down. For <£30 it will be a fun little experiment/toy for myself.

Anyone have one of these yet?

i have one now! no idea what to do with it though. it booted last night so that's a start..

Can you run emulators on it? See if it will handle a NES game

I must have ordered mine 2 months ago, and I'm still waiting (which is fine). I'm also not sure what to do with it. I'll probably be boring and make a media center. I have an m-audio usb interface and a fairly sensitive condenser microphone. I'll probably set up something to scrobble vinyl, but that's not soooo cool since it can already be done with your phone. Or maybe I can do some EQ from my room's response. projects!

NES emulator also sounds tops, but would likely drive my housemates crazy.

It could also be fun to start a collaborative music related project with people here, though. I am open to doing some python coding, if a good idea comes around.

http://blog.makezine.com/2012/10/05/pure-data-running-on-the-raspberry-pi/

I have one of these but every time something starts using audio it gives an ear-destroying RRRRIP noise which is kind of putting me off actually doing anything sound-related with it

tbh I'm just using it to stream movies now because then I just get the horrible noise at the start of the film and then it's OK until it ends when there's another rip

(DC offset issues? iunno. it happens in any sound-generating app in raspbian and also xbmc)

damn.. i had kind of thought about turning it into some kind of cheapo version of sonos boxes

That still sounds possible. Just buy a cheap usb sound card with decent reviews. This sounds like a good project, actually. Sonos founder was in the graduate program I'm currently in.

I've seen some youtubes of people using theirs for audio stuff so you may be lucky, I guess it's just a hardware quirk of mine or I haven't got the drivers set up right or something (though I have seen other audio-related bug reports)

I got the sound working at all by doing this:
http://log.liminastudio.com/programming/running-puredata-on-the-raspberry-pi

I've just ordered one of these for my step-brother's christmas present. He's a 17 year old computer building and computer programming fanatic, so I hope that he's going to love it.

I ordered mine on 7/6, and I am still waiting. It's an awesome gift idea, but you may want to prepare for a delay.

Yeah, I'm certainly expecting a few weeks wait. I bought from RS for UK delivery and they currently claim a 4 week wait. Fingers crossed.

Ok. I was quoted 12 weeks, and they added a 9 week delay. So the US supplier is just much slower. There are some pretty neat cases available for cheap. You might want to give another relative looking for a gift idea a tip. Most computer building dudes I know like cases.

mine arrived yesterday :)

got mine the other day but sadly won't be able to mess with it for a week or two. maybe i will just duct tape it to my arduino and make a nice paperweight.

My order was dispatched today... so five weeks was accurate.

Found out that my step-brother already has one Raspberry Pi though, doh! Is there anything cool that having two might allow one to do, or is the present now a dud?

If he bought the Model A (without Ethernet) and you bought the Model B (with Ethernet) then not dud.

Or if both are Model B's, get some more and build a 'bramble' (a RaspPi cluster)

having 2 of these would be great imo!

I'm going to trust his ingenuity to make the most of it!

Only just discovered this. It sounds neat.

I program on my pc so I don't know whether they'll be any advantage of having this but the geek in me really really wants it.

You might also want to check out the Arduino Due, if you want more interfacing options that the Arduino Uno or Mega, and don't really need a board capable of running Linux.

damn.. i had kind of thought about turning it into some kind of cheapo version of sonos boxes

― ^ sarcasm (ken c), Thursday, October 25, 2012 1:40 PM (5 months ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

This is surprisingly easy to do thanks to the people who wrote shairplay: http://lifehacker.com/5978594/turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-an-airplay-receiver-for-streaming-music-in-your-living-room

I get drops when using it with an ipad, though. It works great with an iphone, however.

can somebody who understands alsa please help me find out how one best comes to understand alsa?

what you need understanding w/r/t alsa?

ot, edium or ild?

It could just be that I don't use linux outside of the the pi. For example in the sentence "Using aplay -L you can get a List of existing PCM output devices. If you want the default to be, for example, a USB Device instead of the onboard sound, you can place a pcm.!default line in the .asoundrc." I understand what a bash command like aplay -l is doing. An .asoundrc file is also intuitive to me because I have bash experience. The 'plc.!default' idea is not intuitive. I don't know if it's intuitive to experienced linux users or just experienced alsa users. Should I be learning about Linux or specifically alsa to get some intuition for this stuff? Thanks.

i'm guessing but i think "pcm.!default" is just some parameter setting in alsa.

from http://www.alsa-project.org/main/index.php/Asoundrc

pcm.!default {
	type hw
	card 0
}

http://alsa.opensrc.org/.asoundrc

but yeah, shairplay works rad on this, but I would recommend running it as a daemon with the right priority. I believe this page has the right setup: http://lifehacker.com/5978594/turn-a-raspberry-pi-into-an-airplay-receiver-for-streaming-music-in-your-living-room

it's a little dated, I don't think you need to build shairplay from scratch anymore

right. I guess I would like to know what pcm even means, for instance. alsa .asoundrc references seem to be very "add this line to a file," which is a hard way for me to learn b/c I want to know what the line is and what 'PCM' stands for. In the end, I'd like to be able to write a driver for an old usb soundcard I own.

pcm is basically default digital audio. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pulse-code_modulation

like 99% of what you send to a sound card these days is going to be pcm audio, unless you're sending it midi or something

or more succinctly, in 2013 "pcm output device" basically translates to "sound card"

ok, thanks. I think I was looking for something like these: http://www.volkerschatz.com/noise/alsa.html
http://www.sabi.co.uk/Notes/linuxSoundALSA.html

and this http://www.alsa-project.org/alsa-doc/alsa-lib/pcm_plugins.html

how easy is it to get one of these up and running as a media player (or is it the same process as the airplay receiver for streaming music as above)

AirPlay is very easy to get running. I have no experience with media player use. You'll likely want an external soundcard for either.

Think i spotted one connected to a mate's tv the last day. Might ask him and report back...

It really is super easy. I hook up the pi to my TV via HDMI, stereo via jack/rca and network with my desktop to access downloaded films etc.

There are also plugins for on demand services like iplayer, 4od, TuneIn etc.

Check out Raspbmc

ta! that sounds simple

http://www.fastcompany.com/3033850/most-creative-people/whats-next-for-raspberry-pi-the-35-computer-powering-hardware-innovatio

https://www.raspberrypi.org/products/pi-zero/

nice idea but probably meant more for embedded projects.

but it prompted me to buy a 2B - i wanted something a bit more general purpose and didn't want to have a buy a bunch of cables i wouldn't use for anything else.

They have a new one now that's still $35 but has a 1.2gb quad core processor and 802.11n wifi!! I was thinking of getting one to make an always-on Plex media server, but I have little exp w/ these things -- are there better options (for something I can connect directly w/ an HDMI cable or possibly stream w/ Chromecast but definitely something I can control w/ my iPhone)?

does anyone else have one of these? i wanna chat rapsberry pi

I got one for my kid but we are stuck at stage 1 trying to get it to see the wifi network in the house

sure, what's up

once we get this thing working what should me and my kid do with it?

http://www.rasplex.com/index.html

when we move I'm thinking about doing this for our home wifi:

http://www.tripwire.com/state-of-security/security-data-protection/sweet-security-part-2-creating-a-defensible-raspberry-pi/

After a couple of months of not using mine it now refuses to sync with the TV over HDMI. Tried two different distros, neither of which has changed in the meantime but all I get is "no signal" on the TV.

Need to check the HDMI cable.

I tried Rasplex but it's a bitch to set up as a standalone HTPC. It can't do ANY streaming video services w/o connecting to yr main computer, and transferring files to it is insaaaaaaanely slow (and the file system makes it m/l impossible to just xfer files directly onto the SD card)

basically I wanted this to be a standalone Plex server and it's not working and idk what else I should do with it (I don't really play games all that much?)

Put the files on a USB stick?

just got my raspberry 3 in this morning. anyone else still fuck with a pi? my goal is to use an ultrasound sensor (or two or three) as input, determine if someone is there, then output different videos and sounds according to if someone is present and where they are positioned.

i'm sure this will be super easy and i won't run into any problems

it's kind of fun and silly connecting it to my living room tv as a display. tbh i wish i could just connect it directly to my macbook, like arduino. apparently there's a way to do it with RPi but it doesn't seem nearly as simple/plug-in-play as arduino in that respect.

I sort of do! I just put Kodi on it and installed Exodus

at this point i have no fucking clue what you're talking about! i love that feeling.

what does Kodi do? what is Exodus? i could google it but i'm too busy deciding what my secret pi password should be. gotta make sure no one can hack into my pi and discover my secret files.

kodi is xbmc, x-box media centre.

Exodus is Dark Netflix

that's cool! so you use it primarily as a media center, then? i got sidetracked early on when i found out that minecraft comes pre-installed in raspbian.

i don't even like minecraft that much, wtf

I have a couple of Arduinos gathering dust while I wait for my electronics skills to progress beyond 'man discovers fire and recoils in fear'. Hopefully, it will still be exciting to toy around with them when they're twenty years out of date.

yeah, the electronics part is the thing i'm worried about. if all goes well i'd like to output my video directly to a projector, and i'm terrified of overloading everything and accidentally burning the building down

there's insanely little chance of that

It's a watered down version of Minecraft but yeah it's kind of amazing to discover when you're not expecting it to be there at all.

Are you living in Brooklyn? There's a store called Tinkersphere downtown in Manhattan that carries all the components you'd need to rig up all that stuff.

nah, i moved to Chicago. but i bet we have something similar here as well.

i'm lucky to have a new friend who is super into all of this stuff and wants to help me with my project.

btw, re exodus: https://torrentfreak.com/popular-kodi-addon-exodus-turned-users-into-a-ddos-botnet-170203/

Don't know how I missed that you moved to Chicago, KM. It's always rad to learn that there are rad people in the metro area outside of my hermitsphere.

I'm trying to teach the kid I'm tutoring what little electronics stuff I know in the hopes that he'll quickly surpass me in that magical way kids do and can, in turn, teach me more than the rudiments.

oh, i didn't make much of a fuss about it! i'm in hyde park, which i believe is located in the heart of the hermitsphere.

It's easy to teach kids basic electronic principles using Minecraft, because they're generally receptive to it.

one odd thing off the bat - i opened up one of the pre-installed python games (Simulate) and almost immediately a thermometer icon appeared in the upper-right to let me know that the CPU temperature was too high. i used "vcgencmd measure_temp" to get the exact reading, which was 83.8 C - just below the max 85 C temp that's supposed to be safe. as soon as i closed the Simulate python game and checked the temp again, it was down to 75 C. after another few minutes of inactivity, it was down to 65.

i repeated all of this and the same thing happened - running the python game instantly raises the CPU temperature to near its maximum safe reading, and closing it immediately drops the temp back down to normal.

i guess i should take the case off? i really didn't expect to need to use the heatsink just for running a simple python game.

heyo new chicago-ers i am nearly among u likewise after moving to evanston for my partner's phd.

i rigged up my pi recently to start up a vpn, via an open source package called streisand, on an amazon web svc machine. i steered into the data collection paranoia skid earlier this yr and started trying to secure all my web traffic and encrypt things in advance of anticipated loosening of isp privacy protections of my web traffic. (i do not wish to become a data point for sale to marketing firms.) i am still in early days of developing working understanding for the tech and tbh it is a pretty pedestrian use for the lil pi but it's my only linux capable machine presently. i am considering conversion to a kodi box for more utility. Or maybe i will make a weather station. the primary limitation still seems to be motivation & time but who knows

> i'd like to output my video directly to a projector,

wouldn't you just use the hdmi port?

my experience with pygame is very similar - very intensive. it's trying to squeeze high fps values out of an interpreted language.

once python's up and going it should be fine unless python for arm sucks

just got my raspberry 3 in this morning. anyone else still fuck with a pi?

Once I went through all the "here's how to make fire" intro stuff I stuck mine on the shelf next to my arudino until I discovered that folks were using them for SDR and then got back into it again
https://learn.adafruit.com/freq-show-raspberry-pi-rtl-sdr-scanner/overview

i'm thinking i got a faulty one (overheating). even at idle it's around 52 C, which is apparently hotter than it should ever be, even when all 4 cores are maxed out with intense use. and when i run simple programs like VLC the CPU temp shoots up to 80 within 30 seconds.

I don't have a Pi 3, but apparently others are having overheat issues too.

I've had a Pi 3 for about a year now and I've never had a problem with overheating. Mind you I mainly use mine as a basic LAMP dev box.

i put the heatsinks on late last night and it dropped the idle temp down to 45 or so, increasing to 70 with intense CPU activity. still higher than i'd prefer, but at least it's workable.

i am learning so, so much about linux, RPi and python. i always hear that the best way to learn is to have a project in mind as you do it, and it's absolutely true in this case. i have run into about one trillion problems, large and small, and have managed to figure them all out.

i think i also solved a common problem that doesn't have a solution posted online anywhere? when playing multiple videos using omxplayer, there is a roughly 1-second pause between each video, often accompanied by the sound cutting out for the first bit of the clip. i came up with a band-aid workaround but fuck, i think it works! i have a loop going where it opens up a new instance of omxplayer just before the previous clip ends, and positions it one render layer higher each time around so that it overlays on top of the previous instance, which closes as soon as it's done playing a moment later. the effect is a seamless transition, and it only uses about 10% of the CPU! i'm super happy because before i started on this i didn't know how to use bash or the terminal and instances and all of that.

i mentioned it a bit upthread, but i'm getting closer to completing this project, and it's changed quite a bit since i started as i learn more about what i can do with python and the rpi. i plan on creating a ton of very short clips that show a face tracking an object - a dozen clips of the face looking straight forward, a dozen to the center-center-left, a dozen to the center-left, etc etc, and then putting them in different buckets. then i'll play back the clips on a small display according to sensor/GPIO readings, so if you're standing directly in front of the display, you'll see clips of the face looking straight at you, but if you walk off to the side, the face and eyes will follow. i have other fun surprises in store as well (or i'm trying to, at least), but that's the gist of it.

i pretty much have everything working on the tech side except for the sensor stuff. but i'm hopeful that it won't be hard, and that i'll be able to easily feed the sensor readings to my python script so that it can determine which bucket of video clips should be playing at any moment. but the rest of it, the hard part - learning how to install python and packages and modules and use the command line via a python script, getting seamless video playback - is pretty much over. the rest is just fun stuff!

anyway sorry if i'm a little giddy but i feel like i just completed a basic, but real, irl conversation in a foreign language for the first time and it's exciting!

also i might have to finally register a stackexchange account to share the video playback workaround, because i've seen so many different people ask about it across multiple years and all the suggested solutions i ran across seem inadequate.

Good on ya, man. I barely got the thing to run RetroPi

Sounds pretty sweet!

that's a pretty cool solution!

programmer mind kicking in here -- if the render layers have any sort of sequence -- i.e. you're literally incrementing a variable by one, it might be worthwhile to have a check if there's an upper limit

the fix there would probably be to loop back to zero and you'd end up with a little pause again, but it'll be a little better than having someone restart your video art in the MoMA some day.

yep - i did set the render layers to increment by one with each cycle. the (scanty) documentation doesn't mention anything about an upper limit, but i reset it back to 1 whenever it reaches 999, so hopefully it won't cause any issues.

right now the biggest issue is performance. there's a tradeoff between the length of the videos, the dimensions of the video - if the length gets too short or the dimensions too big, it sometimes crashes. right now i have it cycling through 1-second long, 500x500 videos, and it's smooth! i want to make the videos as short as possible so that as the sensor tracks the human(s) observing it, they update as close to real-time as possible. the biggest constraint will probably be the sensor and how quickly it can send its new data to python via GPIO. i haven't even really looked into that yet, but i'm hoping that it can do it in near-real-time. i flailed my way through an afternoon arduino workshop a few years ago, and the sensor readings made it to the Serial almost instantaneously, so i'm hopeful that will be the case with this as well.

another interesting dilemma will be what to do if the sensor picks up more than one object on the physical stage. i guess i should just stop fucking around and buy a sensor and give it a shot.

is the ultrasonic beam collimated or focused somehow? how do you plan to arrange the sensors?

i...don't know yet.

a kind stranger in chicago contacted me a few months ago and offered to help me out with general programming stuff, and he went ahead and bought an ultrasonic sensor (i forget which one - an inexpensive one for sure) and started playing around with it. we met up a few weeks ago to talk about our progress and he said that the sensor was able to pick up humans in the room, up to about 10-12 feet away. i asked him if it was able to detect more than one at once, and he said that it did. but i haven't met with him since, and i haven't tried it myself.

so i'm not sure at the moment. ideally i would only need one sensor, but i might end up using two (one from the front, one from the side) in tandem? do you have any thoughts? i should probably have held off on mentioning all that until i had done even 10 minutes of research.

(that last sentence applies to everything i post on ilx btw)

eventually i may end up shifting to one master RPi equipped with the sensor(s) which sends out instructions to a set of subsidiary RPis with displays the videos accordingly. the ultimate evil plan is to go with a modular approach, so i can deploy individual RPIs with displays wherever i want in the room and they'll still be able to track the position of the observer.

i'm thinking each individual unit would only cost ~ $30 for the Rpi + another $30-60 for a small HDMI display. obviously i want to get one unit working well before buying any more, but having a set of 3 would be nice.

ok, after ~5 minutes of looking into i see that ultrasonic sensors only measure the distance to the closest object, so tracking more than one object would be tricky. that's fine though, i'm ok with it only identifying the closest object. that's almost better, in fact, because i'm planning on creating video clips that involve a human in a different dimension trying to reach across the void and make contact with the observer. almost like a frightened animal, so it would make sense that the video faces would only track the closest object, because the idea is that it's a struggle to clearly connect across the void in the first place. i have been watching a lot of unsolved mysteries lately.

as far as the positioning goes, i think i would place the sensor above the RPi + display, so that it's aiming down onto the stage at about a 45 degree angle. If I put it lower and aim it out horizontally, it could pick up objects that are 10-20 meters away, and i don't want that. i only want it to activate if someone actually approaches to take a closer look. (otherwise, the default/inactive state is looping videos of the faces going about their business, bored, or maybe trying and failing to establish contact across the void). if i place the sensor a little higher though, and aim it downward, i'll be able to define the sensor's field of vision.

does that sound right? i am making this up as i go but with the confidence that it should be possible.

So does the sensor return a reflection vs. distance or just a single distance value? The signal that the sensor emits will have some angular cone shape. The received signal will also have a cone-shape dependence away from the receiving aperture. "closest object" likely just means "largest reflection". It seems like it could get more complicated if you have multiple objects of different scattering cross-sections within these sensor cones. But it may also work out fine, as you said. You can probably do more with the signal processing if the sensor return something more than just a single distance value, but maybe that'd be overly complicated. Also, any signal processing might be too slow for your purpose.

I would also think that you'd direct the sensor along the axis you wish to detect movement. Otherwise it will be harder to distinguish movement along the axis you care about versus the orthogonal axis.

the downside is that you'd need somewhere to attach the sensor that doesn't look clunky. you could definitely solve that by buying a more expensive sensor with greater range, but that may not be in the cards. I suppose you'll learn the most from using the thing. Anyway, this all sounds very cool!

ultimate would probably be doing some kind of phased array or MIMO that allowed you to track different objects in the whole space. then maybe you could switch between them in a deliberately creepy way.

hey, i would never do anything in a deliberately creepy way

*rimshot*

what you're saying is really useful - i'm making some rough diagrams which i'll post in a bit if you're interested. i'm realizing that i definitely need more than one sensor!

I am breathlessly following this discussion in which I understand about every fourteenth word.

I'm also wondering if you couldn't get a camera + image processing to work well enough for this project. I know there are some cheaper raspberry pi cameras out there? I've never used one, though.

1) the sensors only have about a 30 degree cone of vision, so i would want more than one just to cover more of the space.

2) the sensor only returns the time that it took for the frequency to hit the object and reflect back to the sensor. that means that using a single sensor to determine an exact x/y coordinate is impossible because each measurement could mean that the object is anywhere along a certain arc:

http://i.imgur.com/cnFo6TF.jpg

3) but with two sensors and two signals, you would be able to solve some of the issues with both 1) and 2):

http://i.imgur.com/qg1UziR.jpg

the area where the two cones overlap (Zone 1 + 2) is the area where the exact coordinates could be determined. for objects in the other zones, i'd at least be able to know the general direction of the object. so if you only detect an object in Zone 1, you'd know that it must be to the left of center. Also, you would know that if the measurement is within a smaller range, the object is generally center-right, while if it the measurement is beyond a certain point the object is far-right:

http://i.imgur.com/2pvi7pe.jpg

i think that would be good enough for me. i'd be able to know the exact location of objects close to the display and trigger the video clips so that they follow the object closely. for objects in only zone 1 or zone 2, i would be able to trigger videos that show the faces looking in the appropriate general direction. for objects straight in front of the display that are out of range of both sensors, i could trigger a video or two of the face looking straight forward, searching for a signal, before reverting back to the original default/inactive state after a certain amount of time.

so if you only detect an object in Zone 1, you'd know that it must be to the left of center.

whoops, i meant right of center here, if you're referring to my shitting diagrams! (which are a lot of fun to make! being unemployed is awesome!)

I am breathlessly following this discussion in which I understand about every fourteenth word.

i am also clueless, but i'm learning! i keep waiting for someone to come in and be like ACTUALLY you can't do this and here's why you dum dum

(which shouldn't deter someone from telling me to abandon ship if this isn't going to work - that's why i'm posting the diagrams here! hopefully so that if there's an obvious better way to do it i can learn about it here, but also so that if it's a complete waste of time someone will let me know before i end up wandering on the mean streets muttering about sensor failures the rest of my life)

m also wondering if you couldn't get a camera + image processing to work well enough for this project. I know there are some cheaper raspberry pi cameras out there? I've never used one, though.

a distant stretch goal with all of this, if and when the physical version is completed, is to make it a website where the input is the user's webcam and it detects the user's face and adjusts the video clips accordingly. i have no idea how to do all of that but it also seems possible.

also, i know that i'd get more sensor coverage if i had one sensor that was located opposite of the display, like across the room, pointed back toward the display. but i wanted to conceal the sensors as much as possible, and i'm already a bit bummed that i might have these two sensors off to the side of the display, connected by cables to the RPi. so ugly. i don't want to add to that mess by having a sensor all the way across the room.

ok i'm going to stop posting but i just realized a fatal flaw in my logic is that it all might break down if more than one object/person is detected. it's fine if the object is the same for both sensors, but if one object is close to the sensor on the left, and another object is closer to the sensor on the right, it could be trouble. i will shut my trapper for a bit and think about it. i guess the good news is that i'm not a perfectionist and i'm very willing to implement some sort of backup plan if the two sensors present measurements that are in conflict with each other - like just pick the location that is closest to the display, or trigger a video clip that shows the face's eyes darting left and right and up and down, obviously searching and a bit confused - that fits in with the theme of unsettling attempts at connecting across dimensions, anyway!

yeah, I think your diagrams are probably otm for a single person in the room. I wonder what you can do when there are two people in Zone 1+2. I suppose you will have another special case when there are short reflections at sensors 1 and 2 such that the time contours cannot possibly intersect, and you will just choose to track one sensor's reading? Maybe that is not something that will happen often? I also worry about crosstalk between the sensors. Can you operate the two sensors at different frequencies or coordinate the pulses/readings?

oh, that's a great point about the crosstalk, but i think it could be addressed. in the python script i could just have the sensors search for objects at staggered intervals so they don't overlap.

i'm not sure about the multiple objects issue. i'm hopeful that it's something that could be mostly addressed with a bunch of if statements in the python script so that if the sensors are giving contradicting object locations the RPi will still have an idea of how to respond.

for example, one rare situation might be if sensor 1 detects an object outside of sensor 2's range, and sensor 2 detects an object outside of sensor 1's range. i wouldn't know the exact location of either object, but i would know that generally there's one off to the left somewhere, and one off the right, so i could trigger a video clip that shows the face scanning from left to right and right to left, acknowledging both of the objects? that's just one example but i think that would be the idea, just plotting out all the different possibilities and making sure that some sort of video clip is prepared for that situation, even if the video clip is just confusedface.mp4

confusedface.mp4 is my default face btw

Honestly I think the camera+image processing idea might be the best option. Not sure if the RPi has enough horsepower to do the image processing though.

lol. another slightly "dumb" option could be to place a few sensors in places that are best for the look of the thing. grid out the room. get some volunteers and measure every possible permutation you'd like to account for. Then you'd just have to calculate a "distance" between every measurement and one of your pre-measured cases and select the closest one. A display response would be associated with each pre-measured permutation. This could get messy if you find that different people have widely varying scattering cross-sections. Would also be a disaster if the sensors were moved or varied with time in any way.

oh man, i just went through a cycle of despair and hope. up until a few minutes ago, i thought any multi-sensor solution was hopeless because of the crosstalk sufjan mentioned above. i started thinking about the waves bouncing at obliuque angles off of objects (and walls) and getting picked up by the second sensor long after they were sent out by the first.

but i think it's ok as long as the two sensor's measurement windows are spaced a few tenths of a second apart. each measurement takes place in a very short amount of time. the speed of sound is 343 m/s at sea level. so if an object is 10 m away, the ultrasonic wave will reflect off the object in ~0.0145 seconds, and return to the sensor at ~0.029 seconds. if i understand correctly, each measurement from the ultrasonic sensor takes place in a brief window of time - it sends a wave out and listens for a defined amount of time (say, 0.1 seconds), then it closes up. so even if a wave hit an object and bounced around the room several times, it would be undetectable to the second sensor because the second sensor's measurement window wouldn't be open yet.

so you'd have the two sensors collecting measurements staggered by 0.2 seconds from each other, and the signals wouldn't interfere with each other, and you'd still be able to get two different readings on the same object as about the same moment in time.

i'm still not sure exactly which method to use to translate the readings into different buckets of videos, but i think it might be something that could be done in a messy/dumb fashion through trial and error.

yes, that time division multiplexing approach should work so long as there isn't a strong resonance in the room at the frequency of the sensor. You can also maybe get sensors operating at different frequencies that filter for that frequency if TDM doesn't work. I would not despair. I think you'll get something good working. You seem to have a good intuition for this stuff.

Raspberry PewDiePieBeret

this is silly, but i'm thinking about other ways to track people near the display. vibration sensors are super cheap. i'm wondering if i could lay down a rug in front of the display and then install a grid of vibration sensors. no matter where someone stood on the rug, they'd be setting off one or more of the sensors on the grid, and it would be easy to track multiple people - almost like an overhead view version of the rug area. downside - no one would ever step on the rug. i think people would think they weren't supposed to touch the rug. bummer. oh well, this could at least be fun just to have at home

i'm still going to order the ultrasonic sensors too, though, since they're really cheap as well

I'm at a loss here since I was digging around to find which Japanese video artist I saw a work from at the NY MoMA a couple weeks ago, but all of this motion sensor talk is reminding me of it: a room with a series of moving projectors in the center, triggered by the presence and movement of viewers in the room, that projected a group of people walking and running on the walls of the room, overlapping but never touching

webcam solution possible (and free)!
https://webgazer.cs.brown.edu/#examples

that is amazing!!! i think you'd have to require a calibration for every person that used it, though, and it wouldn't make sense for more than one person at once. i bet there's some other really cool stuff you could do with that, though!

even the basic demo game is kind of otherworldly, controlling it with only your eyes. holy shit!

controlling it with only your eyes. holy shit!

immediately makes me think of devices for people with cerebral palsy

I tried that just now and it took a few seconds before I realized that without a webcam on my end it didn't matter were I focused my eyes.

Kinect? Gives you colour image AND a depth map (per pixel distance measurement) and the software is capable of whizzy things like skeleton and face detection, can detect up to 6 bodies... Expensive though and I think the open source library has been bought by someone and and the new fork is lagging behind iirc.

oooo you could make the eyes widen in response to screams of terror

a kinect does seem like a good idea if you have the budget and can get it running fast enough on the pi

I'd never looked into how the kinect works. It seems that it has an illuminating IR LED and then an ASIC to quickly process what the camera is seeing reflected back using a trained machine learning algorithm. So it is like the deluxe version of my "stupid" idea for the ultrasound sensors.

those are all really good ideas! it looks like i'll have some options. tbh at the moment i am planning on it tracking only one (the closest) person. i'm working on some video cycling logic that lets it smoothly track from one target to another, so if one person is the target and then they suddenly turn around and leave, the eyes/face will smoothly work its way over to the next-closest person detected (or to it's default resting cycle if no one else is there).

i won't break any ground technically but i hope to make the videos interesting and transition from one another smoothly

have any of you used the Pine64 (https://www.pine64.org/)? or heard anything about it from someone who has?

i'm working on something involving speech recognition and synthesis and while i have the guts of it working on my raspberry pi 3, it's painfully slow. a 2 second speech recording takes about 6 seconds to convert to text, and that's before i even do text-to-speech. meanwhile, i can run the same python code on my mac and the conversion is near-instantaneous. that suggests to me that the slowdown is due to the lack of specs on the raspberry pi. fishing around for a way to improve the performance, i saw some chatter about the relatively new pine64, which apparently has more processing power and general capabilities while still in the $30-50 range.

or actually...maybe it would make more sense to look into inexpensive ways to augment/power up the RPi somehow?

How do you want to install the final project? Is it feasible to use the Pi as a client and offload the speech-to-text to a faster computer over the network? I can well imagine it being hard to get low-latency speech to text performance on any cheapo device.

really hoping to make it as modular and mobile as possible, like completely independent and offline units that could be arranged in different ways. i wanted offline because it has to run for a few hours straight and i didn't want the whole thing to break if the wi-fi went down or something.

Is it feasible to use the Pi as a client and offload the speech-to-text to a faster computer over the network?

maybe? i think it would work, but i don't know how much faster it would be. each Pi unit has its own USB microphone to pick up the last signal in the chain, and each unit also has it's own speaker output connected to it. So each pi unit would have to send the recorded audio file to the faster computer, which would convert it (very quickly), but then send the converted file back to the pi unit again before playing it through the speaker. it just seems like the wait times for sending it back and forth would negate the improvement in speech-to-text conversion speed.

Sensible of you. I think you might want to treat this as a “prototyping” stage and live with what $50 gets you. It looks like for $500 you can get a development board for the NVidia Tegra X1, which is the chip the Nintendo Switch uses and probably has several orders of magnitude better performance than a Pi. Expensive but still cheaper and smaller than duct-taping a MacBook to something.

Don’t overestimate the round trip time of the network though. Six seconds is a long time.

oh, i'll definitely give it a shot! i'm also going to look into adjusting the dictionary i'm using for the speech recognition (using Sphinx). i saw a video of some dude online who is getting a decent turnaround on his RPi3, so maybe he was using a limited dictionary?

this stuff is sometimes frustrating but really fun to look into (especially when it works in the end)

Are there any other speech recognition softwares you've tried?
If the idea is to just robotize people's speech, maybe have it recognize/generate phonemes instead of words?

all the other speech recognition i've found requires an API: a couple google versions limited to 50 API calls a day, IBM, Bing, Jasper, Houndify, others.

i've been thinking of a way to take advantage of the slow processing. i'm thinking a set of 4 units that each work on 12 second cycles: 2 for listening to speech, 6 for converting to text, 2 for text-to-speech playback, and some buffer time in between each of those steps. the timing of the units would overlap so there'd be playback every 2 seconds. like this:

https://i.imgur.com/6afC7mA.png

(sorry for ugly colors)

actually, the cycle length would vary, but each would loop every 32 seconds with the timeline above. i'm thinking i can use python's time.time() to keep everything on schedule, so even if individual components in the cycle (record, convert, playback) take longer or shorter than expected, each step should begin at a precise point in time. the biggest issue (i think) will be with calibrating the units at the beginning. i'm thinking i can start the first unit on it's eternal loop, then manually trigger the launch of the second unit, listen for a few cycles to make sure they're in alignment, continue to the 3rd, and then the 4th.

if all that works i hope to include to introduce human speech (whoever is in the room with this thing) into the mix as well

it's eternal loop

jfc, its

is the idea that these units get a lot of crosstalk from each other so it ends up as cacophonous siri feedback, or are they more orchestrated?
would it be bad if they get slightly out of phase?

the goal was to try to make it tightly coordinated, but i was i interested in what would happen when they inevitably went out of phase.

but shit, bad news. i thought the easy part would be the speech synthesis, because as I already had that working on my mac. turns out that audio and raspberry pi don't work well together at all - playback is wildly irregular, almost always cutting off pieces of sentences, and sometimes starting playback a second into the .wav file, or cutting off the last bit. it sounds the same whether i use aplay or omxplayer to play sound, or the native functions of TTS software like festival, festival lite, espeak.

i don't think it's me, either, i think it's the RPi. reading through this thread (https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?f=38&t=47942) the guy who nails it is the pair of posts from nPHYN1T3 on page 2. i'm feeling you nPHYN1T3, i'm right there too

sorry for drunk. but i'm kind of super bummed because i thought the RPi would be powerful enough to at least play sound files on command. if it can't do that i probably need to start over.

Seems like these weenies will sell you an outboard DAC board for your Pi?

https://www.hifiberry.com/products/dacplus/

Tho to be clear I have no idea if that would help at all lol

hmm...it might! i was thinking about that earlier (actually, i was thinking of connecting to an arduino and using a wave shield, which would just be one more unnecessary step). i'm not sure if it would work either. it's not so much the sound quality, it's more just the weird thing about the beginning and ending of audio clips getting cut off. super weird. it would be one thing if the cutoff was predictable, because then you could just build in extra silence at the edges. but sometimes it cuts off half of the whole file, sometimes just the first second, sometimes only the first syllable. weird.
i might give the DAC a shot. thanks!

Isn’t there supposed to be like some media decoding in hardware on these chips? This is perverse but does an mp3 play back without an issue?

are you playing back audio through the HDMI or headphone jack? also, it might be a stretch but someone had figured out how to use raspberry pi to transmit FM radio (attach a bit of wire to one of the pins to act as an antenna) so that might be another way of getting generated audio off the pi.

Same problem with wav and mp3, yeah.

Same problem with 3.5 mm output. It’s really the craziest thing, seems like people have been complaining for years too.

I will troubleshoot some more tomorrow, but for tonight I declare temporary failure

Temporary failure is just the prelude to permanent success!

—Steve Jobs

I could track it down, but I had a cheap dac that was pretty darn good connected to a pi for quite a while. As in, purchased on alibaba and available in bulk cheap. I don’t remember any playback issues but I was playing music and not short clips

is it only happening on starting and finishing an audio clip? maybe keep the audio engaged by playing an infinite silent stream simultaneously so there's never a start/stop?

Philip i did run across a proposed solution along those lines, and i'm going to give that a shot. plan B (actually more like Plan Z-42 at this point) is going with an audio DAC. i'm also going to try to see if there are any maker-oriented physical stores in the Chicago area.

i also want to look into boosting the processing power - i'm kind of wary to overclock because my normally-clocked unit is having issues with power (if i have a USB microphone connected and then run chromium at the same time, the pi crashes). but there might also be ways to use all 4 cores of the pi rather than just one (this thread has several ideas along these lines: https://www.raspberrypi.org/forums/viewtopic.php?t=198425)

i was super bummed about this the other night but now i'm back in the saddle.

thanks for the ideas and help, by the way! really appreciate it.

are you playing back audio through the HDMI or headphone jack?

i tried the headphone jack again, this time by just right-clicking the desktop GUI sound icon and changing it to Analog. It worked! At the moment it's not cutting off any text, and isn't taking too long to process the TTS either.

i'm going back to the voice recognition (via eSpeak) part again tonight, only this time my plan is to use a pretty limited dictionary/language model (around 500 words) rather than trying to attempt to recognize everything in English. i think that might have been the source of the slow processing speed (it was taking about 6 seconds to process 2 seconds of audio).

Is it feasible to use the Pi as a client and offload the speech-to-text to a faster computer over the network? I can well imagine it being hard to get low-latency speech to text performance on any cheapo device.

― direct to consumer online mattress brand (silby),

silby, i'm a fool. i think this could work! i wanted to avoid dependence on the internet because i didn't want some sort of uncontrollable network connection issue to break it. but a friend just explained to me that it's possible to my computer as the server, the raspberry pi's as clients, and a local modem to transmit the wi-fi signal, without my computer needing to be connected to the internet itself. right? i'm a noob in pretty much everything i'm doing here so i might be way off, but it seems like the only possible connection issue would be the building's wi-fi interfering with the local wi-fi between my laptop and the RPIs, and even that would be avoidable by just using a unique port (or something) on my router?

with all that said, i'm viewing all of that as a backup option, and i'd still rather figure out a way to get these devices working together without any network, as fully independent links in the chain. but if i'm not able to do it, it'll be great to have the server/client processing as an option.

a minor victory today! i didn't realize that time.time() is so consistent and precise between UNIX devices. when i call it on either my laptop or pi, they return the same exact value (in seconds since jan 1, 1970..siiiick). i can run the following bit of code on two different devices, and they'll both play the sound at the exact same time, independently.

import time
import subprocess
def Launch():
	print ("unit initialization time: ", time.time())
	print("waiting for next 18-second cycle to begin...")
	while time.time() % 18 > abs(.005):
		time.sleep(.001)
def Cycle():
	while True:
		print("new cycle: ", time.time())
		subprocess.call('afplay test.wav', shell=True)
		while time.time() % 18 > abs(.005):
			time.sleep(.001)
Launch()
Cycle()

the way i'm making it wait for 18 second intervals is a little hacky but it works.

what's nice is that i can start up one device and then wait as long as i want to start the second, and they'll both sync up as soon as the start of the next 18-second cycle comes around. to me, this is exciting because it means i can define various events in an endless 18-second loop (play a message, record a message, choose a new phrase and play it back, etc), and even if the processing speeds for the various events vary from unit to unit, i can still specify exact times in the cycle for the events to happen so that they stay in sync. plus, it means that the entire chain of devices can be modular, constrained only by the cost of buying all the equipment and the size of the room.

while time.time() % 18 > abs(.005):

why abs() on a constant positive value?

positive or negative, it basically sets a range of .010, centered on 0, as a kind of buffer. i tried setting it at exactly 0 but realized that the granularity of time.sleep is only around 1ms or so, whereas time is measured down to 7 decimal places (the current time is 1520489816.0669749, in seconds since january 1, 1970), which means that it's very unlikely for the time to every hit exactly 0.0000000. so i'm basically establishing a trigger zone for the time rather than requiring an exact value. it seems to work - the output is showing me that i'm triggering new events within thousandth of a second of the "real" time, and it works with multiple, independent units in perfect sync. pretty trippy tbh!

actually i guess time's not going to be negative, so you're right koogs, just positive! but either way the principle is kinda the same, it's just establishing a buffer/trigger zone.

you don't have a buffer there, the absolute value of .005 will always be .005

if you have a variable in there and it could be either .005 or - .005 it'd always return the positive value

absolute value is math shorthand for "drop the negative sign if there is one"

Ok, including absolute value was a silly goof (it can just be > .005) but it still manages to do the job of waiting to start the next cycle until the remainder is between 0 and 0.005, which is the “buffer” I’m blabbing about. Part of my problem in life is I just loosely use terminology that actually has specific meaning in the discipline I’m flailing in atm

You might be able to reduce the number of Pis in favor of cheap radios using something like this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdjQw6P0HLA

Also, does the behavior change if you do something like this?:

print ("unit initialization time: ", time.time())
print("waiting for next 18-second cycle to begin...")
while True:
  time.sleep(18 - (time.time() % 18))
  print("new cycle: ", time.time())
  subprocess.call('afplaytestest.wav', shell=True)

should be .wav',shell=True not wavhell=True unless it's some kind of black metal track

Also, does the behavior change if you do something like this?

it does work! and it does simplify the code a bit, too. t's funny though, because it slightly decreases the precision of the cycle starts. here's the log for time.sleep(5 - (time.time() % 5)):

launch time:  1520541567.056979
waiting for next 5 -second cycle to begin...
new cycle:  1520541575.004256
new cycle:  1520541580.005019
new cycle:  1520541584.999948
new cycle:  1520541590.005019
new cycle:  1520541595.004566
new cycle:  1520541600.0001438
new cycle:  1520541605.000339
new cycle:  1520541610.0040052

which is great! accurate to the ms unit, for the most part. but then here's the log for the while time.time() % 5 > 0.005 approach:

launch time:  1520541896.142796
waiting for next 5-second cycle to begin...
new cycle:  1520541900.000105
new cycle:  1520541905.000193
new cycle:  1520541910.001322
new cycle:  1520541915.000451
new cycle:  1520541920.000237
new cycle:  1520541925.000406
new cycle:  1520541930.0009248
new cycle:  1520541935.000673

accurate to another degree, for some reason. anyway, it doesn't really matter since all of that is way more precise than i actually need it to be.

the fm transmitter idea is really cool! i'm not sure i can really use it for this because i want each unit to have both a speaker and a microphone. each one needs to be capable of recording audio using a microphone, translating to text, converting that back to speech (TTS), then playing it over the speaker. i've already got a working version with all of that, it just needs to be tweaked quite a bit (mostly with the speech recognition side - optimizing dictionary and language models in particular) . i've been so busy the last week or two but i need to just go ahead and order the other units + cheap but good USB microphones + cheap speakers so that i can do the tweaking with the real units.
i've been so busy the last week with various things so i haven't been

i meant to say though, i can think of all sorts of things you could do with the FM transmitter setup, though, as a separate project. i feel like there's all sorts of untapped potential in these things.

of course, the day after i buy 4 new raspberry pis, they announce a newer, better, faster version, at the same price:

https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-3-model-bplus-sale-now-35/

i am thinking of getting one of these for me and my son as a project, initially for video game emulation. anyone use one for that purpose?

i haven't personally, but i think several people in this thread have before! and plus, out of all raspberry pi project ideas, the emulation one is probably the most popular and has many online guides you can use to walk you through the process. i think it's a fantastic project idea for you and your son, because it's complicated enough to be interesting and show you some of the possibilities of the device, but also you have like a 99.5% chance of succeeding within a reasonable time frame.

I have one hooked up to my TV that I use as a video game emulator (classic arcade + consoles). Works really well, running RetroPie. Connected to the TV via HDMI and the built-in bluetooth pairs with a wireless Nintendo Pro controller.

xp to KM yeah! ive been looking at some of the youtube tutorials for it. i guess im sold on getting one, but not sure if want to spend a little extra to get the 4GB ram on the pi 4 or be low budget and get a 3B+. i guess i dont want to mess with several hundred gigs of games and will probably stick to older consoles (maybe up to N64/PS1?)

Pro Switch controller ?

Xp

fhazel which pi model do you have?

I have a pi3 and it plays ps1 games fine. Haven't tested n64

be sure to toss super bonk on there!

I'm using a Pi 3 Model B (not B+) for my emulator, and the controller is actually a Wii U Pro controller, but I bet a Switch controller would work too. With the HDMI cable, case, and power supply it cost about $50 (I already had the controller).

I've heard that the 4 has overheating issues and often needs a fan attached, which for me is a hard pass.

ive read that as well

i def want to minimize the amount of parts to have to install and keep a relatively low electrical

what size sd card do yall use?

*relatively low electrical footprint

Those old 8 bit arcade games are like 40kb each, you can get literally thousands into the smallest SD card and they play on even on a pi2b+. I've a couple of SNES games on the too but haven't stress tested them. Retropie.

I've also got a pi zero music server using volumio and that was also a doddle to set up but the mini usb connectors are a bit strange.

yeah, I only have ROMs for classic arcade and home consoles up to the 16-bit era... once games are disc-based, they take up a lot of storage space. The SD card in my Pi is a 32GB one. Has thousands of arcade ROMs, plus the (mostly) complete libraries of about a dozen home console systems.

just ordered the pi 4 starter kit which includes a case with a built-in fan to address the heating issue. in the end, the 2gb upgrade seemed worth it considering it wasn't much more expensive and retropie has released a pi4-compatible image.

excellent! I've heard that the newer video chip on the Pi 4 can do N64 emulation (which is problematic on even high-end PCs, honestly) much better than the Pi 3. Dreamcast too.

yeah, im at least gonna check it out. i got the 2gb ram version bc i was trying to keep it under 100 for budget (incl controllers).

i picked up 2 ps2-style controllers since i figured those could handle both ps1/n64 configs, although the C buttons could be weird (maybe use the right analog stick?)

I have a version 3 running retropie with two cheapo USB SNES controllers and it's great. It was like $70 all in with an SD card and case and easy if you're comfortable with formatting drives and linux at all.

I've only used it for nes and snes games and it's great, my kid and i have been playing Super Mario 2 and 3, Donkey Kong Country and Super Mario World pretty regularly during lockdown. I've never played anything past the PS1 so it all feels awesome still. I do kind of want to get wireless controllers though

honestly, i've never been able to reliably emulate anything from N64 on. definitely not playstation and up, but even the N64 roms i have are always messing up. maybe i'm just a really bad emulator (openEMU)?

but anyway, just throwing out there because if you notice later generation games don't work well on the Raspberry Pi, keep in mind they might not work well in general.

this is what ive gathered from various youtube tutorials and my limited experience emulating n64 stuff on my old pc laptop. some games would run, but would be laggy. one was just bizarre looking (mario tennis) but still mostly functional. i wasnt clocking fps or anything like that, though.

assuming the executive branch changes hands, anyone—be they R or D or a serious media person just delivering Hard Truths—who suggests that we really have to tighten our belts what with all this deficit should be immediately and in no uncertain terms be told to [ redacted] themselves immediately. and anyone who gives this advice one iota of thought other than to point and laugh and shame should also be written off forever. period.

god damn it. rong thread

otm though

I guess i phrased it wrong - in actual real life, I've only ever played up to the N64 and PS1 and have never used any xbox, ps2+, switch, wii, etc. so my video game literacy ends in the late 90s. I've only ever tried emulating through the SNES on my pi

the wii was the last system i owned when it was current-gen

we have this now and the kid is having a blast, so mission accomplished.

re: n64 emulation, its really hit or miss. mario 64 seems to run okay, mario kart 64 runs but has choppy sound, others are completely unplayable. psone games are much larger files but i dl'ed marvel v capcom 2 and it ran like a dream. he's probably enjoying the snes and GBA games the most at this point.

i also got the simpsons arcade game which i dont know that i ever beat as a kid, but it kind of loses the drama without the limitation of chuck e cheese tokens.

also i learned what a chaotic person my son is by playing nba jam with him bc his favorite shot is a full court heave. he takes like 15 of these and makes at least 3 a game which only emboldens him further despite the fact that we routinely lose games by 10 or more points. he's like a coked out trae young.

this is how we learn

not how to win

but who we are

playing video games with him reminds me there are ppl who do not glean the teleology of Things and live in a state of constant Being, Not Becoming

I mentioned this on the Sonos thread, but it's probably more relevant here. I finally finished my project of making a web-based mp3 player for the Raspberry Pi that I can control from my phone. It's pretty simple, but it seems surprisingly hard to find a product on the market that does this, and the price, even including the DAC card with RCA outputs that I can connect to my stereo, was very reasonable.

lol m bison

o. nate, what software did you go with?

It's all in python, using flask for the web interface and vlc for the mp3 playback.

there are ppl who do not glean the teleology of Things

video games have some of the most unambiguously teleological worlds our universe has to offer though, so keep him at it

in other news, given my squeezebox-based system can't be replaced if the hardware fails, I've been looking into the rasbpi + DAC solutions out there that can still use the logitech media server + have a phone interface available.

"piCorePlayer" is a great distro for making a Pi dedicated to LMS, client and/or server. I'm not running it at the moment since I have a Windows box up full-time.

I recently switched the Pi 2 I was using mainly for Kodi from OSMC to LibreELEC and surprisingly it makes a great LMS client (using Squeezelite in its "Multimedia-tools" addon). Whatever I was doing in OSMC, I had to "turn off" that Pi's music player in order to watch any videos without messed up sound. Now it all just works.

SD cards are finally available in big enough capacities (and at not insane prices) for me to have my entire FLAC library on them too, which means no need for a hard drive... it really is a magical time for home listening.

it's all low power stuff too. Time for someone to hollow out a walkman for a Pi case!

I already have a dedicated media server running Windows that works well for video stuff, but it's kind of irritating to use with LMS... no matter what I do, about 10% of the time it fails to wake up when I try and turn on a network music player and I have to remote into it and fiddle around. A Rasbpi/Linux/SD card server I would assume could be set up to not go to sleep (as you say, it's low-power enough to leave on all the time) and reliably serve music when asked by a network player.

When I used PiCorePlayer to serve with an external disk on my Pi 2 it was all good. I was surprised the Pi could handle the server. Using one of them sounds preferable to messing with wake-on-LAN or something? I haven't messed with that kind of thing.

the motherboard I use for my server supposedly has wake-on-LAN but damned if I have been able to get it to work consistently

https://www.newegg.com/p/1HD-005N-00041?item=9SIAHUB9513511

i mean this may (likely) be garbage but very tempting

a modern Nintendo wireless controller pro will serve for pretty much all those controllers, and the build quality will be way better... but I get the desire for classic controller shapes (especially that NES controller, as painful as they get after a few hours)

xp i bought from vilros and got 2 ps2-style controllers. they're not outstanding (some sticky buttons) but they were cheap ($10 each or so) and they're compatible with every system.

been using volumio on a pi zero as a music player. has been working nicely using an mpd client on my phone rather than the web interface (which fails to display the queue at times)

oh, their webpage says i can type 'volumio pull' to update. that seems easy enough.

2 hours later i'm watching a newly imaged disk fsck. been 30 minutes so far.

I use an 8bitdo sn30 Pro Plus controller for emulation on my pi. Works equally well for retro games and newer. It's essentially a modernized SNES controller with dual analog sticks in a dualshock-style arrangement. This is the only indie controller manufacturer that's putting out stuff with a build quality comparable to the major players.

https://www.8bitdo.com/sn30-pro-plus/

whoa

anybody used a converter for PS2 dual-shock controllers to usb? gotta be cheaper and less wasteful than buying a new controller, i figure

also, spectrum game emulation, what do i use for keys?

m bison did you already do this? retropie JUST released a new version with Pi 4 support w greatly improved n64 compatibility, worth the cost of a fan imo (you can get cheapish cases w/ a fan built in)

i did! and i got a case with a fan! and some of the n64 stuff works ok!

ALSO HI STEVIE

specifically: mario kart, sm64, tony hawk all work with some sound lag that minimally affects gameplay. mario tennis on the other hand was NAH.

stevie d! gad to see you're well!

HI HELLO!

I have a Pi 3 (I don't think it's even a 3+) and I'm considering upgrading to a 4 but I still have SO much to keep be busy with genesis/ps1/snes

my understanding is that while a lot of emulators you just configure them once and they're set, n64 requires a lot more hands on per-game tweaking to get it working the best

yeah im getting that impresh. right now my son and i are both deep diving into game boy advance stuff i never played (esp the pokemen)

oh shit! DEFINITELY play Mother 3 (you can find a translated ROM p easily), I also had a lot of fun w Mario vs Donkey Kong

hit me up via lixmail, i have a pretty complete r0m c0llection

unless you already have them all?

GBA was an amazing system

best Nintendo handheld until the Switch Lite

Switch Lite still too big tbh

we've been playing mother 3!

i get my ROMs from v1mm's, it's been v v reliable

was unfamiliar; thanks for that!

oh v1mm's is the best, that and the-eye are my go-tos

Raspberry Pi - A keyboard sized, personal computer for $70 "now thirty times as powerful as it was at launch"
https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/raspberry-pi-400-the-70-desktop-pc/

pretty cool! although one of the advantages of the current rpi is that it's easy to hide inside of things if you don't want to show the computery parts.

but i'm sure there's a lot more going on with that update than the keyboard and it's physical size. which is why i say,

pretty cool!

https://www.instagram.com/p/CH6jn2WAH_i/?igshid=viivrs3vi8c0

An excellent Chonky case with a pi inside. Love dat keyboard too

The 400 is dplaying on my unfulfilled SAM Coupë / Jupiter Ace desires. Don't need but...

would be interesting to know how many hundreds of times more powerful they are than the spectrum i grew up with. and if the kids are similarly inspired or whether the complexity works against it.

inspired imo

some are, at least, imo

pi Jukebox decided to die yesterday, just stopped playing after a Dead Can Dance song. i was logged in at the time but i couldn't ls let alone shutdown nicely. pulled the plug but the sd card is now toast, laptop doesn't even see it.

still, something to do...

Pi 5 is the most capable yet, and the most expensive (and needs active cooling?). part of me thinks this is missing the point, but i guess you still have the zeros for the small stuff, even the picos. do i need a third? perhaps not.

(oh, places still have various model 3s and 4s in stock, more than enough choice)

It's weird but you can often find used computer kits that used rpi3 for the brains for cheaper than bare rpi3.

I guess less weird but still weird -- you can find full working laptops for even cheaper.

needing active cooling makes them pretty much useless

some of the new cases have fans built in (but will limit expandability, getting in the way of the pins)

the official word is "continual heavy usage" will cause thermal throttling and a fan will avoid that. also that the 5 is generally cooler than the 4 and faster even if throttling, so it's not as terrible as all that.