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Raspberry Pi

Has anyone ever played around with a Raspberry Pi computer? I got one a while back to tinker with. I'm learning a little bit as I go. I have it set up to run Retropie for old games. I found some old DOS games I used to play as a kid and added an emulator to run them. I would be interested to know if anyone has experimented with a Pi and what it was used for.
 
I've got 3 of them. A Model A, a Model B & a RPI 2. I use the model b as a media centre with osmc, the model a as a music streaming device and the RPI 2 as an AirPrint server and a general web development environment for if I feel like messing around with web apps. They are great little devices.
 
I picked up a 3b this summer. I tried a couple of things with it, but the learning curve was a little steep with the amount of time I had to "play". I tried installing Android OS and had issues with overscan on top of the stability issues. I wanted to get it to run Amazon Prime Video, Apple Music and a few other apps without going through AirPlay. I started having more time recently and decided to try Retropie. I'm learning things piece by piece as I work the bugs out.

One of my original ideas was to use an LCD to make calendar/organizer for the kitchen. Set a screen saver to scroll through pictures like a digital photo frame. The default screen would be a calendar with reminders. I also wanted to implement a shopping list that could be updated from our phones. Finally it could store and display recipes. Unfortunately that idea died violently at the hands of SWMBO. We don't need any of my gadgets cluttering up the kitchen. lol
 
A guy I work with has one that looks exactly like a small Nintendo from the 80s. He built the case for it using a 3D printer. I haven't personally seen it in action, but he says he's got pretty much every video game from the era on there - NES, Sega, Atari, Odyssey, etc.
 
I have the Pi 2 with the media kit that was planed to be built into a media server... someday I really should pull it out (it' still NiB) and play with it. lol
 
I have the Pi 2 with the media kit that was planed to be built into a media server... someday I really should pull it out (it' still NiB) and play with it. lol
Mine sat unused for a few months. It's pretty fun once you get into it. There are some cool basic projects, like Retropie, that are fun to get going with.

I have one connected to a AT&T Laptop Dock (for Motorola ATRIX 4G), works just like a laptop!
I'm surprised at the amount of performance crammed into such a small package. Asus just came out with one that's supposed to blow RPi out of the water based on specs. The software and user community will likely be a limitation though. Both hardware and software are based on the RPi. I think most of the accessories are supposed to be interchangeable.
 

BradWorld

Dances with Wolfs
I've had a model B for years. I use it for some IoT and diy smart home stuff, and general messing around. My latest project requires a model 3B, so I gave the old one to my 15 year old son, who promptly started programming his own games in scratch. I've been using the 3B with the Particle IoT cloud service.
 

BradWorld

Dances with Wolfs
Does using the cloud allow you to control smart home stuff outside of your home network?

Yes it does. Particle also makes their own microprocessor boards that run on a very arduino-like language. They work really well for smart home projects such as turning things on and off, etc. I think their boards are about $19 for the wifi enabled models. They also make one that has a built in cellular radio for stuff that's outside of you wifi network. It's fun stuff to play with.
 
I'm not a techie, so never heard of these. Why would a person want/buy one? Do they have some different functionality?
 
I'm not a techie, so never heard of these. Why would a person want/buy one? Do they have some different functionality?
So they are basically a full computer contained on a single board, about the size of your average smart phone. The operating system is fully open source, so anyone can see the code, tweak it, learn how it works (if so motivated). As far as why get one, there are many many facets. Some use them as a learning tool to dig deeper into computer science and programming. Others pick them up to build into a huge variety of different computer solutions. They can be turned into a classic game console, playing all the old Nintendo and Sega console games. They can be built into a media server so you can watch your dvd's/downloaded moves on your big tv, or any other computer in the house. You know those big complex holiday light shows that are popular? Yep, you can set it up to so those. Remote control the lighting in your house from your phone, while you are in another state? Sure thing. The variety of things they can be setup to do is close to endless.
 
It's a great platform to tinker with. Everything from RetroPi as mentioned above to robotics. What blows me away is how powerful it really is and how far the toolchains have come in such a short time. Fifteen years ago or so I was part of a startup that did embedded media players and servers (think AppleTV or Roku, but way before they existed). For the time, what we were doing was very cutting edge stuff and delivering embedded platforms elegant enough to meet the customer's expected use case was a lot of heavy lifting for our team. Now anybody with even some minor knowledge can do roughly the same thing for a $35 investment in a Pi. I guess there is some satisfaction in knowing that some of features, fixes, and libraries that we fed back into the open source enabled a bit of this at some level.

Cheers,
JW
 

BradWorld

Dances with Wolfs
Has anyone run Kodi media player on a R-Pi? Specifically one of the newer models? Ive run it on android stick and the performance has been lackluster compared to running it on a PC. This thread has made me wonder if its worth loading up Kodi on a R-Pi and giving it a shot.
 
I didn't try very hard, but it was a little under powered for the builds I tried. The problem area, I think, was with the memory. Kodi 16 Jarvis installed fine. Some of the builds have smaller versions that are stripped down to work on some of the stick media players.
 

BradWorld

Dances with Wolfs
thanks. I would suspect there would be a lot of lag while searching through media. That was the case with the android sticks. the kodi builds would install fine, but they would run really slow.
 
I think the Pi's have better processing power over all than the Android Sticks. I've never heard anyone complain about lag when using kodi on the Pi for a media server build.
 
Runs decent with some navigation eccentricities and minor lag, but didn't spend a ton of time optimizing. To be fair, what I was playing around with was an image that had both RetroPie and KODI, so may not be representative of a stand alone environment.
 
Runs decent with some navigation eccentricities and minor lag, but didn't spend a ton of time optimizing. To be fair, what I was playing around with was an image that had both RetroPie and KODI, so may not be representative of a stand alone environment.
Does that just use RetroPie as a frontloader for Kodi, or does Kodi run separately?
 
Does that just use RetroPie as a frontloader for Kodi, or does Kodi run separately?

I was using KODI as an experimential package inside of RetroPi/Emulation Station, but RPi is really just an elegant presentation layer and management framework around the emulators. I think there are some out there that flip this on its head a bit and run RPi as a plug-in inside of of KODI.
 
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