Raspberrypi - anybody got one?

[pickledsiblings]

If so, what are you doing with it?

I've got one and I'm struggling a bit...

I haven't got one but have played with a friend's. We connected it to a webcam and stuck it on a remote controlled car and sent it on a tour of the neighbourhood. He's planning on rigging it up to a remote controlled helicopter soon (when he buys the helicopter)

We enjoyed playing with it but I'm not sure what I would use it for long term.

Yeah, we've got one - it's usually running as a web server but is off at the moment. 9-year old discovered Scratch on it and is now using it on main PC too.

I have one! It's in the box still! It was an impulse buy and I really have no clue what to do with it lol

Silver, webcam sounds cool - is your friend a computer whizz then?

Mr Anchovy, snap! My 8 year old uses it for playing Scratch on but there's no sound. Have you got sound? Tried installing Raspbmc (XBMC for the pi) and managed to knacker an SD card - oops!

niceguy, Scratch is fun .

He is a bit of a geek yes. He has a computing science degree, same as me, so we had a bit of a geeky day together.

We love Scratch in our house too

Yes, a computing science degree, that's what I need. So do you work in computers then Silver?

No, haven't got sound. Next project is likely to be GPIO related, I had thought of controlling a land-based robot but a helicopter would be more challenging!

MrA - can you talk to me about running it as a web server please?

I don't actually Pickled. I'm a teacher. There aren't many IT jobs around here and I didn't really want to move closer to the jobs as that's further away from my family. Now it's probably a bit late to go into it as my degree is somewhat out of date. Good job I love teaching then.

Sure OhYouGreatGreatBritain, what part do you need help with?

I'm guessing that the Pi systems will become fairly popular, so links to any specific Pi-related websites for downloads and/or discussions might be worth posting.

May even be worth asking MNHQ to set up a new RaspPi topic (as it is going to attract an even smaller subset of users and would be nice to see all threads in one area not intermingled with the rest of Geeky Stuff, at least in my opinion, else those threads won't be easily seen, and handy tips could be missed).

MrA, pretty much all of it I can set up a website happily. I'd be using it to host my weather station.

At the moment my data goes via USB to my hub and then directly to a very basic website that the weather station manufacturer provides. It also goes to my pc via the Internet hub. I don't like leaving the pc on overnight but I do leave the Internet up.

I'd like to be able to send the data to the raspberry pi, whilst not losing the ability for it to go to the pc, where I do my data analysis, or directly to the internet and hence to the ready made website which is a great back up. Id be happy to leave the pi running 24/7 and Id be able to create a much better website.

I'm much more of a software person than a hardware person as you can see!

Thanks!

I'm guessing that the Pi systems will become fairly popular, so links to any specific Pi-related websites for downloads and/or discussions might be worth posting.

Yes the best places for general RPi stuff are easy:
www.raspberrypi.org/ - the official site
elinux.org/RPi_Community - a section of a wiki dedicated to linux-based embedded computers

Lots of resources linked from there, but they can be a bit hard to find and some assume a level of basic Linux knowledge.

I'll also link to www.myrpi.net/ and declare a personal interest

Ok OhYouGreatGreatBritain, that is a great use for one!

All of the simple guides I have found for RPi web servers install Apache and MySQL which are not very suited to the Pi's small memory. I have started a guide for a more Pi specific stack here (warning this is fairly early work in progress). There are also links to some scripts and templates to make life easier for those who don't know their "nano" from their "vim" (is this you)?

Is there a technical manual online for the weather station?

That is me, the only nano I know is something that is really really small! I'll have a really good look at your manual :) I used to be able to write code a long time ago but that was fortran. I can muddle through HTML but that's it nowadays

weather station manual

This is going to be a GREAT summer project :)

Actually, it's probably the data logger manual you need, the weather station connects to the logger wirelessly.

data logger

Yes thanks, I picked up on that once I got the details. It seems that the software provided by the manufacturer to interface with the USB data is Windows only, and the data sent over the internet doesn't look very easy to intercept.

Fortunately the open source community has already done the heavy lifting: it seems that wview will read the data from the usb connection and write it to an SQLite database, as well as producing some HTML pages to get your web server started.

Here are some useful threads I found:

www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=14418.0
www.wviewweather.com/release-notes/wview-User-Manual.html#Installation-debian
dansraspberrypi.tumblr.com/post/26451666334/installing-wview-on-raspberry-pi

Note that the wview software will not work on Raspbian so you will have to use a different distro. I wouldn't recommend Squeeze because the older versions of nginx and php don't work so well so you will need to use the beta version of the fp emulating Wheezy which was produced before they switched to the hardware floating point Raspbian.

My web server instructions should work fine with that too.

It looks fun, I see there is a sensor data stream emulator in wview so I might have a play .

You are such a star :) I'm going to have to put aside some serious reading time. I'm sure it can be done. Thank you :)