My RasPi arrived today :)

[Steve]

Finally!

 

Now I have to wait until I get home tonight to plug it in :(.  First test will be as a media centre, but the lack of a case will make things difficult when small fingers are around the house.

Is anybody printing cases for these, and if so, can I buy one?

 

Steve

[Paul Schulz]

Hi Steve,

Mine arrived yesterday as well! :-)

The case that I preprinted needs some more tidying up.. but I could
print you one.
What colour would you like. I have white, yellow or pink.
(What colours does Hackerspace still have?)

Let me know which image you end up using. I'm off to but some microcd
cards at lunchtime
(already have an adaper).

Cheers,
Paul

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[Steve Roehrs]

Thanks Paul - that'd be great.  I'd prefer black, but since it's likely to end up stuck on the back of a TV, White or yellow would be fine.  How much do you want for it?

 

Why microSD cards? Mine has what looks like a full size SD card socket on it.  I have some 4Gb and a 3Gb card ready to be re-purposed, but I haven't downloaded the distros yet.

 

Steve

[Paul Schulz]

Hi Steve,

Full size SD slot, but I'm 'standardising' on MicroSD. (I have an adaper)

Do you have a case preference?
http://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=raspberry+pi&sa=Search

The original one that I downloaded doesn't appear to be on this page.
I'll have to have a look for it tonight. (I still have the original
files.)

[Dylan Sale]

Hi guys!

I have been playing with my Pi for the last few weeks. I found using a new SanDisk 8GB Ultra Class 6 card was MUCH faster than using my old 2Gb Kingston microSD one. There were benchmarks online saying that for doing random reads and writes of 4-32kb files (typical OS stuff), the SanDisk is a few orders of magnitude faster than most other brands. 

I installed raspbmc (http://www.raspbmc.com/) on it, and have been playing around with the settings. It struggles a bit on the menus, and crashes when I access the SMB browser, but they say that is expected with the beta build they have because its not optimised yet.

Let me know if you find a better media center solution (its why I bought the Pi, to replace my aging xbox).

PS I made my case out of a breakfast cereal box using one of the paper craft designs out there. Works well!
Dylan Sale

[Ken]

Media centre solution?
$40 set top box from JB HiFi.  :)
It has a USB socket to take memory sticks or external hard drives, HDMI & digital audio out.
Oh, and it has a TV tuner built in.  (And comes in a case.)

Seriously, it probably runs Linux inside, and no doubt there is a hacker group somewhere that has hacked into it.  Though it does work out of the box.

Myself, I run Windows7 Media Center on a dedicated PC connected to my plasma TV.
That gives the maximum flexibility, TV viewing/recording, music (MP3s), DVDs (Blueray with added software), video, internet browsing (especially ABC iView, and Internode free 'radio'), photos, etc etc.
And it 'just works' (Windows quirks aside).
I did have a cheap UPS from MSY running it, but that seems to have died.  Once I've moved into my new house, I'll apply my nice new oscilloscope to it.

The only reason I run Windows Media Center, is because I have never had any joy with a Linux solution.  But hey, I haven't tried for some months now.  It must be time I used up a few more days of effort attempting to get one going.  (I tried Myth quite a few times.)  BMC was, and I assume still is, not TV-recording capable.

Ken.

[Steve Roehrs]

My server is $30 Pentium4 (loud, power hungry, and short of RAM) with 2x2Gb RAID, MythBuntu, and 2 PCI DVB tuner cards.  It's stable recording 2 DVB channels at once, can handle up to 4 if there are two on the same multiplex.  It's also the house MP3 player, only one output at the moment, but capable of supplying 3 zones of audio.  Also runs the mysql database for the solar monitoring, and serves recorded video via upnp and downloaded video via samba

 

Clients are either cheap PCs running XBMC or an old Xbox in the loungeroom with 720P out via component cable.  The RasPI will be replacing this box - the xbox can't handle 1080p replay of ripped blurays, or recorded HDTV.

 

XBMC as a frontend to myth seems to work pretty well for me, I've had occasional issues with the UPnP server disappearing, but the scheduling seems pretty solid. Mind you, I'm not using it for live TV.

 

I could never get any of the Xbox XBMC plugins to work well with the abc websites etc.  I've got an xbox 360 too but I can't get that to replay the mythtv recording without messing around with transcoding.  If the RasPi works well I'll be buying a few, once they're available

 

Steve

[Dylan Sale]

Thanks for the info Ken, but I really meant media center software for the Raspberry Pi. I like XBMC's interface (and the ability to play movies from split RAR files transparently). The plugins are nice as well and it works over ethernet to my media server.

I'm not hugely interested in recording TV, as most of my viewing is done over the internet (Revision 3, iView, etc).

The media center PCs I have seen have been around the $500-700 mark. I really just want it to act as a terminal to my media server so I can play videos, so that seems overkill. The Pi works fine for displaying the video, its just a little slow in the menus.

Cheers 
Dylan Sale

On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:47 AM, Ken <k...@waggies.net> wrote:

[Sam]

Hi all. Haven't posted here much and have never actually come to hack
stuff with you all (yet!) but had to jump in on this convo...

I have been using my rpi as my media centre for a few weeks now and I
have to say it's very impressive. I use raspbmc which is now up to RC3
and has dealt with a lot of the initial bugs. I find that it not only
streams HD video very smoothly over my network but the interface is
beautiful and a lot of streaming video plugins work great (including
iview!)... So I'd have to recommend this to anyone planning to use
their rpi this way :)

http://www.raspbmc.com There is an installer to download first and
transfer to your SD card, then on first boot the rpi will download the
full system and install itself automatically. So note that you do need
the rpi connected to the internet at that time!

As for the case I have to say this works very well as a temporary
solution: http://squareitround.co.uk/Resources/Punnet_net_Mk1.pdf

I have a second rpi now (long story) and I'm looking to do something a
little more interesting with this one so it might be a good
opportunity to come down and meet you all at a meeting some time
soon..?

Cheers, Sam

> > On 26 June 2012 11:33, Dylan Sale <dylan.s...@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> Hi guys!
>
> >> I have been playing with my Pi for the last few weeks. I found using a
> >> new SanDisk 8GB Ultra Class 6 card was MUCH faster than using my old 2Gb
> >> Kingston microSD one. There were benchmarks online saying that for doing
> >> random reads and writes of 4-32kb files (typical OS stuff), the SanDisk is
> >> a few orders of magnitude faster than most other brands.
>
> >> I installed raspbmc (http://www.raspbmc.com/) on it, and have been
> >> playing around with the settings. It struggles a bit on the menus, and
> >> crashes when I access the SMB browser, but they say that is expected with
> >> the beta build they have because its not optimised yet.
>
> >> Let me know if you find a better media center solution (its why I bought
> >> the Pi, to replace my aging xbox).
>
> >> PS I made my case out of a breakfast cereal box using one of the paper
> >> craft designs out there. Works well!
> >> Dylan Sale
>

> >> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 11:25 AM, Paul Schulz <p...@mawsonlakes.org>wrote:
>
> >>> Hi Steve,
>
> >>> Full size SD slot, but I'm 'standardising' on MicroSD. (I have an adaper)
>
> >>> Do you have a case preference?
> >>>http://www.thingiverse.com/search?q=raspberry+pi&sa=Search
>
> >>> The original one that I downloaded doesn't appear to be on this page.
> >>> I'll have to have a look for it tonight. (I still have the original
> >>> files.)
>

> >>> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:50 AM, Steve Roehrs <steve.roe...@gmail.com>

> >>> wrote:
> >>> > Thanks Paul - that'd be great.  I'd prefer black, but since it's
> >>> likely to
> >>> > end up stuck on the back of a TV, White or yellow would be fine.  How
> >>> much
> >>> > do you want for it?
>
> >>> > Why microSD cards? Mine has what looks like a full size SD card socket
> >>> on
> >>> > it.  I have some 4Gb and a 3Gb card ready to be re-purposed, but I
> >>> haven't
> >>> > downloaded the distros yet.
>
> >>> > Steve
>

> >>> > On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:22 AM, Paul Schulz <p...@mawsonlakes.org>

> >>> wrote:
>
> >>> >> Hi Steve,
>
> >>> >> Mine arrived yesterday as well! :-)
>
> >>> >> The case that I preprinted needs some more tidying up.. but I could
> >>> >> print you one.
> >>> >> What colour would you like. I have white, yellow or pink.
> >>> >> (What colours does Hackerspace still have?)
>
> >>> >> Let me know which image you end up using. I'm off to but some microcd
> >>> >> cards at lunchtime
> >>> >> (already have an adaper).
>
> >>> >> Cheers,
> >>> >> Paul
>

> >>> >> On Tue, Jun 26, 2012 at 10:02 AM, Steve <steve.roe...@gmail.com>

[Steve Roehrs]

Hi Sam

 

I tried RaspBMC lastnight - the Pi went through the steps of repartitioning, downloading etc, then it rebooted and was sitting with the RaspBMC logo on the screen for a very long time (hour +).  I had heard that the first boot takes time, but it looked like it had hung completely.  During boot I did notice an error message about not being able to mount the sd card properly, but that may have just been a transient thing that was OK after it retried.

 

I am using a cheapie DSE 8Gb SDHC card, I have a different brand card (also 8GB) that I will try tonight.

 

Cheers

 

Steve

On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 2:15 AM, Sam <s...@griml.in> wrote:

Hi all. Haven't posted here much and have never actually come to hack
stuff with you all (yet!) but had to jump in on this convo...

I have been using my rpi as my media centre for a few weeks now and I
have to say it's very impressive. I use raspbmc which is now up to RC3
and has dealt with a lot of the initial bugs. I find that it not only
streams HD video very smoothly over my network but the interface is
beautiful and a lot of streaming video plugins work great (including
iview!)... So I'd have to recommend this to anyone planning to use
their rpi this way :)

http://www.raspbmc.com There is an installer to download first and
transfer to your SD card, then on first boot the rpi will download the
full system and install itself automatically. So note that you do need
the rpi connected to the internet at that time!

As for the case I have to say this works very well as a temporary
solution: http://squareitround.co.uk/Resources/Punnet_net_Mk1.pdf

I have a second rpi now (long story) and I'm looking to do something a
little more interesting with this one so it might be a good
opportunity to come down and meet you all at a meeting some time
soon..?

Cheers, Sam

...

[Sam]

Hi Steve

This could definitely have been the SD card - I gather compatibility
has been improving in leaps and bounds, but I have been using a
SanDisk class 4 since day one and never had any issues. Going to get a
class 10 soon to see if it improves speeds at all but I can't complain
about performance at the moment anyway. SanDisk seem to be a solid
brand in any case fwiw.

It's normal to get some errors during boot regarding mounting local
filesystem and maybe a couple of others but they can safely be
ignored, assuming you do eventually get to the XBMC interface!
Sometimes rebooting is all it takes for things to get running
smoothly.

One thing I do recommend strongly is that you set up a "shared
library" - all this means is that your library database is on your
file server running mysql rather than a flat sqlite file on the rpi
itself. Makes things a lot easier if/when you need to reimage the SD
card and also if you want to have XBMC on other computers around the
house and keep them synched! (They'll all need to be running the
latest alpha of XBMC if you do this). More details:
http://wiki.xbmc.org/index.php?title=HOW-TO:Sync_multiple_libraries

Cheers, Sam

On Jun 27, 11:36 am, Steve Roehrs <steve.roe...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Sam
>
> I tried RaspBMC lastnight - the Pi went through the steps of
> repartitioning, downloading etc, then it rebooted and was sitting with the
> RaspBMC logo on the screen for a very long time (hour +).  I had heard that
> the first boot takes time, but it looked like it had hung completely.
> During boot I did notice an error message about not being able to mount the
> sd card properly, but that may have just been a transient thing that was OK
> after it retried.
>
> I am using a cheapie DSE 8Gb SDHC card, I have a different brand card (also
> 8GB) that I will try tonight.
>
> Cheers
>
> Steve
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
> On Wed, Jun 27, 2012 at 2:15 AM, Sam <s...@griml.in> wrote:
> > Hi all. Haven't posted here much and have never actually come to hack
> > stuff with you all (yet!) but had to jump in on this convo...
>
> > I have been using my rpi as my media centre for a few weeks now and I
> > have to say it's very impressive. I use raspbmc which is now up to RC3
> > and has dealt with a lot of the initial bugs. I find that it not only
> > streams HD video very smoothly over my network but the interface is
> > beautiful and a lot of streaming video plugins work great (including
> > iview!)... So I'd have to recommend this to anyone planning to use
> > their rpi this way :)
>

> >http://www.raspbmc.comThere is an installer to download first and

[Paul Shirren]

On 28/06/12 1:54 AM, Sam wrote:
> This could definitely have been the SD card - I gather compatibility
> has been improving in leaps and bounds, but I have been using a
> SanDisk class 4 since day one and never had any issues. Going to get a
> class 10 soon to see if it improves speeds at all but I can't complain
> about performance at the moment anyway. SanDisk seem to be a solid
> brand in any case fwiw.

There have been a few changes in recent kernels and firmware to improve
sd card compatibility and performance. If you have an image you
downloaded while waiting for your Pi you probably want to update it or
update the firmware and kernel.

No card went faster than just over 4MB/s for the first few months then
earlier this month we saw patches that can push a card over 20MB/s. That
is about as fast as things will go within spec. The interface can't do
the voltage drop to 1.8V required to support UHS so I think 25MB/s minus
some overhead is the theoretical max. I am guessing above a good class
4/6 you probably will not get any read performance improvement. Not sure
about write.

[Dylan Sale]

It is also worth noting that these read/write speeds are for sequential access for large files (MBs in size). In practice most reads and writes are in the order of 4-32kb in a typical OS/filesystem, and are generally random rather than sequential. This means the buffers that some cards use to get faster sequential speeds need to be flushed continuously when accessing smaller sizes randomly, and it makes them incredibly slow. 

As I mentioned before, SanDisk seem to be the best (up to 3MB/s for random reads and writes of 4-32kb files from some benchmarks I have seen), compared to others (as low as 10-100KB/s for the same).

I found swapping from my old Kingston microSD card to a new full sized SanDisk one improved boot and general responsiveness considerably.

Dylan Sale

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[Paul Schulz]

Greetings,

Something to note about the speed rating.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secure_Digital#Speed_Class_Rating

Speed Classes 2, 4, and 6 assert that the card supports the respective
number of MB/sec as a minimum sustained write speed for a card in a
fragmented state. Class 10 asserts that the card supports 10 MB/s as a
minimum non-fragmented sequential write speed.

I just bought a SanDisk (microSD) which had Class 10 marked on the
packet, but Class 4 stamped on the card itself.

On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 8:44 AM, Paul Shirren <shi...@shirro.com> wrote:

[Paul Shirren]

On 28/06/12 8:59 AM, Dylan Sale wrote:
>
> I found swapping from my old Kingston microSD card to a new full sized
> SanDisk one improved boot and general responsiveness considerably.
>

I have always been a Sandisk fan but my best one is busy on my imx53.
There have been mixed reports about compatibility, even with Sandisk.
You are probably best served getting the cheapest thing that works
rather than trying to wring the last 1% out of these things or you can
easily spend multiples of the cost of the Pi on peripherals.

You want to minimise writes anyway. tmpfs filesystems (hard with the ram
limits), disable journaling, noatime, zram swap (not convinced yet) or
reduce vm.swappiness. Put your files on a usb drive or use nfs, cifs,
iscsi, sshfs etc. Also it can be handy to disable syncing with eatmydata
when you are running lots of operations that fsync (at some risk of data
loss).

[Ken]

Victim of counterfeiting?

Ken.

[Steve Roehrs]

Well, second card has given me the same problem.  From reading their forums it seems that the intial installer image is using different firmware (and kernel?) to the final installed image, and others have seen the same problem.  The recommended solution (for RC-3 at least) is to download a full image, not the bootstrap image, and try that.  So, it's take 3 tonight and I'll let you know how it goes.

 

Thanks for the advice on the library, sounds like a good idea, and since I'm running a myth backend I already have mysql on the server so it should be a snap.

Steve

[Sam]

Just browsing the raspbmc forums and found this:
http://forum.stmlabs.com/showthread.php?tid=691

Sounds like it may be an issue with the mirrors not resolving
correctly at the moment. When RC3 was released the other day,
raspbmc.com was hit with a sudden and suspiciously well-timed DDoS
attack. The solution has been to change hosts but there are still DNS
issues, etc etc... It's a real shame, and I must say I feel very lucky
I installed RC3 during a brief break in the initial DDoS :/

The full image option sounds solid to me, but let me know if you
continue to have problems and I can copy my working image and host it
somewhere, minus any custom settings :)

By the way, another tip re: serving media to raspbmc is that it seems
to work smoothest when shares are mounted at boot via /etc/fstab,
rather than browsing to them through the XBMC gui. At least that's
been my experience with NFS shares and I find NFS preferable to samba.
I feel this also probably helps the shared library work consistently
as the media can be mounted at the same point across all machines.

> > > >http://www.raspbmc.comThere<http://www.raspbmc.comthere/> is an

[Steve Roehrs]

OK success with the prebuilt image, which only took a few minutes to get from their torrent.  It even works!

 

Unfortunately the main reason I wanted raspbmc was to playback recorded DVB tv which old Xbox can handle magnificently, but the Raspi chokes on MPEG2 and flat out refuses to play it.  I've read about the licensing issues so now I guess I'll have to wait until they organise to sell licenses for the MPEG2 hardware codec, or someone gets a software one working, at least for SD - I can wait for HD :)

 

Or I could just say forget about it and find another use for it...

 

Steve

[Sam Birbeck]

Ah, a shame. I'm afraid MPEG2 is indeed the one thing it can't handle. Doesn't affect me much as I tend to download my TV rather than record it! No real elegant solution for this I'm afraid - you could transcode these on the server end but then you'd probably be serving them over UPnP and then you miss out on all the lovely library functionality.

On Friday, 29 June 2012 at 12:02 AM, Steve Roehrs wrote:

> OK success with the prebuilt image, which only took a few minutes to get from their torrent. It even works!
>
> Unfortunately the main reason I wanted raspbmc was to playback recorded DVB tv which old Xbox can handle magnificently, but the Raspi chokes on MPEG2 and flat out refuses to play it. I've read about the licensing issues so now I guess I'll have to wait until they organise to sell licenses for the MPEG2 hardware codec, or someone gets a software one working, at least for SD - I can wait for HD :)
>
> Or I could just say forget about it and find another use for it...
>
> Steve
>

> On Thu, Jun 28, 2012 at 2:14 PM, Sam <s...@griml.in (mailto:s...@griml.in)> wrote:
> > Just browsing the raspbmc forums and found this:
> > http://forum.stmlabs.com/showthread.php?tid=691
> >
> > Sounds like it may be an issue with the mirrors not resolving
> > correctly at the moment. When RC3 was released the other day,

> > raspbmc.com (http://raspbmc.com) was hit with a sudden and suspiciously well-timed DDoS

> > > > To post to this group, send email to hackerspac...@googlegroups.com (mailto:hackerspac...@googlegroups.com)

> > > > .
> > > > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to

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> > >
> >
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