Raspberry Pi 2

[Suff]

Is now as powerful as a netbook and will run Windows10.

I must admit I'm tempted. Very portable computing without the need to go all Linuxy... More things I have no time to do. But whet's my appetite anyway.

[Workingman]

If my children were still age 11 or 12 I would certainly be tempted.

I might still be. A computer for the price of a meal in a restaurant has to be a good deal.

[Suff]

Yes a 900mhz quad core with 1gb ram and HDMI out with 5.1 surround sound for the cost of a meal. All with operating system and media player on a configured SD card.

Hard to go wrong in the arcane world of trying to get all your media and audio streaming properly. I've already spent some £400 on all my boxes and I'm going to have to sell off two of them as they're just not good enough.

[Workingman]

I paid a visit to my local computer guy and he has one set up with mouse, keyboard, game controller and speakers and running a racer game on demo on a 40" flat panel. It is more than up to the job

The kit comes with a decent quality black enclosure, a couple of heat sinks, 8GB micro SD with NOOB and XBMC installed, wi-fi dongle, HDMI cable and power pack all for £40.

He also has an extension board with about 15 features including more self-powered USB ports, SATA port and power connector, powered 3.5mm stero jack, stero amp @3.5W, real time clock....With a little bit of work, some decent wiring, sensors and motors you could run a home on one of these things.

When I remember that my first laptop had a single core 1.3Ghz CPU, 512MB SDRAM with 64MB used for video, 120MB hard drive and only 2 USB ports I am stunned. It also cost about £750, and that made me cry.

[Suff]

My first laptop, if I remember correctly, was a 1000mhz PIII with 1GB DDR RAM, but it had dedicated games graphics. It was advanced for the time. It cost just over £1,000 I think and had a 1400 x 1050 15" screen and 5.1 sound.

Apart from the drives and screen, the £26 Pi 2 (£50 with the kit), is pretty much better than that laptop. Which is quite an achievement. Looks like I won't get mine till Monday now. Which is a pain because I'm going home the weekend after so it will be two weeks before I really get some solid time to play with it.

We shall see how it goes but my brother tells me the Pi 2 is as fast as a budget PC. Which is as fast as I need.

[Workingman]

I wish that I was young enough and in the market for a new home.

I would have one of these open and close my curtains, turn the lights on and off and control the central heating. All I would do is phone home from my smartphone and I could do it all for a fraction of the £thousands companies now charge for the same services.

[Suff]

I wish that I was young enough and in the market for a new home.

I would have one of these open and close my curtains, turn the lights on and off and control the central heating. All I would do is phone home from my smartphone and I could do it all for a fraction of the £thousands companies now charge for the same services.

Erm, Wifi got there now. Download the app and away you go...

I bought this for my Father for Christmas.

Curtains

Light Switch

Lighting, power and Central Heating
Or a British Gas installed one for heating only

None of these are prohibitive. It just seemed to happen. One year I was scouring the internet for devices to allow me to do this from a PC remotely over a remote control link, the next year everyone is bombarding me with "smart apps" which link your home devices to your mobile wherever you are.

Note none of these solutions is prohibitive. I've gone for a single power socket today. #1 Son tells me there are fairly serious security concerns right now, so I'm restricting what I do right now. However I'm watching very carefully to see how this goes. Mrs S has already found some wireless switch pairs which allow me to add switches to rooms which were never built to take a second switch, but we opened a doorway which can't have a switch. If I could have it wifi too, I'd be even happier.

Note the Belkin light switch has advanced time adjustment capabilities. Tell it to go on with the dusk and off at, say, a range between 10 and 11pm and it will keep adjusting the on time. My friend (Astrophysicist), has these sytle controls on his main house blinds. They open with the dawn and close with the dusk all with no light sensors. Tell it where you are in the world and the correct time, the computer does the rest.

Our home automation suddenly got a huge boost. Mainly due to truly capable mobiles and their app stores, plus microminiaturised wifi components.

[Suff]

My Pi seems to have arrived on Friday. After I left for home.

I'll go and pick it up first thing before going to work I think. Especially as we have another huge meeting at Schuman and the whole place will be shut down to traffic again ....

[Workingman]

Keep us informed.

I would love to know how it performs re your music-XBMC-smart TV and other devices.

Cost wise, it has to be the deal of the century....... if it works.

[Suff]

Hmmm, received it today. The footprint is the size of a credit card. The box is 1" tall. I have a keyboard connected to it and a mouse plus two different remotes.

I bought one of these.

In short I'm using the OpenElec Kodi 14.1. It came as one of many versions on the SD card that came in the kit. I also installed the plain OpenElec and the Raspbian OS too so I have a 3 choice boot menu.

In short it's fast. Very quick, very slick. It's taken a bit to find my way through the menu but it has connected to my server, mapped the media shares, loaded the Movie and TV files into the menu and downloaded the media info.

During the library build I had a few issues where the interface crashed but I was able to ssh to the box from my laptop and issue a restart command each time so I didn't have to power it down.

I'm having an issue with the m3u playlist, it can read the m3u files but can't navigate the paths. I need to find out how the paths should be built. That will take some reading.

Right now I'm typing this whilst watching a BluRay full screen on a 40" tv in 1920x1080 and it's working perfectly with no sound flux or stuttering. Literally it's perfect. The BluRay menu's work but I'm having issues with the subtitles. They won't enable cleanly unless I use the real time interface, the menu enables it but the player simply won't activate them unless I choose as it's playing. Not a major issue.

The remotes are working but do some rather odd things from time to time and it has a penchant for bringing up the player bar in the middle of the screen and you have to navigate to the fullscreen icon and bring it back up again.

However idiosyncrasies apart, it's excellent value. Never mind the fact that you can do PVR functions with it too if you add a tuner. I haven't had much of a chance to look at the add on's but there are premium service add on's too.

I had a bit of fun with the heatsink, the hole in the case is out of line so it's slightly misaligned. Then again they are not supposed to need one so I guess a misaligned one is enough.

All in all I'm pretty impressed. BTW, my BluRay's are ripped without encryption. I use DVDFab to do that. Considering what I got from ASUS in their O!Play Mini Plus for ~£80 I am significantly impressed. What I have now is faster and generally better if a bit loose around the edges. For a Media Player which is free on a free OS, I'm very impressed and very happy. Especially as I'm now in control of my upgrades too.

It was a bit amusing though when I opened the box and looked for the micro SD card slot. And looked and looked.... Eventually my brain kicked in and I turned it over.....

[Edit]

Sorted the music playlist path. I'd borked it. fixed now with a simple global replace on the beginning of the relative path.