When we had Mike Riley on the show back in May, one major deterrent to his pitch that we can/should “run our homes on a Raspberry Pi” is that, well, you couldn’t buy one anywhere.
It’s six months later and you still can’t buy one! In this post, Jeff Geerling dives into the why behind that unfortunate fact, gets an official response from RPi, and lays out a few alternatives. One alternative even pleasantly surprised him…
What’s this? Basically:
Batch 1 is shipping now, but they’re taking pre-orders for batch 2, which ships in October. Starts at $159 and goes up from there.
Spoiler alert: it’s a Pi-hole
How does the Pi Hole work though? The Pi Hole answers your computer’s DNS queries and if it is a domain on the blacklist, it sends the request to the Pi Web server. This Web server just serves up a blank page. So instead of loading the ad from the real domain, the blank page from the Pi is downloaded, thus “blocking” the ad or metric.
How effective is the setup, in practice?
Statistically speaking our household is averaging 15% of queries blocked and a spike over a bad weather weekend of 30% blocked. It is scary and incredible to think the number of ads and metrics forced upon us, and this number continues to increase. I am delighted with the Pi Hole project and am recommending it to all.
Let’s be honest: The current generation of robotic lawn mowers sucks. Basically all of these bots drive in a random direction until they hit the border of the lawn, rotate for a randomized duration and repeat. I think we can do better!
Therefore, we have disassembled the cheapest off-the-shelf robotic mower we could find (YardForce Classic 500) and were surprised that the hardware itself is actually quite decent.
The bot itself is surprisingly high quality and doesn’t need to be changed at all. We just need some better software in there.
Here’s an overview video that explains the entire idea.
With a detailed instructions video, anyone can build it at home - you just need access to a 3D printer and have to buy a Raspberry Pi computer and an 8MP Raspberry Pi camera.
The full set of instructions are on their GitHub org.
Designed by Cambridge engineers and computer scientists, Raspberry Pi has sold more than 40 million units, and created a market worth $1 billion… is used in tens of thousands of commercial applications in a variety of industries across the world… has created a whole new class of computing device, transforming the way engineers design control systems… has supported more than 26,000 teachers in the UK…
And the list goes on. Quite the accomplishment! Reminds me of that Bill Gates quote: “Most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in ten years.”
This is a wrapper script that simplifies deployment of RPiPlay, which does the heavy lifting. How well does it work?
Screen mirroring and audio works for iOS 9 or newer. Recent macOS versions also seem to be compatible. The GPU is used for decoding the h264 video stream. The Pi has no hardware acceleration for audio (AirPlay mirroring uses AAC), so the FDK-AAC decoder is used for that.
Both audio and video work fine on a Raspberry Pi 3B+ and a Raspberry Pi Zero, though playback is a bit smoother on the 3B+
This incredibly cool DIY e-ink calendar uses a Raspberry Pi Zero WH to do its thing. Here’s how it works:
Through PiSugar2’s web interface, the onboard RTC can be set to wake and trigger the RPi to boot up daily at a time of your preference. Upon boot, a cronjob on the RPi is triggered to run a Python script that fetches calendar events from Google Calendar for the next few weeks, and formats them into the desired layout before displaying it on the E-Ink display. The RPi then shuts down to conserve battery. The calendar remains displayed on the E-Ink screen, because well, E-Ink…
There are server colocation providers that allow hosting a 1U server for as low as $30/month, but there’s a catch: There are restrictions on power usage (1A @ 120v max, for example) because they’re expecting small and power-efficient network equipment like firewalls.
This repo is about designing a server that fits within the 1U space and 1A @ 120v power constraint while maximizing computing power, storage, and value.
Don Watkins:
Mark Van Doren said, “the art of teaching is the art of assisting discovery.” I saw that play out in this classroom using open source tools. More students need opportunities like this to help them gain a quality education. The Raspberry Pi 400 is a great form factor for teaching and learning.
Such a cool program that’d be easy to reproduce in your local library.
Local network monitoring stack (forked from this project) that’s tailored to run on your Raspberry Pi.
Here’s a quick start to stand-up a Docker Prometheus stack containing Prometheus, Grafana with blackbox-exporter and speedtest-exporter to collect and graph home network connections and speed.
Did you hear that Go Time panelist Mark Bates won a FREE Raspberry Pi 400 by besting his fellow gophers in our Go Panic game show at GopherCon?
Turns out he declined the prize, so we’re giving it away to a member of our lovely Go Time audience!!
The Raspberry Pi Zero is five years old, has limited RAM, a slow CPU, and poor I/O, but can it still handle Cloud Native workloads like containers? I’ll show you my experiment where I got “nerd sniped” and spent far too much time trying to get faasd (a light-weight OpenFaaS version) working on the device.
A deep-dive on the design decisions behind the new Raspberry Pi inside a keyboard. Have you been wondering why the mouse is on the left? Wonder no more…
You likely already saw this, but I don’t even care because I have to link to it because it is so freakin’ cool!
We’ve never been shy about borrowing a good idea. Which brings us to Raspberry Pi 400: it’s a faster, cooler 4GB Raspberry Pi 4, integrated into a compact keyboard. Priced at just $70 for the computer on its own, or $100 for a ready-to-go kit, if you’re looking for an affordable PC for day-to-day use this is the Raspberry Pi for you.
Instead of blocking ads & trackers at the device level, Pi-hole is a DNS sinkhole that gets the job done at the network level. One benefit of this (in addition to ease of use) is that it can block content in non-browser locations like mobile apps and the like.
Gives you access to a virtualised ARM based Raspberry Pi machine running the Raspian operating system. This is not just a Raspian Docker image, it’s a full ARM based Raspberry Pi virtual machine environment.
How it does its thing:
A full ARM environment is created by using Docker to bootstrap a QEMU virtual machine. The Docker QEMU process virtualises a machine with a single core ARM11 CPU and 256MB RAM, just like the Raspberry Pi. The official Raspbian image is mounted and booted along with a modified QEMU compatible kernel.
Run it on a Raspberry Pi or any other local server. Try the online demo to see what all it’s capable of.
CutiePi is a good name for this device. It sure is cute!
We believe in open source, and we believe people should have control over the technology they use. Everything you see here is open source – schematics, PCB, drivers, firmware, UI, everything.
It’s still early (no pricing, for example), but they’re shooting for a release before 2019 is out.
It astounds me how much bang you can get for 35 bucks today.
Tanner Villarete asked himself, “How far can JavaScript take us?” Then answered:
Turns out, pretty dang far. This web app was my attempt at mimicking Apple’s iOS music app, and I think I’ve come pretty close!
I have to admit, he did a pretty good job. The frontend is built on React and Redux. The backend? A Laravel-based API running on a Raspberry Pi!
Here’s the live demo, but be nice because Raspberry Pi.
This repository contains a step-by-step guide that teaches how to create a simple operating system (OS) kernel from scratch. I call this OS Raspberry Pi OS or just RPi OS. The RPi OS source code is largely based on Linux kernel, but the OS has very limited functionality and supports only Raspberry PI 3.
6 lessons available with 5 more on the roadmap.
Very simple, inexpensive for small businesses. For Linux, MacOS, and Windows!
If you’ve been looking for a good excuse to hack on a Raspberry PI… well, now you just might have it.
Paul Miller with a good breakdown of what’s new (and what’s not) in the latest Raspberry Pi:
The new board has a slightly faster 1.4 GHz quad-core processor, Bluetooth 4.2 (an upgrade from 4.1), and dual-band Wi-Fi.
Sounds like an incremental upgrade, but progress nonetheless. It never ceases to amaze me how much value they cram in to these things for just $35. And so cute!
