I got a Pi over Christmas and built a neat case out of LEGO ZNAP and then installed MPD on it to stream music via the audio jack to the FM transmitter in my house.
Now I can get rid of an aging HP eVectra running a Celeron 700 with 128 MB of RAM – cool, and good for the planet.
I really enjoy hacking on hardware that lets me recycle older hardware – but I just got something that makes more sense. It’s a Rasberry Pi.
The little $35 computer (plus power supply and cables) makes futzing around with old computers much less attractive, mainly because you get “Overall real world performance is something like a 300MHz Pentium 2, only with much, much swankier graphics”, according to the Rasberry Pi FAQ. Plus the Pi is really cute, in a way that an old Dell or IBM desktop is not.
I installed Arch Linux, mainly because the HDMI output does not interest me at this point, and got MPD up and running serving files from my D-Link DNS-323 running Alt-F within a couple of hours (including refreshment breaks).
More on how to set up MPD later. First, I needed a case – and here is the result:
It’s made of LEGO ZNAP – a product manufactured only between 1998 and 1999. It’s kind of like K’nex but it never really gained traction in the marketplace, which is OK by me because it makes for a more unusual LEGO based Pi case.
Here are the step by step photos of the assembly in thumbnails:
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OK, I’ve got your attention – so now I can tell you why I really do love git .And it’s only partly because I’m stupid. Here’s the backstory…
Some of you know that I love LEGO MINDSTORMS, and some of you know that I enjoy hacking on older computers, and some of you know that I like to get out and work in the yard. What you may not know is I also have this urge to fix stuff that isn’t really broken – like my DNS-323 storage system. It was working perfectly fine backing up all my photos, music, and hosting some git repositories. But it was not running the latest and greatest version of alt-f firmware.
So I backed up all the stuff under my /home directory on the DNS-323. My photos, music, and miscellaneous setup files, double checked that the backup was good, then proceeded to format the drives so I could start fresh. So far so good.
Those of you paying attention will be asking yourselves “Hey, what about the git repositories. He backed those up too, right?” Wrong. They were not in my /home directory. I cleverly stuck them in /var/www/ so they would be in the "right" place.
So long story short the git repos are gone. What happened next is why I love git.
I just happened to have been doing some development with all of the repos that were being hosted on that DNS-323, so all I had to do was:
Bam! All my repos were back the way they were before I was stupid and clobbered them.
When you do your work using git you have a complete replica of the original repository. It's what makes it possible for you to examine history or create new branches offline - which is a huge advantage that anyone using a remotely hosted svn solution will understand. It also means that as long as you have a up to date clone of that repository, you have a backup, and it's less likely that a single failure cripples your development.
And that's why I love git.
Thanks to all the users that tried rc1 and discovered the issues with the Windows USB .inf file.
These issues are now fixed, and I encourage Windows users that had trouble in the past to download the most recent pbLua distribution and then refer to the
installation instructions.
As always, feel free to email me with questions – now that this release is out the door I think I can focus on getting the tutorial material in line with the actual code in preparation for a final 2.0.0 release.
Thanks for your patience!
Finally got some spare time to start customizing my Debian Wheezy install on the new Acer 8372. Got wifi working using wicd and a minor update to the module blacklist.
More updates soon, including a list of apps that I install on every Debian machine!
I was idling away some time when I wandered into a Staples in a small town in Ontario. On the “specials” table they had a clean, mint-in-box Acer 8372 Laptop. Sure, it’s two years old – it even has a DVD drive – but it’s a big step up from the trusty Samsung NB30 Netbook that’s been my main pbLua development machine for some time now.
It’s got an i3-380 processor, 4GB of RAM, and a 13.3″ screen – and almost fits in my LowePro Classified Sling 180 camera bag.
Here’s a page on how to do the actual install – more details on particular apps I use all the time for developing embedded firmware in the future.
Yes, it has finally happened. We had a rainy day here in Owen Sound, Ontario yesterday and I finally got the next release of pbLua buttoned up.
Major changes for this release (pbLua 2.0.0 rc1) include:
To get started, download the most recent pbLua distribution and then refer to the
installation instructions.
As always, feel free to email me with questions – now that this release is out the door I think I can focus on getting the tutorial material in line with the actual code in preparation for a final 2.0.0 release.
Thanks for your patience!
I’ve had a few requests to see if I’m still actively maintaining pbLua, and the answer is yes. The main Lua source code that I base pbLua on is just about ready to go to 5.2 – and when it does there will be a new version of pbLua shortly afterwards.
Right now, they are at 5.2-beta status.
There’s not much new in this release – really just a rebuild and I have fixed up the Download link on the About page.
For everyone (OK maybe only a few of you) that has been worried about this site since the May 24 weekend, I’m rebuilding it to use WordPress. Up until now I’ve been using a hand-built CMS that stated as a Tcl script that is now a Lua script.
Later on, I moved part of the site (the pbLua tutorials) to WordPress. It was so much easier to update the WordPress site that I decided I’d rather write than scratch my head trying to figure out how my own CMS worked.
Last weekend was pretty rainy, so I backed up the old site and wiped it clean, and now I need to rebuild it. I should have most of the site up by next week.