Uly.me

cloud engineer

raspberry pi

2 Million Raspberry Pi

Sales of the popular and highly successful Raspberry Pi have hit the two million units last week. The creators of the $35 credit-card sized computer initially planned to sell a 1000 units. It took a year to sell the first million and 8 months to sell the second. I bought two units myself last year. Raspberry Pi have been introduced to schools to teach kids how to program. There are many uses for Raspberry Pi. The Linux-based units are used in variety of ways from running websites, mail servers, print servers, media servers, DNS servers, as well as automation. Raspberry Pi users have found different uses for the open-sourced units from running bars, as a translator, for ordering pizzas, etc.

Following the success of the Pi, there are other projects worth checking into in 2014.

Setup Wireless On Raspberry Pi

One of the first things you should do once you have your Raspberry Pi is setup a wireless network adapter. This will allow you to be cable free. To configure, you will need one of several approved USB wireless adapters. I’m using an Airlink 101 Wireless N 150 Ultra Mini-USB Adapter that I purchased at Amazon for just $14. I chose the Airline 101 because it was affordable, and it works very well with the Raspberry Pi.

10 steps to setup wireless on Raspberry Pi:

  1. Plug in the Airlink 101 adapter.
  2. Power up the the Raspberry Pi.
  3. To see if the wireless device is recognized, type lsusb.
  4. To see if the kernel driver is installed, type lsmod.
  5. Edit the /etc/network/interfaces file.
  6. Edit the /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf file.
  7. Reboot.
  8. Check with ifconfig.
  9. Check with ping.
  10. All done.

Here are the commands, instructions and their respected screen outputs.

$ lsusb
Bus 001 Device 004: ID 0bda:8176 Realtek Semiconductor Corp. RTL8188CUS 802.11n WLAN Adapter
 
$ lsmod
8192cu                485042  0
 
$ sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces
# Add the following lines:
auto wlan0
allow-hotplug wlan0
iface wlan0 inet manual
wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
 
$ sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf
# Add the following lines:
network={
ssid="The_SSID"
proto=RSN
key_mgmt=WPA-PSK
pairwise=CCMP TKIP
group=CCMP TKIP
psk="The_WPA_SHARED_KEY_"
}
 
$ sudo reboot
 
$ sudo ifconfig wlan0
 
$ ping yahoo.com

The Raspberry Pi Works

My Raspberry Pi finally arrived yesterday, after what seemed like an eternity of waiting. I ordered it October 24. It was shipped November 20 and arrived on my doorstep November 29. That’s over a month! I had a few hours to play around with it. The first thing I did was placed the Raspberry Pi inside an Adafruit Rainbow Pibow enclosure that I’ve ordered several weeks back. It looks amazing. Here’s it is.

Once it was inside the Pibow enclosure, I downloaded the Raspberry image called Raspbian Wheezy. I loaded it to an old 4GB SD card that originally came with my Nikon D90 camera. Once the image was loaded, I inserted the SD card, connected a USB keyboard, a USB mouse, and a HDMI cable.

On a side note, I’m currently using a 5v 750ma USB adapter, which I know is sufficient, but the Raspberry Pi needs more ooomp with multiple USB devices connected to it. They recommend that you have at least a 5v 1amp power adapter.

Finally, I powered the Raspberry Pi. A blank screen! Not good. It turned out to be just a resolution issue. I ended up plugging my Raspberry Pi to my old TV, via a RCA composite cable. It worked, although a good portion of the screen was clipped. I started the GUI, then accessed the Terminal and changed the screen resolution from there.

I found this page with instructions how to change Raspberry Pi to 1680×1050 resolution.

Edit the /boot/config.txt file.

sudo nano /boot/config.txt

Add the following code to the end of the file. 58 is for screens with a 1680×1050 resolution.

hdmi_group=2
hdmi_mode=58

Reboot.

sudo reboot

My monitor works! All 1680×1050 pixels. I ran an update next by issuing the following commands.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

This process takes a good 20 minutes. Finally, I installed Apache. 

sudo apt-get install apache2

Once installed. I checked if the web server works. It does.

Raspberry Pi

I ordered a couple of Raspberry Pis from Newark Element 14 two weeks ago. I’m ecstatic to say the least. I can’t wait to get my hands on the Raspberry Pi. The estimated shipment date is November 19. It will probably take 4-5 days for the shipment to arrive home.

I’m not sure yet what I plan to do with the Raspberry Pi yet. I will probably start with a media center for streaming music, videos, movies, and radio stations. The other Raspberry Pi, I will most likely use it for other projects. November 19 can’t get here soon enough.

Debian will probably be my OS of choice. What kind of services do I plan to install? Maybe, a web server, FTP server, PHP and MySQL database. I could install TeamSpeak or Ventrilo server as well. Who knows. There are tons of possibilities. X10 home automation also is another possibility.