Over Christmas, I bought myself a 3D printer kit from printrbot. It didn’t arrive in time to occupy me over the holiday break, however, which meant that over the weekends, I was actually lacking in toys to play with for myself. Since I had already spent somewhat lavishly on myself — I bought the Printrbot Plus kit, which is pricier than I really should have — I was looking for a toy that would be entertaining but also relatively inexpensive.<\/p>\n
In the end, I went with the Raspberry Pi Model B<\/a>: A credit card sized ARM-based computer. Part of the reason was actually related to my 3D Printer: Since prints take a long time to run, having the Pi as an extra computer I can hook up to the printer when needed seemed opportune — but part of it was just the fact that it was relatively inexpensive and seemed like it might let me do some interesting things.<\/p>\n Originally, I had planned on using it as a video game emulator — something that a number of people have talked about having done, via distributions like RetroPie and the like. Unfortunately, I’ve had some trouble getting the primary platform I’m interested in emulating — NES — to run at a reasonable speed. (Amusingly, SNES emulators seem to actually be noticeably faster.) This has led to some interesting research and reading about emulators — like an article in Ars Technica about how accurate emulation requires much more resources than the original hardware<\/a>, and how emulator developers should take advantage of the hardware they have available these days. <\/p>\n In the end, I haven’t really done that much of interest with the Pi yet — nothing I couldn’t have done using the Linux machine that I already pay for on Linode. However, it has led to me actually doing some things that I hadn’t otherwise — setting up Asterisk, for example. It’s now possible to dial a given phone number, and you’ll be logged into a conference call served from my Raspberry Pi. I also set up munin — after having serious issues with Verizon for months, I was finally able to track and confirm that I was getting packet loss to Google at regular intervals. None of this is particularly complex, but there’s also nothing pi specific about it — these are things you can do pretty easily with *any* linux computer — but I haven’t had another computer running in this house for years, and the Pi provided motivation to learn these things.<\/p>\n That doesn’t mean that I don’t plan to use the Pi to do things that *do* actually get benefit out of it; I made my first order to Adafruit the other day, buying a digital temperature sensor<\/a> and Pi Cobbler breakout board<\/a> for the Pi, as well as breadboarding bits, to be able to experiment with the GPIO pins on the Pi; I’m hoping that I can entice Julie into doing some electronics experiments with me using the Pi. (She enjoyed the toy electronics kit that we got for her a while back, but I get the feeling that she’d be more interested in more involved electronics work.)<\/p>\n I also still plan to use the Pi to drive 3D Printing, though I expect it will be a while before I’m in a position to actually need it — given how finicky 3d printing tends to be, I expect to be at the “Goddamnit nothing works” stage for quite a while first. (Of course, before that, I’ll have to put the darn thing together<\/a>, which may or may not be sufficiently complex to cause me to give up on the whole notion.)<\/p>\n In short: Raspberry Pi. Cheap, Small Linux computer. For me, not a lot more or a lot less — but having a Linux computer in the house is a nice thing to have. It’s also got me interested in a few new areas of interest — emulation, home automation, and amateur electronics — which may prove more interesting than the computer itself.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Over Christmas, I bought myself a 3D printer kit from printrbot. It didn’t arrive in time to occupy me over the holiday break, however, which meant that over the weekends, I was actually lacking in toys to play with for myself. Since I had already spent somewhat lavishly on myself — I bought the Printrbot […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[114,20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-636","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-raspberry-pi","category-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=636"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/636\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=636"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=636"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crschmidt.net\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=636"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}