[wakibaki]

Hi Boris
 
It was a bit lazy of me not to check the voltages on the board but the other evidence of a fault was overwhelming in the end. When the Ethernet wouldn't come up with the eLinux recommended supply and the USB cable from ModMyPi with no other load that was the last straw. The device was totally incommunicado headless. Useless.
 
I do have numerous PSUs and regulators lying around here, but once you plug in a homebuilt supply you're on shaky ground as far as warranty claims are concerned. I just want to get a benchmark for the thing's reliable performance before I move on.
 
Linux is actually a PITA in many respects. The Squeeze distro wouldn't even let me drag and drop files from the USB stick to the SD card when logged in as pi. Permission denied. You had to open the file manager as root. What kind of nonsense is that? A computer where you log on as a user who can't do anything other than on the command line if you prefix everything with 'sudo'. Text editors that run in character mode with a bunch of cryptic keystroke combinations to run commands. I gave up stuff like that years ago with Wordstar and DOS programming. I don't need to be an expert in gobbledygook to feel good about myself (anymore), and stuff like that is going to piss off naiive users quick time.
 
w

 

[MrSlim]

In case anyone is interested, there is a new "Raspbian" disto, available on the Raspberry Pi site that takes better advantage of the floating point hardware in the ARM processor, and improves performance in a number of ways..  particularly web browsing (not that we're talking about using it in that way here)., but it's good to know they are tweaking things to get the most out of it..

 

[wakibaki]

The replacement rpi arrived this morning and to my relief this one works like the other one didn't.
 
It's still a fairly slow computer, you have to be patient while it does things like installing a new package, but at least now mine fires up with the ethernet port active and it talks to the USB DAC.
 
The sound from the USB DAC leaves something to be desired though, there's a popping superimposed on the loudest peaks of the music, sounds a bit like a scratched vinyl record. I wouldn't use it as a music server in this configuration, it definitely isn't acceptable as it stands.
 
I'll play with it some more...
 
w

 

[Boris-Aries]

Hi,
Sorry for the late reply.
It is great everything is "working", albeit slowly.
As for the popping, it may have to do with jitter. Not sure how you can get around that, maybe a different driver to make it work in async mode? Just a wild guess.
 
Btw, thanks for the follow-up.
 

 

[Avro_Arrow]

You knew it was just a matter of time...
 
Raspberry Pi has a friend.

 

[ujamerstand]

Eh, but that thing has almost half the processing power and a quarter of the ram...No ethernet port either. D:

 

[KimLaroux]

But it's smaller, uses a lot less energy, has 60 GPIO pins and is fully open source and open hardware.
 
The Raspi Model A consumes 2.5W and the Model B consumes 3.5W. The OLinuxXino Micro consumes between 0.3W and 1W, depending on what hardware is activated. They have other models, like the the Maxi, which has Ethernet, stereo audio IN and OUT. And guess what? The Maxi only consumes between 0.6W and 1.5W. You can turn off different features on the OLinuXino boards to save energy. For an application running on a battery or solar, the Raspi is not a preferable choice here.
 
Olimex is working on a bigger one around the A13 CORTEX-A8 running at 1 Ghz and 512MB of RAM, which features an LCD port so you can plug a mini LCD directly into it. It has 74 GPIO pins.
 
Also, the Raspi only has 8 GPIO pins, hardly accessed trough the double row header. The OLinuXino Micro has two rows of 30 GPIO pins. The form factor allows the board to be mounted directly over another larger PCB.
 
Just because the Raspi is hyped doesn't mean it's now the yard stick from which everything is compared to. It's not the first mini computer running Linux available, nor the cheapest, nor the most powerful... Yes the Raspi is cool, but it's just being stubborn to automatically discard any other mini computer as being a "Raspberry Pi wannabe". Not everybody need everything the Raspi has on board, and some people need features the Raspi does not have.

 

[ujamerstand]

Overreaction much? I never said raspi i is the best one size fit all solution. It'd be nice if you don't put words in my mouth. And I do agree, it isn't that great for portable usage; it's also hard to mount the darn thing securely in a portable setup. I personally do not need to worry about power usage though, and compared to the product linked, the raspberry pi simply has more processing power and ram to work with at similar price point, it also have an ethernet port when the other one don't. That's why I liked it better. That's all I'm saying.
 
Maxi does seem very nice, being carried by mouser and digikey is a plus, so's the fully open source part. The cortex-a8 based kit also sounds nice. An easy to work with display solution is always welcome. Got more info on it?

 

[onefatsurfer]

I just finished setting up my Raspberry Pi as a server for my Logitech Transporter.  Thing works awesome.

 

[wakibaki]

I'm afraid $1000 for a streaming music player is exactly what I was hoping to avoid. I wanted the RPi to strip data from my NAS and feed it out the USB port to a DAC and thence to one or other of my amplifiers. It proved incapable of reading from its own SD card and sending it to the DAC without gaps and pops.
 
I dunno, maybe somebody's found out how to do it reliably, but a setup that would work no problem on most other Linux boxes just didn't hack it, and I didn't have the patience to mess with it.
 
Anyway I went to a radio rally and a guy sold me a pair of Celestion DItton 15s in great condition for £10, which is a tenth of what you'd pay for them on ebay, and I hooked them up to the new HDTV via a T-amp that did come from ebay (10 dollars, plus 10 for a PSU) and put a zillion MP3s on a USB stick, plugged it into the TV, and it all works great using the remote.
 
I found a use for the RPi too.
 
My wife hated me using the desktop in the same room as her because of the fan noise. I discovered that you could log on to the PC in the bedroom (we have wired Ethernet everywhere, as well as the wireless) using its native (WinXP) remote desktop connection and running rdesktop on the RPi. This has the advantage that the RPi runs the monitor in full HD, which the video card in the PC was too old to manage. Plus I have some other PCs around the house, and I can log on to any of them. The remote desktop is not quite as responsive as sitting at the machines, but it's OK, and I can use my existing PCB design software, which is a bonus.
 
w

 

[onefatsurfer]

You can set up squeezeplug on the pi and connect your USB DAC to the pi and it'll do what you want. I haven't tried it yet, but I've read of people doing just that with it. Connect an LCD screen to it and do some programming and you should be able to read what's playing, skip songs etc. That's my next project. I spent $720 on my transporter, my wife nearly killed me, and if I can get a raspberry pi set up to replicate it's functionality and ease of use, I'll use that and sell the transporter. For now, I'm enjoying the silent, power efficient server.

 

[onefatsurfer]

If you do set up squeezeplug on the pi, make sure you update in the ssh interface, to the newest version.

 

[onefatsurfer]

Actually, now that I think about it, you could use the Logitech app to control it, most likely. I'll get mine set up like that and keep everyone posted.

 

[wakibaki]

Quote:

You can set up squeezeplug on the pi and connect your USB DAC to the pi and it'll do what you want. I haven't tried it yet, but I've read of people doing just that with it.

 
Yes, that's what I read, early on just after the release. Then a load of flame wars broke out on the RPi forum, because it turned out there was some kind of hardware problem with the USB on the first version, many people saying that it wouldn't support reliable audio playback, and it became very difficult to tell what was the actual state of play. I certainly couldn't get mine to work with what I thought was a minimal software burden, I had to return the first one because it had a more serious hardware fault, and by the time I got the replacement I had lost interest in trying to make it work.
 
I did think about trying the HDMI audio, but it would have meant re-tasking one of the TV's, because the HD monitor I bought to use with the RPi doesn't have audio. You can't get an HDMI audio splitter unless you pay quite a lot (more than the cost of an RPi), so I chucked it in a box and left it for months, until I thought about using it as a remote desktop.
 
If you get it working satisfactorily, please post a blow-by-blow description of the setup process, I'm sure lots of people here would welcome a verified description of exactly how to set up a working system. As you can see the thread has fallen into abeyance for some time, which I think indicates that nobody here has come across a satisfactory working system.
 
Oh, I'd also be interested to know if yours is the newer version with increased memory, as there may be other hardware updates incorporated which impact the USB audio.
 
w

 

[onefatsurfer]

Quote:

 
Yes, that's what I read, early on just after the release. Then a load of flame wars broke out on the RPi forum, because it turned out there was some kind of hardware problem with the USB on the first version, many people saying that it wouldn't support reliable audio playback, and it became very difficult to tell what was the actual state of play. I certainly couldn't get mine to work with what I thought was a minimal software burden, I had to return the first one because it had a more serious hardware fault, and by the time I got the replacement I had lost interest in trying to make it work.
 
I did think about trying the HDMI audio, but it would have meant re-tasking one of the TV's, because the HD monitor I bought to use with the RPi doesn't have audio. You can't get an HDMI audio splitter unless you pay quite a lot (more than the cost of an RPi), so I chucked it in a box and left it for months, until I thought about using it as a remote desktop.
 
If you get it working satisfactorily, please post a blow-by-blow description of the setup process, I'm sure lots of people here would welcome a verified description of exactly how to set up a working system. As you can see the thread has fallen into abeyance for some time, which I think indicates that nobody here has come across a satisfactory working system.
 
Oh, I'd also be interested to know if yours is the newer version with increased memory, as there may be other hardware updates incorporated which impact the USB audio.
 
w

Mine is the newest version as of today, with 512mb ram.  I haven't tried setting up USB audio since I'm using mine as a server at the moment, but today when I go home, I'm going to give it a shot setting it up as a home-built squeezebox.  I'll keep you posted after I get it working (or if I don't) with whatever problems I come across.