raspi 3.5 inch touch screen

I got a 3.5 inch touch screen for my raspi. Loading the driver is pretty straightforward if you use raspbian:

git clone https://github.com/goodtft/LCD-show.git
chmod -R 755 LCD-show
cd LCD-show/
sudo ./LCD35-show

Awesome!!!

raspi 3 and usb hard drive

Using a 16GB sd card for a basic cli raspbian system (no desktop environment whatsoever) is more than enough. However, it is very limited to really enjoy the awesome minidlna software I installed. So I ended up attaching a 1TB usb hard drive to my raspi 3.

The first thing to notice is that the power supply works fine supporting both devices (raspi and hard drive).

The second thing is that I can now finally enjoy the UPnP service for hours and hours during these cold winter afternoons.

Note: I've been watching SG Atlantis all afternoon. What a great Saturday :)

raspi 3

My raspi 2 suddenly stopped working for an $unknown_reason I only know it lost ssh connection all the time. So I decided to get a raspi 3.

It arrived on November 24th. You could have seen me broadcast on irc the steps from the moment I put my hands on it until I finally plugged it in:

Day changed to Thu, 24 Nov 2016                                                                                        
[...]                                                                                                                                            
10:03:06        @chals | My raspi3 kit just arrived yay                                                                
10:03:10        @chals | time to play                                                                                  
10:05:22        @chals | ok heat sinks in place                                                                        
10:11:49        @chals | board in case...                                                                              
10:13:53        @chals | case closed                                                                                    
10:14:01        @chals | it's show time

And here it is:

Its hostname is kiwi (legacy name from its predecesor)

(Note: Is is plugged to a 900va UPS so that it can actually work 24/7)

MiniDLNA on a raspi

One of the best things in life is that you never stop learning and/or discovering new and exciting things. Today was a great day in that sense. I discovered the set -u builtin which warns you if a variable is not set and also that it is good to talk to people to share ideas. (I've been talking to a cousin of mine for a long, long while this afternoon, interesting things).

But in respect to software, the discovery of the day/week/month and probably the whole year (hmm) was MiniDLNA. minidlna is a streaming server that can serve your files across the network to any device that supports the UPnP (Universal Plug and Play) protocol.

I was looking for a way to stream media from my raspi. Since I had only tried to do it once and it was with vlc, I installed vlc in my raspi and tried to stream video with it but it was almost impossible. It turned out to be a too resource intensive method.

Then I used a clever way of streaming media from my raspi to my network. I copied the files that I wanted to stream to /var/www and accessed the contents of that directory over http, either using vlc or just a web browser. But no matter how clever this idea is, it is not very handy. You have to do a lot of manual work.

Today I asked on irc and a friend of mine said he used minidlna. I installed and configured it follwowing a tutorial I found on the web. Basically what I did was to edit/etc/minidlna.conf with several settings that apply to my device. It is pretty simple and straightforward, and in case you do not know what to put in there, you can always use the default settings.

Then from another computer I launched vlc and went to View --> Playlist --> Local Network --> Universal Plug n' Play and there I could see all the files that I wanted to share. Impressive, huh?

And the best thing yet to come, minidlna does not stress your raspi cpu at all. While working, it only used 0.3% of the cpu power.

PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
2966 minidlna 20 0 37332 5824 552 S 0.3 1.3 0:00.22 minidlna

Screenshot of the week 7

A few days ago I wrote a tutorial on how to configure weechat's relay plugin through a single port for all servers. I published it on my phlog, so I'm not unnecessarily going to repeat the information here. The link is here in case you are interested: (Warning: gopher link!)

gopher://sdf-eu.org:70/1/users/chals/phlog/2013/./12-15-13

Since the relay is working so fine, I decided to take a screenshot of the weechat instance running 24/7 with the configured relay running in a remote server and the other one of my local instance running in my raspi.

Just in case somebody is wondering why I run two instances of the same program both locally and remotely, the answer is plain simple. In my local instance I can configure and use as many plugins and scripts as I like whereas things are not so easy on the remote server. For example the aspell plugin which is really handy when typing fast or the buffersscript, just to name a few.

Using a raspi as a switch

Everybody is asking me why the heck I got a raspi. I proudly show it to all my family and friends and they all say:

 "What's this? What's this for?"

(I do not have the energy to explain them what a gopher server is, and why everbody should have, at least, one.)

I imagine that everyone has a different use for their raspis. I am having so much fun playing with it since I received it that I should write a post every single day. But unfortunately I do not have the time to do it :-(

Today I have yet found a new use for it, perhaps one of the best uses I could think of, even though I didn't have that idea in mind when I bought it.

I have a network server that I only use occasionally. I turn it on when I get home if I need it, but I always turn it off at night. One of the reasons to get my raspi was the possibility of having a machine connected 24/7 and also reachable through the internet, for example, using a smart phone.

Today, I was away from home with my netbook (eeepc 701) and I needed to start a build on my server. I thought it would be excellent if I could start the build before getting home and this way the first test would be done by the time I arrived home. Well, suddenly I got the idea:

I often turn the server on using 'wakeonlan', I have got several aliases to mount devices on my network and do other similar things. So using ssh from my eeepc I logged on to my shell account at sdf-eu, from there I connected to my raspi and installed the wakeonlan package (I didn't have it installed there yet) but I had my.shell_aliases in my $HOME. From there I turned on the server and opened a shell to start the build. When I got home the first build had failed and stopped, but it saved me a lot of time because when I arrived I could start another build right away.

I know that the idea is not the state of the art. Many IT guys do most of their work jumping from one server into the other all day long but I'm happy to have come up with such a nice trick: Using the raspi to turn on and off other machines in my network remotely. From now on my raspi will be one server to rule them all.

raspi at work

I must admit that I am really, really excited about my raspi (raspberry pi). I ordered it three months ago and during all this time I have spent a lot of time thinking about the endless possibilities that such an amazing piece of machinery could offer.

I have installed a lot of applications from the debian archive, perhaps the most outstanding ones are the servers: ssh, ftp, http and gopher.

In the screenshot you can see the result of:

 $ lynx gopher://localhost

and the moment of writing this post.

My raspi finally arrived!

This came as a complete surprise. Well I ordered it more than three months ago (On September 2nd to be exact) but now after thirteen weeks it is already here.

My surprise is due to the fact that I thought I would be notified by e-mail about the shipping but that didn't happen. Today I got home for lunch and it was there.

At the moment, I am downloading the raspbian (debian based) to boot this wonderful toy.

I'm publishing here one of the pictures I took but I'll upload some more later. One of them goes to my profile.