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The Ultimate Mobile Computer: Connecting an Asus Transformer and a Raspberry Pi

samuelstern.wordpress.com

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Re: The Ultimate Mobile Computer: Connecting an Asus Transformer and a Raspberry Pi

#3
From the title I was expecting the RPi to be permanently inserted inside the Transformer somehow. Being at the mercy of the vagaries of 3G reception / public wifi provision is the sort of thing that puts me off doing this kind of thing myself.

Why an RPi as the backend though? Why not something that will compile your code faster? I recognise that not everyone is comfortable with renting a virtual server, but if you're going to leave your MacBook at home, can't you ssh into that?

Re: The Ultimate Mobile Computer: Connecting an Asus Transformer and a Raspberry Pi

#5
post #3

From the title I was expecting the RPi to be permanently inserted inside the Transformer somehow. Being at the mercy of the vagaries of 3G reception / public wifi provision is the sort of thing that puts me off doing this kind of thing myself. Why an RPi as the backend though? Why not something that will compile your code faster? I recognise that not everyone is comfortable with renting a virtual server, but if you'r…

The backend question is a big one and I agree that an RPi seems to be a poor choice. Samuel Stern has a MacBook Pro, which has much more power, single-thread and multi-threaded. Nevertheless it probably consumes much more energy than the RPi.

Other people rent some server, e.g. Matt Might uses Linode [0], but something like $20 per month flat is really expensive, if you would use it rarely and not for business. Maybe Amazon EC2? Though I doubt it fits the use case of weekend use plus one or two hours per week day.

[0] http://matt.might.usesthis.com/

Re: The Ultimate Mobile Computer: Connecting an Asus Transformer and a Raspberry Pi

#6
post #3

From the title I was expecting the RPi to be permanently inserted inside the Transformer somehow. Being at the mercy of the vagaries of 3G reception / public wifi provision is the sort of thing that puts me off doing this kind of thing myself. Why an RPi as the backend though? Why not something that will compile your code faster? I recognise that not everyone is comfortable with renting a virtual server, but if you'r…

good point here. I'd either ssh into the macbook or attach the Pi to the back of the Transformer screen and also power it from the transformer.

Re: The Ultimate Mobile Computer: Connecting an Asus Transformer and a Raspberry Pi

#7
I have a Nexus 7 with a bluetooth keyboard, I rooted it and installed Debian. I can SSH into it and pretty much do anything I want (I use ConnectBot or Terminal IDE). I have installed Vim, PHP5 Cli, MySQL and also PHPUnit. For testing sites locally in a browser, I have installed KSWeb. I also use an RDP client to access the LXDE desktop on Debian. Is there really a need to SSH into an RPi when one can have a setup like this?

Re: The Ultimate Mobile Computer: Connecting an Asus Transformer and a Raspberry Pi

#8
post #2

This is my mobile setup. Let me know if you have any questions about the specifics or ways I could improve this. I just finished it today and thought I'd share.

I'm probably missing something crucial here, but I was just wondering why you actually need the Raspberry Pi?

I'm don't own any Android devices so I'm not an expert, but wasn't the idea that you could easily install and run a Linux userland with all your tools, directly on the Transformer Prime?

Re: The Ultimate Mobile Computer: Connecting an Asus Transformer and a Raspberry Pi

#9
post #4

A detail, but the RPi does not have a 1Ghz ARM processor. Only running at 700Mhz by default. Of course, you can overclock it, but it's not the same.

Actually the latest official firmware automatically overclocks it to 1Ghz if needed.
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