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Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

raspberrypi.org

461–470 of 521 posts

Re: Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

#461

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build them out as dummy media boxes and sell them for a markup. I've had people knocking my door down after they saw my Kodi setup but I simply pointed them to the how-to guides and told them to learn for themselves. I'm sure there's a few people out there who'd take one for $50 or so.

Probably. But at $50 each you're not really making a profit.

There is a "Dragon Box" on Amazon that sells for $270ish and appears to be a lower-powered Android Kodi box. I imagine that a second generation Pi could perform just as well.

Re: Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

#462
post #284

Too bad they didn't include camera module connector (CSI). Low-latency hardware-encoded h264 stream from camera is one of the most cool features in RPi platform. The Zero would be great e.g. for FPV fying folks, if it supported camera module. (USB cameras aren't answer here, as they typically don't have low-latency hw-encoding.)

Yeah, I had hoped for that as well. But connectors cost money. Could the camera module be attached via the header?

its not the connector, I have a suspicion Zero is 2 layer pcb

Re: Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

#463

I've got three Raspberry Pis. I don't know why. I don't know what to do with them. None of the projects that I've seen have been particularly compelling to me, and I'm not creative enough to come up with a good idea. So they sit on my desk, gathering dust, and act as a conversation piece when friends come over. "That? Yeah, I can build X, Y, or Z." and they say, "oooh, cool" and then I never actually follow through.…

I set mine up with a camera to do timelapse. https://simonswain.com/day

This is cool, did you follow a guide to set it up, or just wing it?

Re: Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

#464
post #452

I've got three Raspberry Pis. I don't know why. I don't know what to do with them. None of the projects that I've seen have been particularly compelling to me, and I'm not creative enough to come up with a good idea. So they sit on my desk, gathering dust, and act as a conversation piece when friends come over. "That? Yeah, I can build X, Y, or Z." and they say, "oooh, cool" and then I never actually follow through.…

Just as a counterpoint, I have found many, many uses for Pis in my life. One is hosting my home automation software, I have built several information radiators with it, one is acting as a network-controlled media player, I even made one that acts as a faux remote control for the AC with IR diodes attached to the GPIO ports. By contrast, I have several Arduino boards sitting here, and never found a good use for them.…

I have a Raspberry Pi 2 and would like to buy a digital scale, and somehow tweak it so that it can sync my weight with my myfitnesspal account anytime I weigh myself, how do you suggest I get started with this? I don't have much of an electronics background.

Re: Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

#465

I've got three Raspberry Pis. I don't know why. I don't know what to do with them. None of the projects that I've seen have been particularly compelling to me, and I'm not creative enough to come up with a good idea. So they sit on my desk, gathering dust, and act as a conversation piece when friends come over. "That? Yeah, I can build X, Y, or Z." and they say, "oooh, cool" and then I never actually follow through.…

Mmmm. I had a conversation the other day about side projects. People would ask me what I did for side projects, since I have experience in software, electrical engineering, control systems, mechanical assemblies, etc. My answer was generally that at my day job I got to write software to control electromechanical systems with a budget in the millions. What am I going to do on the side to compete with that? Sound famil…

It used to be called a "hobby", but now it's a "side project"?

Re: Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

#466
post #452

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just as a counterpoint, I have found many, many uses for Pis in my life. One is hosting my home automation software, I have built several information radiators with it, one is acting as a network-controlled media player, I even made one that acts as a faux remote control for the AC with IR diodes attached to the GPIO ports. By contrast, I have several Arduino boards sitting here, and never found a good use for them.…

I have a Raspberry Pi 2 and would like to buy a digital scale, and somehow tweak it so that it can sync my weight with my myfitnesspal account anytime I weigh myself, how do you suggest I get started with this? I don't have much of an electronics background.

I have been searching for the same thing, ideally I'd like to buy an electronic scale with a digital I/O port. You may have more luck finding these in the US than I had in the EU, but in any case I wasn't able to find anything that hooks up to a computer in a non-proprietary way. As with home automation, all products seem to sync to the cloud, most of them in a one-way fashion.

I lost track of this idea a few years ago, so the situation may have changed. But if it hasn't, I see the following options for you:

1) find a cloud-synced scale that offers an SDK or at least some way of retrieving the data from the cloud.

2) buy a low-cost digital scale, take it apart and see what you can do with a voltmeter and a soldering iron. At the very least, you should be able to hook into the raw analog weight data which you could feed to a Pi with an A/D board. The nicer solution would be to siphon off the digital value. Even in scales where one chip does everything you could still try to pick up data going to the LCD. However, that might require some epic cabling and soldering, not sure it's worth it.

3) cheesing it: hook up a networked camera and point it to the scale's display. You can do this with any old android phone and a remote webcam app. Have the software on the Pi (or some other computer) pull the image when you step on the scale, run OCR on it, write the value out to wherever you want.

Re: Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

#467
post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a Raspberry Pi 2 and would like to buy a digital scale, and somehow tweak it so that it can sync my weight with my myfitnesspal account anytime I weigh myself, how do you suggest I get started with this? I don't have much of an electronics background.

I have been searching for the same thing, ideally I'd like to buy an electronic scale with a digital I/O port. You may have more luck finding these in the US than I had in the EU, but in any case I wasn't able to find anything that hooks up to a computer in a non-proprietary way. As with home automation, all products seem to sync to the cloud, most of them in a one-way fashion. I lost track of this idea a few years a…

What about option 2.5? Rather than hack the hardware, hack the software; buy a cloud-synced scale and sniff the traffic it sends out with the pi.

Re: Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

#468
post #302

Oh Nice! They are finally delivering on what I feel was the great promise of the Raspi in the beginning. Full linux install in the size and price of a micro (read: Arduino). Some people are bound to gripe about the "lack" of ports but its not like this one displaced the A or B models. Its just another spin of the concept where you don't have to pay for expensive physical parts you don't need. Its a linux server at a…

I have no idea why Arduino is so popular--it has NO debugging support unless you use an ICE. (People "debug" with printf statements.) We use Netduinos because with .NET we can single step and inspect variables in live code.

Arduino is popular because it was the first one that got big and built up a community. It's the same reason the RPi is so popular despite not being especially compelling from a pure spec standpoint.

You can get more performance for less money with other boards, but you'll have to figure out a lot more stuff on your own.

Re: Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

#469
Amazing news to see this! I made a Homemade Sports Ticker using a Model B almost 1.5 years ago and its still going strong.

Here's a couple of links:

* Blog post: https://medium.com/@mikemetral/a-homemade-sports-ticker-875c...

* Code to write to LED Sign: https://github.com/metral/led_sign

* Code to pull the scores: https://github.com/metral/scores

* The LED sign itself: http://brightledsigns.com/programmable/indoor/bs-4x16-mini

Fair Warning: I haven't touched the code in over a year so it's not maintained. If I were to do things today, I'd probably switch to Go to make the score requests a bit more streamlined than the single synchronous process I have now, and I would throw it into a container as the #1 request I get is people struggling to install both the code base and the dependencies.

Happy Hacking!

Re: Raspberry Pi Zero: the $5 computer

#470

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure if you fancy the risk of your house going up in flames because you bought some dodgy no-name power supply knocked out in a Chinese electronics sweatshop.

I'm not sure that low voltage 0.5-2amp power supplies can short that badly to cause fire, but heck anything is possible. That said you can find lots of old original cellphone chargers on Ebay or just get them at yard sale or thrift/goodwill stores for about a 1$ each easily. Even if it's not a micro/mini USB power adapter most of the old Nokia chargers have pretty much the same voltage output as USB, those that are c…

I always dismount cheap power supplies, to see their quality for myself. I check for creepage, clearance distances, noise filtering circuits, transformer quality, grounding quality if appropriate, build quality, circuit sophistication, appropriate wire gauge, protection fuses, etc.

Some of those I checked had none of the above.

I enjoy understanding electronic circuits.

But it is also important, I believe. Just reading the list of unsafe banned products from EU markets, a lot of the time it is these cheap power adapters. And I can absolutely understand why.

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