Over the last few months as I have been working with the Raspberry Pi, I have been using eXtplorer as a file manager and text editor. It is PHP and runs from the RPi’s web server. This is a great way to write code on the RPi from your desktop or from any web browser. I figured that I should share it since it is such a great tool. It should almost come with Rasbian. You can find it here: http://extplorer.net/ Here are some pictures of it running on the RPi: eXtplorer Login Screen eXtplorer File Manager Some of the great features are listed below (from their site). This is a must needed tool for working on the Raspberry Pi! I can’t …
Raspberr Pi: htop
In my other posts, I forgot to mention that I use htop instead of top for viewing processes. If you want to install run: $ sudo apt-get install htop and to run: $ htopIt works nicely, it’s colored, and it’s easy to use with the arrow keys.
Raspberry Pi and Motion Graphing
This week was the week of Raspberry Pi goodness and lots of coding. Now that I had the PIR sensor working, I wanted to do something with that data over time. I decided to log the data to MySQL running on my web server instead of the Pi. The Pi is awesome but I didn’t want the overhead of running MySQL on it along with writing constantly to the SD Card. Here is how I did it, after the break. First thing was to setup the database on my Web server which is running Server 2008 R2 on my VMWare ESXi server. I ended up using the Web Platform installer to install MySQL 5.1 and PHP. I probably won’t need …
Raspberry Pi and Wheezy
I finally decided to take the plunge and upgrade to Debian Wheezy. I have been putting it off because Squeeze works and it would involve re-configuring everything I have setup so far. At the same time, the longer I wait the more stuff there will be to setup. The great thing about re-installing: I get to do a clean install without the mistakes of figuring things out. It is also a refresher of how I got where I am now. Jump below for notes about the upgrade process. Firstly, you should make a backup of the SD card in case you need to restore back or to check how you did something. I used win32diskimager on my Windows 7 PC to make an …
Raspberry Pi and GPIO Permissions
It works! Okay, back up a little. Getting a PHP web interface to talk to hardware proved to be rather difficult. You need root access to control hardware but the web service runs with minimal permissions. So how does one bridge the gap without compromising the system? The answer, very carefully. I found a few workarounds but they involved either using MySQL or the gpio-admin library that works from commandline or shell scripts. In my case I wanted to stay with using C programs with the wiringPi library being called from PHP. C is much faster to control GPIO and PHP gives me a web front end. Here is how I did it. First the PHP process needs a way to run the binary as …
The Raspberry Pi is Running: Getting You There
Excited, I ripped open the package to find my Raspberry Pi. The packing looked like it had been run over but my Pi was still intact. Yay! First thing I realized I needed to find a power source and a SD card. After some digging I just ended up using an iPad power adapter with a cell phone micro USB cable. I was going to use my Galaxy S power adapter but I didn’t want to run it close to the limit of 700ma. For some reason I thought I had plenty of SD cards around, but I guess not. Luckily Best Buy had a 32GB Sandisk Ultra class 10 available in store for $27. Perfect! Raspberry Pi packaging, amazing it wasn’t damaged For the most part I hard …