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 …
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 …
Raspberry Pi, CommandIR and Beyond
Now that I have had some time to play with the CommandIR, progress has been made. Of the two initial issues I have one left. The first issue is that LIRCD doesn’t auto start even though it is configured in the hardware.conf. While researching, I came to the conclusion that LIRC isn’t reading the hardware.conf at all. I made a change to it, enabling the listen option to try an Android app but it didn’t take effect. When I manually start LIRCD I have to include the options at the commandline. This is still a mystery but I am working with support on it. The odd thing is the init.d service script doesn’t seem to do anything. TV with IR Emitter Xbox S with IR Emitter …