6 ms·

I bought my first two RPis from Little Bird, the company whose tweet is linked (albeit through one of their web stores, not via ebay). Those were an original RP

by mewse 6y ago

I bought my first two RPis from Little Bird, the company whose tweet is linked (albeit through one of their web stores, not via ebay). Those were an original RPi model B, now sadly retired (it still works, just is very slow even for running basic services), and a 3B+, now faithfully serving as a PiHole and HomeBridge machine. I have a surprising number of RPis around the apartment now; a PiZero with the HQ camera module is serving as a webcam for my desktop machine, and another one is acting as an “on air” indicator to let folks know when a microphone is hot in the room (typically working-from-home zoom meetings). And another zero is controlling a set of “presence” indicator lights, watching bluetooth to determine who is in the apartment at any given time. That makes it so that if one of us is leaving the apartment, we can easily tell whether we need to lock the door on our way out, without needing to go searching through the apartment to check whether another flatmate is home or not. (I found that for us, testing bluetooth was far faster and more reliable than testing arp, wifi, bonjour, geofencing, or etc) ... and I’ve just ordered a moderately large e-paper display which is destined to be mounted with a zero inside a picture frame and hung from the wall like a photo. Haven’t decided exactly what to show on it yet; probably will show a weather forecast and how long until the next tram will arrive at the stop outside our building. That kind of thing. Plus, of course, the pi 4 that I just use as a generic linux box for my own amusement. These little projects have been such fun little creative outlets; I’ve very much enjoyed coming up with and implementing them over the past few years!

formercoder 6y ago
Cool stuff, check out the ESP32 if you want to get smaller.
- mewse 6y ago
  ESP32 is one of the Arduino-compatible boards, right? I keep bouncing off Arduino stuff just because I find their IDE to be astonishingly awful (at least on Linux, running inside a dwm window manager) I’d be 100% on board if I could write the code in vim and ideally compile/upload from the command line. Maybe a nice makefile. And I did set that up for a few arduino devices in the past, but it was just too much jumping through hoops for me to really bother with longterm. Much easier to just grab a RPi Zero and install a compiler or python on it and then just code directly on the device, over ssh. If there’s a better approach to handle the coding side of things than the standard Arduino IDE, I’d be super interested to learn about it!
  - lostlogin 6y ago
    > ESP32 is one of the Arduino-compatible boards, right? Yes. The ESP8266 is too. I drive several of both chips through Arduino or ESPHome. I’m no programmer but have been very pleased by what I could achieve through the Arduino IDE (on a Mac).
  - mjard 6y ago
    Esp32 has its own framework/runtime but you can flash it using arduino framework. Have you checked out the platformio cli?
  - shakna 6y ago
    I run MicroPython on a half dozen of my ESPs. Being able to drop into REPL and rewrite it is a super power. And while MicroPython doesn't tend to come with every library that Python does, you can generally install them via pip.
    - curryst 6y ago
      How fast is it? I'm curious because I've been debating trying it out for some relatively simple stuff with GPIO pins and MQTT (largely just reading some sensors, enabling/disabling some other pins based on those sensors, and submitting telemetry via MQTT). MicroPython seems a lot faster to get up and running with, but I'm concerned that on such a small device that it'll be prohibitive (but I'm also coming from a server background, so I may be overestimating how much slower these are).
      - shakna 6y ago
        It isn't slow. If all you're doing is reading, then the overhead will be pretty much the same as if you were using the Espressif SDK, because you'll find the bottleneck is I/O, not the extras that MicroPython provides. A cold boot is slower, and takes a couple seconds, but after that most of the latency is comparable to if you were doing it with the SDK. MicroPython is heavily optimised, and doesn't supply a lot of the mutable madness that makes CPython so slow. (For example, a for loop in CPython is slower than a list expression. In MicroPython, they're the same speed.)
dirkc 6y ago
> PiZero with the HQ camera module is serving as a webcam for my desktop machine How did you set that up? I wanted to do that for some time now
- walrus01 6y ago
  http://www.davidhunt.ie/raspberry-pi-zero-with-pi-camera-as-usb-webcam/ http://www.davidhunt.ie/raspberry-pi-zero-with-pi-camera-as-... https://ubuntu.com/blog/how-to-stream-video-with-raspberry-pi-hq-camera-on-ubuntu-core https://ubuntu.com/blog/how-to-stream-video-with-raspberry-p...
- mewse 6y ago
  walrus01 pointed out the original DIY methods, but there’s a pre-built especially nice implementation over here: https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam It boots up much faster and mounts the filesystem read-only so you don’t have to worry about unplugging the pi and accidentally corrupting the file system or anything like that. I’m currently using this one.
the_angry_angel 6y ago
> and I’ve just ordered a moderately large e-paper display which is destined to be mounted with a zero inside a picture frame and hung from the wall like a photo Which display, if you don’t mind me asking? I’ve had a similar idea for a while, but haven’t seen a display that felt reasonably sized or priced for a hobby project
- mewse 6y ago
  I ordered this one: https://www.waveshare.com/product/raspberry-pi/displays/e-paper/6inch-e-paper-hat.htm https://www.waveshare.com/product/raspberry-pi/displays/e-pa... It’s the same size as the screen on most Kindle devices; 12cm by 9cm. So it’s not large except in comparison to most e-paper displays out there, which seem to most often come in at 6cm by 3cm or smaller. And it’s not exactly cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but for me it was at the ‘sweet spot’ between size and cost, as stuff bigger than this gets expensive fast. Note that I haven’t actually received the display yet and can’t vouch for its quality or usability. But for what it’s worth, that’s the one I ordered.
  - mkl 6y ago
    How do you plan to power this one, if it's hung on the wall?
    - mewse 6y ago
      Initially, I’m going to try to use a power cable in a color that matches the wall. The spot I have in mind is above some knee-high shelves, so I’d probably only need to run the cable for half a meter before it vanishes behind them. Hopefully it shouldn’t be too jarringly visible! As I’m renting the apartment, I can’t really poke holes in the walls to hide cables (sadly). Alternately, there are some other shelves of a more normal height that I could just set it on top of; the power cable would be much less visible that way. But I do like the idea of having it on a wall. As you say, the trick is going to be working out how to camouflage the cable.
      - 6y ago
imagine99 6y ago
> one is acting as an “on air” indicator to let folks know when a microphone is hot in the room (typically working-from-home zoom meetings). How did you achieve this? I'd be very interested in setting something like this up for myself... Thanks.
- mewse 6y ago
  This was a little bit of a cheat. It just so happens that the computer being used for the Zoom calls is a Mac, so I just wrote a program that runs in the background on the Mac and asks the OS about whether any microphone devices are in use by any programs, and then sends a message to the Pi, which really is only turning a hat of LEDs on/off based on UDP packets it receives. It could be turning the indicator on/off for anything that somebody else told it to do it for. (Originally, I was using an Arduino Nano and a USB serial interface for communication, but my flatmate rewrote it to go over UDP to a Pi Zero W, as he wanted to use a particular RPi hat as the indicator lights) Detecting the microphone on/off status on OS X was shamelessly ripped off from the answer to this StackExchange question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37470201/how-can-i-tell-if-the-camera-is-in-use-by-another-process https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37470201/how-can-i-tell-.... I don’t know if there’s a similar approach that would work for Windows or other OSes.
  - thedanbob 6y ago
    Eh, I wouldn’t call that a cheat. Most of my home brew IoT devices are controlled by Home Assistant via MQTT which pretty much falls in the same category.
  - nitrogen 6y ago
    On Linux it should be possible to see if something is recording through PulseAudio using its command line tools, and ALSA/OSS use could be detected with lsof.
  - darkarmani 6y ago
    Awesome! That's exactly what I've wanted for the last 5 years.
  - 6y ago
madaxe_again 6y ago
I bought my first RPi six months ago, and now I have four (two 4s, two zeros), and six arduinos. My uses are all brutally utilitarian. One pi 4 is openhab, grafana, mqtt broker etc., and the other is doing all the network gumph - vpns, qos, Wi-Fi ap, Bluetooth presence, LoRa. One zero is a controller in a micro hydro system I’m building, the other runs a couple of remote cameras. The arduinos are being used in a lora sensor network, using dinky batteries and solar panels - they’re so low power it’s ridiculous - most of them using ultrasonic rangefinders to measure depth in tanks (water, gasoline) and monitor river levels here and upstream - we live in a mill, so being able to see the delta-h will hopefully save us from a surprise flood this winter. The government operated river gauges were all destroyed in the floods last year, and haven’t yet been replaced. I’m managing to build serviceable river gauges for under €100 a pop - I might have to see if they’re interested, as I think their issue is money - they use these big mechanical gauges that I can’t see being cheap. Another arduino is a weather station, and the last one for now is controlling a valve way, way uphill that I got bored of walking to. Over the winter I intend to build out a heap of arduino/lora irrigation control valves, and am toying with sapping a tiny amount of energy from the water with an impeller to power the things - my ultimate aim here is to automate everything that reasonably can be, so we have more time to do the things that can’t be. Also, damn, it’s fun to be tinkering again - 15 years of working in tech kinda killed my passion for playing with tech, but it turns out it’s still there.
- prox 6y ago
  That’s pretty amazing, how you can build solutions “on the spot” (instead of buying something off the shelves) how did get started with tinkering?
  - madaxe_again 6y ago
    As a kid, with analogue electronics, and microcomputers. I did little to none between ‘04 and last year, when I moved off grid and got back into “gear” while installing a PV system, and got the first RPi all of six months ago because my NAS wasn’t up to running openhab - and haven’t looked back. The arduino stuff has been “buy the bits and put them together”, although some of the bits have been a bare PCB and a bunch of components. So far it’s almost paint by numbers, to be honest - I’m combining things in a somewhat novel way, but the components are all existing solutions to one degree or another.
shadowpho 6y ago
Can you link to the3 large e-paper display please?

by mewse 6y ago

formercoder 6y ago

Cool stuff, check out the ESP32 if you want to get smaller.

mewse 6y ago
ESP32 is one of the Arduino-compatible boards, right? I keep bouncing off Arduino stuff just because I find their IDE to be astonishingly awful (at least on Linux, running inside a dwm window manager) I’d be 100% on board if I could write the code in vim and ideally compile/upload from the command line. Maybe a nice makefile. And I did set that up for a few arduino devices in the past, but it was just too much jumping through hoops for me to really bother with longterm. Much easier to just grab a RPi Zero and install a compiler or python on it and then just code directly on the device, over ssh. If there’s a better approach to handle the coding side of things than the standard Arduino IDE, I’d be super interested to learn about it!
- lostlogin 6y ago
  > ESP32 is one of the Arduino-compatible boards, right? Yes. The ESP8266 is too. I drive several of both chips through Arduino or ESPHome. I’m no programmer but have been very pleased by what I could achieve through the Arduino IDE (on a Mac).
- mjard 6y ago
  Esp32 has its own framework/runtime but you can flash it using arduino framework. Have you checked out the platformio cli?
- shakna 6y ago
  I run MicroPython on a half dozen of my ESPs. Being able to drop into REPL and rewrite it is a super power. And while MicroPython doesn't tend to come with every library that Python does, you can generally install them via pip.
  - curryst 6y ago
    How fast is it? I'm curious because I've been debating trying it out for some relatively simple stuff with GPIO pins and MQTT (largely just reading some sensors, enabling/disabling some other pins based on those sensors, and submitting telemetry via MQTT). MicroPython seems a lot faster to get up and running with, but I'm concerned that on such a small device that it'll be prohibitive (but I'm also coming from a server background, so I may be overestimating how much slower these are).
    - shakna 6y ago
      It isn't slow. If all you're doing is reading, then the overhead will be pretty much the same as if you were using the Espressif SDK, because you'll find the bottleneck is I/O, not the extras that MicroPython provides. A cold boot is slower, and takes a couple seconds, but after that most of the latency is comparable to if you were doing it with the SDK. MicroPython is heavily optimised, and doesn't supply a lot of the mutable madness that makes CPython so slow. (For example, a for loop in CPython is slower than a list expression. In MicroPython, they're the same speed.)

dirkc 6y ago

> PiZero with the HQ camera module is serving as a webcam for my desktop machine How did you set that up? I wanted to do that for some time now

walrus01 6y ago
http://www.davidhunt.ie/raspberry-pi-zero-with-pi-camera-as-usb-webcam/ http://www.davidhunt.ie/raspberry-pi-zero-with-pi-camera-as-... https://ubuntu.com/blog/how-to-stream-video-with-raspberry-pi-hq-camera-on-ubuntu-core https://ubuntu.com/blog/how-to-stream-video-with-raspberry-p...
mewse 6y ago
walrus01 pointed out the original DIY methods, but there’s a pre-built especially nice implementation over here: https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam It boots up much faster and mounts the filesystem read-only so you don’t have to worry about unplugging the pi and accidentally corrupting the file system or anything like that. I’m currently using this one.

the_angry_angel 6y ago

> and I’ve just ordered a moderately large e-paper display which is destined to be mounted with a zero inside a picture frame and hung from the wall like a photo Which display, if you don’t mind me asking? I’ve had a similar idea for a while, but haven’t seen a display that felt reasonably sized or priced for a hobby project

mewse 6y ago
I ordered this one: https://www.waveshare.com/product/raspberry-pi/displays/e-paper/6inch-e-paper-hat.htm https://www.waveshare.com/product/raspberry-pi/displays/e-pa... It’s the same size as the screen on most Kindle devices; 12cm by 9cm. So it’s not large except in comparison to most e-paper displays out there, which seem to most often come in at 6cm by 3cm or smaller. And it’s not exactly cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but for me it was at the ‘sweet spot’ between size and cost, as stuff bigger than this gets expensive fast. Note that I haven’t actually received the display yet and can’t vouch for its quality or usability. But for what it’s worth, that’s the one I ordered.
- mkl 6y ago
  How do you plan to power this one, if it's hung on the wall?
  - mewse 6y ago
    Initially, I’m going to try to use a power cable in a color that matches the wall. The spot I have in mind is above some knee-high shelves, so I’d probably only need to run the cable for half a meter before it vanishes behind them. Hopefully it shouldn’t be too jarringly visible! As I’m renting the apartment, I can’t really poke holes in the walls to hide cables (sadly). Alternately, there are some other shelves of a more normal height that I could just set it on top of; the power cable would be much less visible that way. But I do like the idea of having it on a wall. As you say, the trick is going to be working out how to camouflage the cable.
    - 6y ago

imagine99 6y ago

> one is acting as an “on air” indicator to let folks know when a microphone is hot in the room (typically working-from-home zoom meetings). How did you achieve this? I'd be very interested in setting something like this up for myself... Thanks.

mewse 6y ago
This was a little bit of a cheat. It just so happens that the computer being used for the Zoom calls is a Mac, so I just wrote a program that runs in the background on the Mac and asks the OS about whether any microphone devices are in use by any programs, and then sends a message to the Pi, which really is only turning a hat of LEDs on/off based on UDP packets it receives. It could be turning the indicator on/off for anything that somebody else told it to do it for. (Originally, I was using an Arduino Nano and a USB serial interface for communication, but my flatmate rewrote it to go over UDP to a Pi Zero W, as he wanted to use a particular RPi hat as the indicator lights) Detecting the microphone on/off status on OS X was shamelessly ripped off from the answer to this StackExchange question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37470201/how-can-i-tell-if-the-camera-is-in-use-by-another-process https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37470201/how-can-i-tell-.... I don’t know if there’s a similar approach that would work for Windows or other OSes.
- thedanbob 6y ago
  Eh, I wouldn’t call that a cheat. Most of my home brew IoT devices are controlled by Home Assistant via MQTT which pretty much falls in the same category.
- nitrogen 6y ago
  On Linux it should be possible to see if something is recording through PulseAudio using its command line tools, and ALSA/OSS use could be detected with lsof.
- darkarmani 6y ago
  Awesome! That's exactly what I've wanted for the last 5 years.
- 6y ago

madaxe_again 6y ago

I bought my first RPi six months ago, and now I have four (two 4s, two zeros), and six arduinos. My uses are all brutally utilitarian. One pi 4 is openhab, grafana, mqtt broker etc., and the other is doing all the network gumph - vpns, qos, Wi-Fi ap, Bluetooth presence, LoRa. One zero is a controller in a micro hydro system I’m building, the other runs a couple of remote cameras. The arduinos are being used in a lora sensor network, using dinky batteries and solar panels - they’re so low power it’s ridiculous - most of them using ultrasonic rangefinders to measure depth in tanks (water, gasoline) and monitor river levels here and upstream - we live in a mill, so being able to see the delta-h will hopefully save us from a surprise flood this winter. The government operated river gauges were all destroyed in the floods last year, and haven’t yet been replaced. I’m managing to build serviceable river gauges for under €100 a pop - I might have to see if they’re interested, as I think their issue is money - they use these big mechanical gauges that I can’t see being cheap. Another arduino is a weather station, and the last one for now is controlling a valve way, way uphill that I got bored of walking to. Over the winter I intend to build out a heap of arduino/lora irrigation control valves, and am toying with sapping a tiny amount of energy from the water with an impeller to power the things - my ultimate aim here is to automate everything that reasonably can be, so we have more time to do the things that can’t be. Also, damn, it’s fun to be tinkering again - 15 years of working in tech kinda killed my passion for playing with tech, but it turns out it’s still there.

prox 6y ago
That’s pretty amazing, how you can build solutions “on the spot” (instead of buying something off the shelves) how did get started with tinkering?
- madaxe_again 6y ago
  As a kid, with analogue electronics, and microcomputers. I did little to none between ‘04 and last year, when I moved off grid and got back into “gear” while installing a PV system, and got the first RPi all of six months ago because my NAS wasn’t up to running openhab - and haven’t looked back. The arduino stuff has been “buy the bits and put them together”, although some of the bits have been a bare PCB and a bunch of components. So far it’s almost paint by numbers, to be honest - I’m combining things in a somewhat novel way, but the components are all existing solutions to one degree or another.

shadowpho 6y ago

Can you link to the3 large e-paper display please?