Book Review #28

Learn to Play the Piano and Keyboard
Nick Freeth

Another book by Parragon Publishing, and hard to find author's name. Unfortunately, unlike the sushi book, this one is piano playing. Piano playing is somewhat a rather involved activity. Sure you have some good techniques explained there. Plenty of good pictures, too. But going from simple keyboarding to The Entertainer simply requires more practice than the pages provides. Worse, there's no chord chart at the end of the book the student can refer to. This book is not a tutorial book, or even an introductory one. It's a piano user guide. Here is the white key. Here is the black key, and here is the pedal. And not much after that. Not recommended.

Raspberry Pi Journal #12

Installing NOOBS

NOOBS is a one gigabyte download from raspberry.org. It contains several operating systems that you can install. I'm installing the default Raspbian here. Even though the process is straightforward, there's quite a bit of steps to go through. I've been taking pictures, and I'm sharing them with you so you can see what's going on.

Take care to set up your regions, and keyboard. The first time I installed, I didn't set the keyboard to US keyboard. Needless to say, what I type and what I see on screen are two different things!

You download NOOBS into a fresh SD card (running FAT32), a minimum of 4GB size. Then simply insert the card into Raspberry Pi and turn it on.

Wow, there sure is a lot of pictures here.

I'm installing the default Raspbian system. If this is your first time doing Pi, there's no reason not to do so. Raspbian is based on Debian OS, so it's a pretty solid choice.

Make some tea. It's going to take a while. The process is done automatically, but it takes time to write to the SD card. I didn't time it, but I'd say it's about 10-15 minutes.

Installation is complete. Now it's time to reboot!

Raspi config is started automatically

I enable boot to Desktop. The reason is that I'll have an easier time setting up things. However, there's some magic behind the scene. There's automatic password entry, so the system is less secure overall. Furthermore, all those graphic drawing on screen does make it slower overall.

I decided to trade speed and safety for ease-of-use and convenience. If you don't like it, you'll want to enable the short cut to stop the windowing system.

Set your Time zone!

Unless you're British, set your keyboard!

Ugh. The keyboard installation is pretty involved, doesn't it? I'm using wireless keyboard with USB dongle, so I'm treating it like any other USB keyboard. I'm setting it to just boring old keyboard. No fancy key mapping for me!

If you want to set up your Raspberry Pi to run headless, you want to set this up. Once you download all the necessary drivers and packages, then you want to re-run raspi-config and disable booting into GUI.

Advance options? Good stuff here!

Overscan setting, just in case you don't like black borders. Mine works perfectly out-of-box. Sometimes, though, I didn't turn on the monitor when the Pi boots, so I would be treated to different resolution and I see black bands.

Hostname for the network.

I set it to 256 MB. Half my main memory.

If you want to run headless, set it lower!

Done setting up? I think I forget something. In my installation, I went into the boot configuration file

• hdmi_force_hotplug=1
• hdmi_drive=2

If you missed it, you can go to /boot/config.txt to change it. This will force HDMI output, which is my TV.

Now reboot, and open up Leaf Pad, and type in all the punctuation marks and all to see if your keyboard is set up right. 

Well done! You have just installed an operating system from scratch!

My network connection works right off the bat. There's an icon Wifi Config where you need to put in your password. You know the network connection works because the time will automatically be set to local time. That's why it's important for you to set your locality.

Raspberry Pi Journal #11

The Making of Cigar Box Computer

It was a long time ago where I saw a smallish motherboard computer that somebody suggest would make a great cigar box computer. I passed on that kit, but I always wondered if I should have it someday. Computer processing power is just such a tremendous amount, that most of it is wasted. I've always wanted a small, cheap and rather underpowered computer to do my daily web surfing and working.

For a time, I use a Kindle Fire HD with bluetooth keyboard. It's just such a neat little device, and I've used that successfully for my Nanowrimo activities. Enter the Raspberry Pi. After waiting for a great while, I finally managed to locate a Raspberry Pi and proceeded to go to the local thriftshop and look for some empty boxes.

I picked up a wooden cigar box for $1.49. It comes complete with wax paper and a square wooden rod. Perfect! Well, not really. I needed some holes for cables on the back. Out comes the drill. I drilled a series of holes in the approximate shape, followed by some shavings with my trusty swiss army knife. Done.

I got my Raspberry Pi from element14. This was before sparkfun got a massive dose of Raspberry Pi. As I write this, I saw some kit, along with the new camera at Microcenter. I will have to revisit the store and get another one. I'll be running headless on that one. 

You can see the cigar box in the back, along with my $250 32inch HDMI flat screen.

You can see the holes on the back. A big one for USB cables on the left, and a small round one on the right. At one time, the drill slipped and I drilled my hand. Ouchie. That's when I decided pulling out my knife would be better. The sharp swiss army knife turned out to be an easy way to make holes.

I'm using Gigaware USB 2.0 Desktop Hub. I also have a USB 3 Hub, but that one didn't work. I routed the power cable through the small hole. That power cable comes from my old multi switch device. I connected it on the "computer" switch.

I connected one of the USB output from the hub into the micro USB to power the Raspberry Pi. It's okay to do this because the power micro USB connector does not contain data pin. Only power pins. This way, whenever I turn on the USB hub, I turn on the Pi. Very convenient.

For data, I still need to connect the USB data cable from Raspberry Pi to the hub. I used the bottom USB connector and into the hub.

I use Logitech n400 Wireless keyboard with Pad. It's really light and convenient. It takes some practice, though. Took me two weeks to get comfortable with it. The dongle has some kind of USB extension. I simply put it in. It has quite a nice range. I'm really happy with it, especially since it works right out of the box.

I plugged in male to female USB cable. I knew I will put the box in out of the way place, so in order to conveniently plug in memory card/flash drive, I use this extension.

This is Belkin n150 USB Wifi Adapter. I simply pick one off the shelf, the cheapest kind I could find. I probably should have visited microcenter store, because the last time I was there, I saw some really tiny ones that would not crowd the USB plug.

And there it is, the final box incarnation. Everything fits in perfectly, with the wooden rod placed so that the Pi does not shift in the box. Plenty of space to wound the cables in. The micro USB power connector eventually broke off, leaving just a bare wire. I managed to squeeze the plastic together, but I will have to watch out for it. It happens every time I replace the SD card.

This is my SD card to USB converter. It's very convenient to use. I also have USB flash drive with lots of capacity. I don't know about the transfer rate, but for medium movie files, it works great.

Speaking of movie files, I have an old Flip video recorder. Remember those? It was a cute way to record movies. I plugged in the Flip into USB connector, and the Pi autodetect the device. For a time, I use this:

lxterminal -e omxplayer -o hdmi filename

but later on, the sound went all out. I never did managed to fix it without it blanking the screen, and I don't want to have to reset the frame buffer every time. So, eventually, I gave up and used media player instead. mplayer works great with framedrop feature. I'm pretty happy with it.

So there you have it: My very own cigar box computer. I love it so much, especially considering that the Pi does not draw much power, and neither does the TV. The TV was rated to cost $6 per year. Interesting, eh? I wonder how they come up with that?