So, how many people are after a Raspberry Pi?

[hawsey]

Right so I am going to have to give this a try out .
I had a little google about and found BerryBoot.
http://www.berryterminal.com/doku.php/berryboot
looks very nice
thanks didn't realise you could do this with the a PI its just the sort of thing I would love to be able to do with the Joggler

Will the pi be powerfull enough to run tv sticks I wonder ?

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[gegs]

So it would make sense to boot the Pi from a small-capacity SD card & use a (say) 64GB USB stick to host RasbBMC and recorded TV files?

Yes!

[gegs]

Will the pi be powerfull enough to run tv sticks I wonder ?

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If the stick is supported, you should be able to use it; you might need to insert it in a powered USB hub though. The same is true of a USB hard drive. The Pi can be used as a PVR but it doesn't have enough juice to fire up a portable hard drive - you need to run one of these from a powered hub or connect to a powered desktop hard drive instead.

[dwl99]

Does anyone have any advice about a reliable PSU for the Pi? I was intending to use a 5V 1A mobile phone charger I had lying about but read that some of them can be a bit unreliable?

[hawsey]

Dwl99 I would go for a 1.5 or 2 amp one personally, ive been fiddling trying out using my bt home hub as a power source, then my Sony phone charger, but was having issues.
I now have a BlackBerry playbook charger 2amp running the PI and all is good.
There seem to be plenty on ebay cheap enough but just go for one with plenty of power for what you might plug in to it.
The issues I had were that everyting just ran really slow or didnt work at all with lower power..
Hope this helps

[dwl99]

Ahh I see, mine says it does but wouldnt work on old firmware / images but does on new ones just thought it might be the same issue.
Having problems with openelec now on Frodo, if you play some music then do a photo slideshow it crashes it and re boots, my openelec Frodo on my acer revo 3610 is doing the same as well so it could be this version of openelec.
Im going to give raspbmc a whirl tonight, do you use an sd card or a usb stick to boot your image?

I use both. Raspbmc has an "install to USB" option but the boot loader remains on an SD card. The Pi needs to boot from SD.

Use a small SD card for booting, no point in wasting a large capacity one. I noticed a big speed advantage when I swapped from an SD based system to a USB one, although I must admit that even the card based versions are zippier now on the Pi with continual improvements being made to the code. The most noticeable speed improvement was with the EPG version of the TVCatchup addon. Loading the EPG was pretty slow with SD but impressively swift with USB. Having said that, I'm now using the non-EPG version because I find it simpler and less prone to freezing.

If you install the RaspBMC OS files to a USB stick and let the Pi just boot from the SD card would it matter if you used an older class 4 card? Would a 2GB card be big enough? I have any number of older SD cards lying around the house & I'm loathe to buy any more!

[hawsey]

Just thinking the same thing myself a nice fast usb stick or even hdd and just any old SD card to start the boot, wonder if it has been tested out?
Just proved the power supply thing again this am ; trying to set up a PI as a HTPC at my elderly parents house and the power port from the BT HH3 would not power a keyboard and mouse but my 2000 ma BlackBerry charger worked first time.
Unfortunately the CEC wont kick in although a message does pop up so it looks like ill need a remote :-/might try raspbmc first just in case a different built works.
If a remote is needed I have an old xbox remote I might try to get working .

[dwl99]

Remember if you're using an old Xbox remote you'll need an IR receiver for the Pi
I ended up ordering one of these http://www.amazon.co.uk/Belkin-Dual-iPo ... 854&sr=8-1 as a Pi PSU, it has 1000mA per output and the feedback says that it has enough oomph to power a Pi. I was also a bit happier with a branded psu as I think some of the cheap Chinese ones can be a bit scary in terms of bursting into flames. My plan is to use a separate Belkin USB powered hub for the TV card, keyboard and USB.

Anyway, the Pi has been ordered & is on its way!

[hawsey]

Yep I agree a good move getting the Belkin, it should have plenty of power for most things and not a bad price either.
I was fixing a REIN fault on somebodys broadband the other week and I tracked his issue down to 3 cheap chineese power supplys emitting a large amount of REIN thus causing thousands of FEC and CRC errors on his line; he thought he would save a bit of money but it ended up causing a big problem with his broadband :-/.
Ive possibly sourced an external CEC to try off a mate who has one surplus

Going to see how I can use the ir reciever off the Xbox, I know I had an extender cable that I used when my Xbox was in a cabinet so I could cut in to that, off to the PI forums to investigate

[dwl99]

@gegs / hawsey - how on earth do you get CEC to work? My Pi arrived yesterday & is booting off a class 6 SDcard and RaspBMC is running off a 32GB USB stick on a powered hub. I've enabled the webserver but the remote for my Panasonic Viera TX-L37ET5B TV refuses to work. The Pulse-Eight CEC adapter loads when RaspBMC boots.

On a happier note my mini Android keyboard & mouse combo is working well with it.

[hawsey]

@dwl99 I think it could be one of many things unfortunately for u m8 :-/.
First thing I would try would be openelec myself.
When I tried months ago the CEC wouldnt work on my tv on any build but it could see it,
Now running Openelec my tv works no bother but on my parents it wont play ball :-/
This time I booted in to a linux build and updated the pi 's firmware and kernel using Hexxeths tool first before I started so dont know if it was that or a more recent build of Openelec that made it work on my Tv.
Going to do more experiments and report back....

[dwl99]

Thanks, will try the firmware & kernel update first. Next will be OpenELEC!

[hawsey]

This might be of interest re CEC and PI

http://forum.stmlabs.com/showthread.php?tid=6888

[dwl99]

Thanks hawsey, I tried OpenELEC & CEC didn't work on that either. Updating the Pi's firmware with Debian Wheezy didn't work either. I would say that RaspBMC is definitely a smoother OS than OpenELEC. Oddly enough when I hooked up my DVB-T2 card to RaspBMC it detected only 6 muxes & did not display any BBC channels but with OpenELEC it detected 10 muxes & displayed all the BBC channels. The TV card works fine with Windows 7. Back to the drawing board for now!

[hawsey]

Very interesting with your tv card, I had my doubts it would work at all;-) so your nearly there...
I now have in my possession for CEC testing purposes(off a good friend) ,
A raspberry PI from Rs, mine is a Farnell 1 .
A CEC adapter that was attached to his revo.
So I am going to be armed with two sd cards with latest Openelec/raspbmc, and the above stuff for my next vist to my folks's place
Hope one combo works, really want their tv remote to work the PI......

[gegs]

@gegs / hawsey - how on earth do you get CEC to work?

Sorry for the lack of a reply until now; I've been on holiday for a week in Siberia - sorry, I meant the North Yorkshire coast. Boy, it was cold!

I haven't been able to get CEC to work because the TV my Pi is connected to doesn't support it. Additional circuitry is needed to provide CEC capability and my cheap kitchen TV doesn't have it.

You may have to enable CEC (or Viera Link for your particular TV) on the TV itself. I have a Viera TV in my lounge that is CEC linked to a Philips Blu-Ray player but it wasn't enabled by default. Check your TV's settings.

[dwl99]

Thanks, I already fiddled about with all of the Viera Link settings on the TV but no dice. In the end I used a PC remote I got from ebay for a couple of quid & programmed my Harmony remote with the relevant settings and it all works very well.

[hawsey]

Tried everything I could re CEC on my folks Sony tv but to no avail , different distro , pi from a different manufacturer , even a CEC adapter , nothing works so now to plan B , possibly a hacked old xbox remote which I always thought was great for xbmc anyway


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[dwl99]

Get one of these http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/140912854677? ... 1423.l2649 for the princely sum of £2.80 - it works fine with the Rpi and you can clone it to your Harmony remote.

[hawsey]

Nice find:-) how do you clone it,?
I have an old silver harmony somewhere that you can plug in to the pc to download codes to, I wonder if this will work with it....