Most of my posts here will
be technical or at least practical. This
first one, however, is of a more personal nature.
After waiting for many
months I received my Raspberry Pi on 30 August. I did not order a power supply with it,
believing I have a USB cable with the right connector. This turned out not to be the case, so I
rushed to a shop and bought a small cell phone charger with different adaptors
for the cable. Although I read that it
requires 0.7 A, this one was only 0.5 A, but it worked. So on the first day, I had the Pi running
Rasbian and RaspBMC. I proudly took photos
and posted it on Facebook and one of my blogs.
On the 3rd of September I
had a huge setback - I fell down a staircase of just 3 steps, so bad that I had
to be taken to hospital to checked I was still in one piece -which I was, but I
took to bed for two days and after that still went to work in pain for many
days. I believe this (and pressure at
work) was the cause of me not switching on my Pi again for a few weeks.
On the 8th of November, my
life took a different turn. The evening
I received an e-mail from a local newsreader on E-Nuus, her name is Genée Heyl, she Googled and found my blog,
and wanted to interview somebody who is a Raspberry Pi user. Although I knew I wasn't really ready for
this, it sounded exciting and did not want to say no. The next morning we made and appointment for
3 the afternoon.
At about 1:30 I dashed
home. Having removed the living room
couches and bought a new set the previous day, it was due to be delivered just
after 2. I called the shop, which is
only a few blocks away, and asked them to deliver immediately. Then I started digging out the Pi and
everything I needed. The SD card with
RasbBMC was in the slot, but I could not find the Raspbian card. I removed the card from my camera, backed up
the photos and wrote the image again.
The furniture arrived at about 2:30.
While they had the truck in the front yard, my daughter arrived in her
car from university for the weekend.
When I tried to show her where to park, with the delivery truck in the
yard, she drove over my left foot!
Luckily I was not injured.
The interview was fun and
took almost an hour. Nothing much came
of it, except seeing Genée talking to the camera in our living room! I do not blame the editor - I am not very
photogenic.
The good thing that came out
of this was that I have started with the Raspberry Pi again. Now I am doing it a bit back to front. I should have blog as I was doing it. I will
try to catch up! A few exciting things
I did was:
·
Use my laptop keyboard and mouse via Synergy.
·
Ran it on a PP9 battery.
·
Got a webcam working
·
Used the webcam with the program called "motion", to take for
example lightning pictures.
·
Tested a LG TV remote control (via a USB-to-serial cable.)
Needless to say, the 0.5 A
power supply did not last for long.
Fortunately it survived the TV interview! So I had to make another plan. I did not feel like shelling out more money
on an overpriced cell phone charger. My
solution was to use a mostly unused external IDE drive enclosure. I salvaged a drive power plug and usb socket
from old PC parts. The cable on the USB
socket was cut of and soldered to the loose drive power plug, on ground and
+5V. I used the cable from the now dead
cell phone charger, first testing without the adapter on the round connector on
the cable that I had +5V on the center and ground on the outer. I used a cable tie to secure the Pi to the
base. The plastic case being too fat, I
can't put the shell of the drive enclosure on.
My Pi is working!
I have a rechargeable PP9
battery, with a cable clip soldered to a round power connecter, the same as on
the 12V supply of the drive enclosure. I
figured that there might be a simple 5V regulator on the board of the drive
enclosure, so it might be just as able to convert 9V down to 5V. I gave the battery a good overnight charge
and then tried it. The Pi booted and I
ran it for close to 10 minutes! The
picture above shows my Pi on the base of the drive enclosure, next to it the
12V PSU and the PP9 battery. Stay tuned!
