The Raspberry Pi computer goes on general sale

[Pete]

Adam,

Does it stream HD when running XBMC? Just curious because I was going to try fitting one to one of the LCD TV's in the house. I have one LCD TV flush mounted to a wall and have little space for anything. Can you also connect an IR receiver to the Raspberry Pi?

I am going to power it via a POE splitter; so really I only need the base board. What would you recommend? I was originally on a list to purchase them when available and never got an email.

[mrhappy]

Adam,

Does it stream HD when running XBMC? Just curious because I was going to try fitting one to one of the LCD TV's in the house. I have one LCD TV flush mounted to a wall and have little space for anything. Can you also connect an IR receiver to the Raspberry Pi?

I am going to power it via a POE splitter; so really I only need the base board. What would you recommend? I was originally on a list to purchase them when available and never got an email.

You inspired me to try it Pete, I have been using RISC OS on it for the past couple of days which has been a bit nostalgic.

I have just tried the latest build of Raspbmc and it is currently playing a 1080 video streamed across my network.

I would say it streams it fine, you can get the very occasional stutter or microsecond pause but it catches up. I imagine 720p videos will be better, the pauses could be any number of things as I am running on a 100mb LAN (not that the pi supports 1gb anyway) with a relatively slow PC with the HD connected to so it is not exactly a fast network I have to stream the content to start with. The pi is also now shipping with 512mb ram and I have 256 mb units so this may help some things. Edit: One thing it does not appear to like is coming out of the xbmc menu when the video attempts to play in the background with the menu over the top. It stutters badly here, would be easier if the video switched off here and the audio carried on. The play/pause/timeline menu does display fine, it is the full menu that it has issues with.

The raspbmc does seem to suggest it can support IR remotes although I don't really have any to try with though unfortunately as I am not sure what I have done with my MCE remote.

I think you can place direct orders with whoever RS/Farnell sell with in the US now, I think the waiting list was dropped and you just put your order in and get in line. Not sure what the waiting time is at the minute.

[travisdh]

This is what i am intending to use mine for Pete, with the exception of IR. Whilst it would be nice to get that going, i thought for ease of setup it would be much easier to use an ATI RF remote, and the RFXCOM plugin, that way the RF remote can be used, and on value change it runs specific events, be them turn on the TV, or set the source to the appropriate input.

The great thing about XBMC as an example, is that it can be controlled through http calls, so the hs.geturl works fine to control the XBMC device, and can emulate keypresses, so in my test setup i can press the down arrow on the ATI remote, this is received by the rfxcom reciever (433mhz), and registers as a downpress value, this then calls a http url like the below:

&hs.GetUrl("http://IP/xbmcCmds/xbmcHttp?command=SendKey(271)","",True,80)

Which sends the down arrow keypress, and allows for complete control of the device. The beauty of using an RF remote as the sole device controller (TV, and HDMI Devices) is that you can keep track of which input the device is set to, so for example you could have a conditional event for the keypress arrows, that only works if a virtual device shows that the TV's source is set to HDMI. The same with source input control, I just set a devicevalue change trigger on an event, which then references the actual manual with conditions event, so if a user tries to hit the "Web" button which in my case signifies XBMC, it will only trigger if the TV Source is TV.

Not sure about the US, but the waiting lists for the Pi here are shocking. I am going on about 6 months waiting for my first one, and given the delay decided to order another three. The bonus of the delay though is new models have been upgraded from 256 to 512mb for the same price

[mrhappy]

Just been looking at the HTTP interface travis, looks like it was depreciated in some of the later releases but has been retained. Guess I should start to look at the newer interface...guess it will keep me occupied.

[travisdh]

The newer interface is JSON-RPC, This is what i was looking into by way of Homeseer scripts / plugins.

As Raspberry Pi is a few revisions behind in the XBMC stream, the HTTP API might last a little bit longer, but will need to eventually move towards JSON.

This was also the reason i was interested in websockets, to listen into the broadcast address, as the JSON API has all sorts of great broadcast messages, for example

onPlayerStart
onPlayerPause
onPlayerStop

This are just a few that would be great triggers for homeseer, e.g. you could set an event that is conditional on the room being in "Movie Mode" and then when OnPlayerPause being received, brings the lights up, then on PlayerStart it dims the lights in the room.

Lots of great control elements to be integrated

[Pete]

Thanks guys!

[Pete]

Searching for a Rasberry Pi. I am on the original list but never got any emails...that said found the Raspberry Pi Model B Revision 2.0 (512MB). It is going to be connected via a POE (and poe power spitter) behind an LCD TV.


Is that the one that I want?

[mrhappy]

Yes, I have the 256mb version but there is no difference other than a free ram upgrade. The model A is the one to avoid (not even sure they have made any) as it has no LAN port.

[Pete]

Thanks Adam.

[GatorEye]

Curious if anyone who got a Raspberry Pi has looked into the ZWave daughter board?

http://www.zwaveproducts.com/Zwave-C...hter-Card.html

[travisdh]

How did you go with this Pete,

I am currently running three Raspberry Pi's as media centres, and one Raspberry Pi as a SiriProxy. They are great little devices given the cost of them, and have a whole lot of potential.

Must admit i never thought of using POE, but it is a great idea given how small the boards are, plus they could be used as Access Points, Security Cameras etc.

[Pete]

Not yet...went off on a tangent playing with the Openframe 2 stuff. Two flavors now. One phone hub with a DECT chip and WLAN/Bluetooth stuff. The other is an "energy hub" with a Zigbee chip, wireless, bluetooth, dect chip et al. Looking now to play more with Zigbee some....

I found the TP-Link POE power splitters to work well with this kind of stuff with the Jogglers.

Relating to XBMC I have been turning the Aopen DE's into little XBMC boxes and HSTouch clients. They are larger but still have a small footprint. They are all over the house these days.

[Pete]

Maybe unrelated but did a test for a couple of days comparing running single USB SSD boot of the openelec and ubuntu versions of XBMC.

I am very impressed with openelect and what it does; but I like the ubuntu version better on the bigger LCD TV.

That is me and my personally opinion on using the larger LCD TV and my age as my ears and eyes are not as good as they used to be.

I also concurrently tested it on a smaller LCD TV and the dissimilarities between the two were not easily noted. (that said for the smaller kitchen LCD TV I wouldn't most likely see much of a difference).