Setting up the Raspberry Pi to be a PS3 streaming server (DLNA server)

A while back, I kinda wished that I could stream the stuff from my raspberry pi server, which had torrent server, octoprint (3d printer server), NAS server, server for standard printers(cups), and many other servers, to my playstation 3, but no matter what I tried, I couldnt get anything to work. I finally discovered that what most systems use to detect media servers like ps3 media server programs is called a DLNA protocol, then after a little research, I discovered that the raspberry pi has a version of DLNA that can run on it easily called minidlna.

just do:

 sudo apt-get update

 sudo apt-get upgrade

 sudo apt-get install minidlna

Then edit the configuration file by typing this into the terminal:

 sudo nano /etc/minidlna.conf

you’ll see something like this:

media_dir=/home/pi/videos

at least starting with “media_dir”, just change the stuff after the = sign to where your files are that you want to stream.

You can also uncomment the line

 friendly_name=raspberrypi

to anything you want, and that is the name that will show up on the ps3/bluray players/media centers.

To get it to start up on boot, just run this command at the terminal:

sudo update-rc.d minidlna defaults

and reboot the raspberry pi. If you make any changes to the /etc/minidlna.conf file later on, you’ll have to have it update the library files manually. You do that by typing in this command into the terminal:

sudo service minidlna force-reload

After that, just start up your ps3, and within seconds, you should see a new icon under music, pictures, and movies that has the debian like logo. That will be the raspberry pi with all of your video files/music/pictures.

Ive also found that alot of bluray players and such that are hooked into the network, they’ll also have that same icon appear on them also with the same layout and everything as the ps3, and will be able to stream the media to them, assuming that the bluray players will actually support the said media in the first place.

Low Profile Printable Pibow

Well, I havnt really posted anything in a while due to the fact that Im not really much of a blogger type person, and that Ive been busy designing some ideas.

I made a case that was low profile for the raspberry pi B version, but it allows access to the GPIO pins and everything, just like as if you didnt have a case, so plates/shields fit on it perfectly and are still usable. I know you can access the GPIO on the normal raspberry pi B pibow version, but you need a cable, this one, you dont. This one is more for people who do the electronics and such, or just want a cool looking case.

here’s a pic, there’s more on my thingiverse page with the design files that you can just print out.

http://www.thingiverse.com/thing:214301

In the sources part, there’s a printable pibow, just print out parts 0-4 only, then print out my rpi5/rpi5_cam file, and it’ll fit all together just like the normal pibow cases, but my piece replaces part 5,6,7, and 8.

It’s the one I use now, and everyone loves the look of it, even more so than my other cases that Ive bought in the past.

Premade Netbook Kernel Image

Well, Ive been talking about designing my own linux kernel for the sylvania netbook, or cheap chinese netbooks for a while now, and I figured I’d share my modified kernel which contains usb sound card support, most usb wifi dongles that the raspberry pi can use, along with most of the extra hardware that the raspberry pi can use too. I also changed the linux kernel image from the penguin tux logo to the raspberry pi logo since technically we are hacking the netbook into thinking that it’s a lightweight version of a raspberry pi.

Well, Here’s what youve been waiting for, the download link:

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwYG1PFb3ZByeEN5ZW9vS3dNdlU&authuser=0

Just download it and inside of the archive will be a folder named script that contains two files, just copy that script folder and two files over to the base of the boot partition of the SD card that the rpi soft float disk uses.

This is designed for those who dont want to deal with the headache of designing thier own kernel.

Only two things that I have yet to fix is no onboard sound/battery info since they both use the vt1613 chip, and the rebooting, but just shut it down and turn it back on. Its not as much of a headache as it sounds.

Here’s the files to create everything by yourself or modify the files if you wanted.

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwYG1PFb3ZBydmNWRktzM01PQkE&authuser=0

My little Printrbot Jr assembly kit

Here, Ive collected all of the documents and everything needed to assemble and get your printrbot jr up and running, and comments to really help get those first getting started to get decent prints.

Printrbot Jr. Instructions:

http://printrbot.dozuki.com/Guide/Printrbot+Jr.+Kit+Build/25/1

Printrbot Jr Extruder Instructions (is not included with normal instructions):

http://printrbot.dozuki.com/Guide/Extruder/38/1

I had to take a knife and file down a little bit on the wood in where the hot end goes in so it would fit, and it slides up inside the bottom of the wood extruder parts, then there’s two long screws that go through the wood and into the beveled part of the hot head to keep everything locked into place. It’s kinda hard to see that, so I figured I’d mention how it went.

While assembling everything, you’ll want to check all connections multiple times, and defenitely check the fan so it’s not shorted, short circuits will blow up parts on the circuit board, and is very expensive to fix.

Also, for those saying it only takes around 2 hours to assemble the printer itself either is on some serious speed, or has found a way to control time because it definitely doesn’t go that easily. I can usually just blow through assembly of something in a few hours of what takes most people a week, and this printer took me close to 2 full days to put together.

For those who have the problem of the printer wanting to home to the bottom right instead of bottom left, the X axis wire can be rewired easily using this diagram to fix all of those problems:

http://d17kynu4zpq5hy.cloudfront.net/igi/printrbot/jHFB2IXlYOxwWhJs

The easiest software Ive found to use is repetier host, it can be downloaded here:

http://www.repetier.com/download/

or if you prefer to use a laptop and dont feel like needing to have it plugged in all the time to the printer while printing, you can set up a raspberry pi as a print server like I did using octoprint using this method:

https://github.com/foosel/OctoPrint/wiki/Setup-on-a-Raspberry-Pi-running-Raspbian

Then just run repetier-host on your laptop to just slice the files into gcode, and save it, then use the web-ui of octoprint to upload it to the raspberry pi. After you get everything set up, I would highly reccommend putting at least 3 layers of the wide blue painter’s tape on the print bed, dont overlap the pieces for each layer, just make it so it’s perfectly flat. For repetier host, there is a setup guide here:

Click to access Getting-Started-Guide.pdf

but it doesnt show what print size to put in, so here’s the dimensions I used for the printrbot jr and they work perfectly:

X = 140

Y = 114

Z = 102

For temperatures of printing of normal layers and base layer in slic3r settings, I reccommend first layer being 195C and rest of the layers being 190C. Those have given me the best results with the natural PLA cord that you recieve with the printrbot.

After you get all of that set up, make sure the bed is perfectly level with the nozzle, you can do this by just moving the nozzle to the corners and turning the bed levelling screws until the nozzle looks like it’s just touching, but you can just barely slide a piece of paper between the bed and nozzle. After that’s all done, you should be able to plug in the USB cable to the computer or raspberry pi, then plug in the power for the printer. You should hear the sound that it makes when the usb is connected in windows, or in linux, by using the terminal, type lsusb into the terminal and you should see something with 4 capitilised letters, like YUSD or something like that, I forget what it shows atm, but it is something like that. If it doesnt make the sound in windows or show up in lsusb in linux, just unplug the power cord from the printer, and plug it back in. If it still doesnt work, check all of your wiring and check everything in the printer again. The best idea is to wait to put the printrboard circuit board and wiring in the base of the printer until you know everything is working fine.

Another thing to mention is, just let the printer heat up for a few minutes, like 3-5 minutes before starting your prints, and keep the print head off of the board while it’s heating up so it doesnt burn the tape. (it is around twice the temperature needed to boil water) Also, if you start running into one side of the bed, where the edges of the raft or bottom layer of the prints start lifting up and curling the passes, then letting it preheat usually fixes that, and if not, just loosen the bed leveling screws a little bit and it should fix that. It’s usually caused by either the bed not being close enough or the extruder not being warmed up enough.

I think I covered everything I could remember atm, but if I remember anything else, Ill be sure to add it. I hope this helps whoever reads this and is first getting started with the printrbot jr kits.

Make LXDE look like gnome 2

Here is a little guide to making lxde look like gnome 2 because I for one cannot stand the look of the tiles everything operating systems, or the windows start menu look alike desktop, so I found a few mods for lxde to bring it as close to the good old gnome2 interface as we could get it.

First, right click on the panel at the bottom of the screen where everything is at and click “Panel Settings”. You’ll want to change the Edge option to Top so it puts it on the top of the screen, then you want to click the Appearance tab and select the option for system theme, and uncheck the “custom color checkbox”.

Then you’ll want to go to the Panel Applets tab and set the applets up like this:

spacer, Menu, Application Launch Bar, 3 Spacer Applets(click the checkbox in one so it fills the rest of the space up), Manage Networks, System Tray(Dont delete this!), Volume Control, and finally Digital clock.

then click on the edit button on the digital clock options, and in the Clock Format button, change the “%R” to “%r”, just changing the capital R to lowercase, this changes the clock from 24 hour time to 12 hour (AM/PM time),  then click ok on everything.

Then you’ll want the bottom bar, so right click on the bar at the top and click “Create New Panel”. Right click on the bottom bar and add the applets like this in this order.

Spacer(edit it to go 10 pixels), Minimise All Windows, Spacer(edit it to 10 pixels again), Task bar(Windows List) (click the checkbox on that one so it fills up the dock, and I added the Temperature Monitor as the last one to keep an eye on my temps at the bottom right of the screen out of the way.

Then finally, under preferences in the main menu, select “customize look and feel” and just select “Clearlooks”. Then go to mouse cursor and select the “Adwaita” set so the mouse didnt look like a broken hand when your clicking on things. 😛 I went to fonts and disabled anti-aliasing to give a little more speed, but that’s just something I did.

I decided to make lxde look like gnome2 rather than just setting up mate because of the speed and memory usage differences, lxde does run a good bit faster, but I liked the look of gnome2 interface.

I hope this helps some people out in some way.

Sylvania Netbook Debian Linux

We found this Sylvania netbook in someone’s trash about a week ago and when I got it, it didnt work and wouldnt even try to charge. Upon further inspection, all that was wrong with it was just power connector that broke away  from the solder joint inside of the netbook. It originally ran Windows CE 6 and has a WM8505 SoC processor inside. As you can tell Im not a windows person at all, and started looking around for a good linux system that would run on it. I found a ton of android versions for it, but I was wanting true debian version that I could run directly from the SD card, just like the Raspberry Pi. Then I could leave android installed on the internal flash so others could use the thing also for their ebook readers and such.

Ok, I dont really have my own distro like everyone else, but I discovered a way to put a full debian distro on it using these steps:

First, you’ll need to download the two parts you’ll need for getting the system to boot on the netbook and OS from the raspberry pi. You’ll need the Linux kernel files for the netbook:

http://code.google.com/p/yus-repo/downloads/detail?name=wm8505-kernel-3.0-fatpart.tar.gz

And the main OS from the raspberry pi. You’ll want the softfloat version because the hardfloat wont work on the older arm6 chips.

Torrent	2013-05-29-wheezy-armel.zip.torrent
Direct download	2013-05-29-wheezy-armel.zip
SHA-1	d42d913fb4f49b351ef865edcf318f47ae04edca
Default login	Username: pi Password: raspberry

There’s the torrent and primary download from the raspberry pi site itself. Just follow the instructions here to copy the OS to an SD card, just as you would any raspberry pi system.

http://elinux.org/RPi_Easy_SD_Card_Setup

Then unplug the SD card and plug it back in so the two partitions show up on the SD card. You’ll see that the larger partition doesnt take up the full space on the sd card, that’s fine, it’ll be fixed on the first boot. The smaller partition that has the boot files, just extract the fatpart.tar.gz folders into that partition so it shows up with the tools and script folder on the base disk part.

From there, just unmount the SD card partitions and insert the SD card into the netbook, and it’ll boot up right off of the SD card if everything is set up correctly. Then it will boot to a blue screen with options to change locale, password, keyboard layout, and expand SD card space. You’ll want to select the expand option so it uses all of the empty space on the SD card. Just set up all of your options and select finish, and let the netbook reboot like it asks.

This version doesnt have any sound support yet, but everything else works fine, Im currently working on finding a kernel module that would work, but having a bit of difficulty atm due to unable to find much about the sound card.

It will boot right up to the desktop and everything should work fine.

If you get the issue of when you try to shut down or reboot from lxde menu, it may ask for password, and the dialog will dissappear before you can enter anything. An easy fix for that problem is right here:

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=60561

But instead of:

gksu gedit /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.consolekit.policy

you want:

sudo leafpad /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.consolekit.policy

or

sudo nano /usr/share/polkit-1/actions/org.freedesktop.consolekit.policy

From then on, the system will run all programs that are available to the raspberry pi, which is an insanely large list. Everything should be able to be updated and such with no issues at all and install everything just fine.

After this is all done up and set up how you want it, you should be able to interchange the SD card between the netbook and the raspberry pi with no effort.

Just a warning, if you fully update everything, and due to the low amount of RAM in the netbook, it’ll slow down the netbook really badly, so best thing that Ive found is just to do “sudo apt-get update” and install/uninstall all of the stuff you want/dont want and leave it be.

EDIT: After discovering that the softfloat version is being discontinued, I searched for a mirror site for those who need the images still, which is here:

http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/downloads.raspberrypi.org/images/debian/7/2013-05-29-wheezy-armel/

And updated the download links in the guide. If the links die again, just google for “2013-05-29-wheezy-armel.zip.torrent” and it’ll show a bunch of mirrors with the files needed for this guide.

XMMS for the Raspberry Pi

XMMS has been rebuilt for armv6 with hard float support.
Complete list of packages related to xmms available in the same repository:

• xmms-crossfade
• xmmsctrl
• xmms-curses
• xmms-find
• xmms-finespectrum
• xmms-flac
• xmms-goom
• xmms-infinity
• xmms-jess
• xmms-mad
• xmms-shell
• xmms-stats
• xmms-status-plugin
• xmms-volnorm
• xmms-wmdiscotux
• xmms-skins-others

For developpers:

• xmms-dev
• libgtk1.2-common
• libflac7
• libglib1.2
• libglib1.2-dev
• libgtk1.2
• libgtk1.2-dev

All these packages were built using debian archive source from Etch. The sources are unmodified. Some files relating to building have been modified (either due to quite old methods used which do not work with current tools or due to qemu known bugs)

To install run this as root:

echo “deb http://p.quinput.eu/debfarm unstable all” > /etc/apt/sources.list.d/99quinput.list ; apt-get update; apt-get install xmms

The repository is here
Known bug: When you hit ‘D’ for double size, you will crash xmms. On restart, it will crash again (as it restores your settings). Simply erase the directory .xmms in your home directory. While it is probably trivial to fix, I do not intend to fix it.

How to use: As usual with xmms, after starting, select a proper output. For the pi, select ALSA.
The pops on the audio analog output can be suppressed by installing xmms-crossfade. Configure the plugin to use ALSA and apply other wanted settings.

Conclusion: It runs smoothly, even with some visuals.
Have fun!

Mirrored from this site:

http://teebeenator.blogspot.com/2013/01/xmms-for-raspberry-pi.html

Must have for raspberry pi media center

Must haves if you use Raspberry pi as a media center:

Yatse: android app for using an android tablet/phone as at tv remote for xbmc.

http://www36.zippyshare.com/v/41818295/file.html

OpenElec: best xbmc system Ive found on the raspberry pi.

http://openelec.tv/get-openelec/download/viewcategory/10-raspberry-pi-builds

tubeplus plugin: greatest plugin ever for xbmc, allows you access to almost every movie and tv show from around the world for free. It searches the web for links for various sites like putlocker and such that match the show you’re looking for and streams it directly to the raspberry pi.

https://github.com/anilkuj/xbmc-addons/tree/master/plugin.video.tubeplus

just click the zip button and save it to a thumb drive or whatever, then goto settings, addons, install addons from zip file, and point it to that zip file. after a few mins, it’ll install and you’ll be able to access it under the main menu by going to video, video plugins, tubeplus

Short tutorial on Raspberry Pi’s GPIO pins in Python

Here is a short tutorial on how to use the GPIO pins in python and the labeling on them. Alot of people seem confused about this and I figured I’d explain how the labeling works. There’s a third labeling part too, but from what Ive discovered, it’s only used with shell commands and C/C++, not with python.

In python with the RPi.GPIO package, there’s two common numbering systems to describe the pins on the GPIO header, there’s the BCM layout and Board layout.

BCM labeling: The pin labeling from the BCM2835 IC itself (The main Processor), Here’s an example in python:

import time
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
LED = 4               #Physical pin 7, BCM pin GPIO.4 on the BCM2835
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BCM)
GPIO.setup(LED, GPIO.OUT)

while 1:
GPIO.output(LED, True)
time.sleep(0.5)
GPIO.output(LED, False)
time.sleep(0.5)

Board Labeling: the physical pinout on the GPIO header, and here’s the same example using the same pin but using board layout:

import time
import RPi.GPIO as GPIO
LED = 7               #Physical pin 7, BCM pin GPIO.4 on the BCM2835
GPIO.setmode(GPIO.BOARD)
GPIO.setup(LED, GPIO.OUT)

while 1:
GPIO.output(LED, True)
time.sleep(0.5)
GPIO.output(LED, False)
time.sleep(0.5)

This tabel below is the labeling of both the physical board pinout (inside numbers) to the BCM layout (outside labels):

I hope this helps those that are starting out with programming the GPIO pins in python on your Raspberry Pi.

Update: on version 2 raspberry pi boards, GPIO 21 is renamed GPIO 27, so dont think the pin was broken like I did. 😛

Basic logic analyzer on raspberry pi using PICKit2

I discovered this little trick for all of you out there that uses the rpi for the electronics projects like I do.

First, go to this link and download the pk2-la zip file, and extract it somewhere like a Downloads folder on the rpi.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pk2-la/

Then go “sudo apt-get install python-usb”, which will install the USB stuff for python, and just run the pk2-la executable through root command line, or “sudo pk2-la”. Make sure your pickit2 is plugged in before you run it tho otherwise it will not run.

I copied the pk2-la file, LA-Format file, and IO-Format file to /usr/bin so I could just call it from anywhere in the command line by using “sudo pk2-la”.

You should see a window pop up after a few seconds looking like this:

You need to hook 5v from your circuit to pin 2 and gnd to pin 3/middle pin, then the other three inputs are shown in this diagram:

And there you go, a 3 channel logic analyzer for your Raspberry Pi 😛

All credit for pictures go to Josejx at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pk2-la/ and Microchip.