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Post by PatrickG on Feb 1, 2014 14:01:51 GMT -6
I'm making this thread to detail and outline my personal Raspberry Pi (RPi) project I'm calling my FunBox (until I come up with a better name). I'm building this because I wanted a practical project that'll also be useful outside of the STEM Club/educational experience. I'm using this thread almost has a project journal and I'll update it as I go so I don't forget anything and so I can track my progress. If anyone else is interested in the RPi and has an idea or general questions feel free to post in here and I'll do what I can to help out but this is definitely a learning experience and I don't claim to be a master of the RPi or in Linux. Ultimate Objective:Have an extraordinarily convenient and portable system by the end of the semester I can use to connect to any TV, monitor, or projector I want so I can - Stream HD movies from my large (~800) collection - Functional
- Use emulators to play oldskool games (notably Brutal Doom) with either a console (Xbox 360/Playstation 3) controller or keyboard/mouse - Work in Progress
- Use local or my phones Wi-Fi (though it's hotspot functionality) to connect to the internet to surf the web - Functional
To Do list:- Get the hardware I need:
Powered USB Hub to connect and power all components Bought a 7-port hub
Basic USB (preferably wireless) keyboard and mouse or possibly a touch panel or combo. Using a wireless keyboard/mouse combo that runs off a single nano USB adapterHD monitor for testing Using one of my spare 24" 1080p
Large portable USB hard drives for mass storage (I'll start with a single 2TB) *Using internal drives + docking station for now Using a 2TB portable hard drive
- Console controller (PS3 or Xbox 360)
- Possibly a FLIRC setup
with remote App for phone remote, also wireless keyboard/mouse make this unnecessary
- Second SD card for secondary OS installation (possibly OpenELEC or Raspbian), might dual boot from a single if possible
Durable case (might construct my own, legos?) *Will cut and engrave one with the laser cutter- MPEG-2 license key or crack and a VC-1 license key or crack
Get the Pi up and running with basic functionality
Install operating system for video playback, might have to resolve some issues with the lossless HD audio DTS-HD and AC3 formats in my 1080p MKV's.- Encode my library of uncompressed movies to smaller file sizes to maximize space efficiency on portable hard drives
- Transfer movie collection to portable hard drives,
considering TrueCrypt at this point. Currently using it to protect all (16) of my other hard drives No OS support for TrueCrypt, likely to do this on the media server project though
- Install emulators and transfer games, priority for DosBox (MS-DOS emulator) and Fusion (Sega Genesis emulator)
Get Wi-Fi working in general, then test compatibility with my phone's hotspot- Possibly setup FLIRC for remote control functionality
- Figure out what the deal is with larger sized hard drives on the RPi - GPT compatibility issues? (see post below)
Figure out what the deal is with non-HD video playback on the RPi (see post below)Figure out what the deal is with my .mkv's from DVD source (see post below) MPEG-2 license required for hardware acceleration- Figure out what the deal is with the OS not automatically mounting hard drives on boot (see post below)
- Find a permanent fix for the fast charging issue on the USB hub (see post below)
- Get the nano USB WiFi dongle working on my USB hub
Setup media sever using my private collection for remote access including movie streaming (think Netflix but free and better selection) This has grown massively in complexity since I first thought it up. I will start another project thread when I get to this.
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Post by PatrickG on Feb 1, 2014 14:24:07 GMT -6
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Post by risswidseth on Feb 11, 2014 19:55:36 GMT -6
I'm really interested in this, especially since we will also be using one for the quadcopter. I'm still not quite sure what it does, or rather, what it could do. As well as how it does it (which is almost more interesting). And I'm too lazy to do the research myself, is there ever a time that maybe there could be an informational/fun opportunity to play with it? Explaining and such?
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Post by PatrickG on Feb 12, 2014 18:32:58 GMT -6
Well I'm sorry I haven't updated this thread in a while but all my professors decided using the same week for all the first tests of the semester was a good idea. Unfortunately I'm also in the boring part of the project of just assembling everything and acquiring all the hardware necessary. The RPi is up and running, however, I'm still waiting on some hardware to show up. Right now I'm using a cheap wireless keyboard/mouse combo and a spare 24" 1080p monitor I had lying around to get a basic feel for it. I spent some time getting a bit more comfortable on it as well as testing/playing around connecting it to some of my standard 3.5" hard drives using one of my docking stations (that white thing) and one of my larger 8 bay external enclosures. The docking station ended up working out so well I've been thinking I might hold off on the portable USB hard drives for now. I'm also thinking at this point it might be cool to use the RPi to drive a private media server that I can load up my private collection on and access anywhere I have an internet connection. I've also realized I need an additional SD card I can install OpenELEC on to streamline movie playback for the FunBox (only have Raspbian distro for an OS). I'm really interested in this, especially since we will also be using one for the quadcopter. I'm still not quite sure what it does, or rather, what it could do. As well as how it does it (which is almost more interesting). And I'm too lazy to do the research myself, is there ever a time that maybe there could be an informational/fun opportunity to play with it? Explaining and such? The Raspberry Pi (RPi) is simply a very small computer. It can do anything your computer can (within reason, this thing is the size of a credit card) and as such can be programmed to do a wide variety of tasks (such as flying the quadcopter), attached to this post I'll upload some more images including surfing the web on it using a wireless nano adapter. Once I have it up and running/capable of at least streaming movies I can definitely bring it in to one of the meetings for people to check out/play around with. (surfing the web)  (testing one of my docking stations)  (testing one of my external enclosures, gave me the idea to make a media server)  |
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Post by greenb on Feb 16, 2014 22:03:38 GMT -6
So Patrick, have you done any programming yet for the pi?
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Post by PatrickG on Feb 17, 2014 22:07:21 GMT -6
Funbox now has movie playback capabilities!Well it's been a busy weekend between enjoying it and fixing my truck (it decided to burst a brake line and spew brake fluid everywhere). HOWEVER, the RPi is up and running with complete video playback functionality! Using one of my docking stations and an internal hard drive (haven't gotten my hands on portables yet) I spent some time testing just about every audio/video format combination I could think of. Also, the HDMI video and both the HDMI and 3.5mm analog audio worked flawlessly. I'm not sure if it's the RPi's fault, but non-HD videos looked like complete garbage, this is strange since watching them on my PC they look much, much better. Since I started this project I've been worried about the HD audio ( DTS-HD and AC3 formats) on Blu-Rays as I've heard it can be too much for the RPi to process in real-time causing stuttering and lag. As such it was pretty awesome when the audio on the HD movies I tested came through crisp as can be (HD AC3 in a .mkv). I haven't tested any movies with DTS-HD audio so I guess I'm not out of the woods yet but I'm hopeful. One downside of my current setup is that while the RPi is great for movie playback now, the operating system (OS) I'm currently using is designed to be extraordinarily lightweight (in order to play movies) which means it can't do much else. If I'm going to use the RPi with emulators I'm going to need another OS on another SD card or I need to figure out how I can dual boot off a single SD card. Another issue I've run into is that the RPi can't recognize my larger capacity hard drives (>2 TB), I'm guessing this is the operating systems fault (on the RPi that is). All my hard drives 2TB and under are formatted with a MBR partition table while those larger are formatted with a GUID partition table (GPT) since the MBR can't be used on larger drives. I know most operating systems don't yet support GPT so I'm wondering if that's the cause of my problem. Either way, the portable hard drives I was planning on getting down the road are only 2TB each so I guess it's not the most critical issue. So Patrick, have you done any programming yet for the pi? Nope, and I'm hoping I don't have to. I'm no computer science major, I was hoping I could complete most if not all of this project without any programming work for the RPi OR Linux. This project is geared towards assembly and configuration of the hardware and Linux (the personal media server I'm cooking up is too) so I don't intend to mess around with any of the programmable aspects of the RPi (breakout boards, GPIO pins, etc.) just yet. However, if anyone else wanted to get into it/had a project that required RPi programming I'd definitely be interested and willing to help.
(Pacific Rim in 1080p in MKV format)
(Akira in 1080p in MP4 format)
-Both looked beautiful and played extremely smoothly, pictures don't do them justice.
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Post by PatrickG on Feb 22, 2014 17:15:40 GMT -6
Well the problems keep rolling in. The movies in my personal library are uncompressed DVD/Blu-Ray's, this means they have the maximum quality possible but can also be very big - a typical Blu-Ray or DVD is 30-45GB or 6-8GB per. This isn't an issue on my PC where I have plenty of space but when I'm trying cram 800 movies into the Funbox (which I'm keeping as physically small as possible) this is obviously a problem because I can't just keep adding hard drives. Another thing I have to consider is the power load of the RPi, hard drives, and accessories on the powered USB hub I'm going to get. I might be able to use a maximum of two hard drives total without overloading the hub, this means I have to get as efficient as possible with hard drive space. With this in mind I've been playing around encoding my movies to smaller file sizes and testing some settings. Encoding is where you take your original video and pretty much tear it up and put the pieces back the way you want them. This can be to change the format, alter various elements in it, or in my case shrink the file size. Unfortunately when you shrink a video down you lose quality, this can be avoided the more careful you are but generally the higher the quality the larger the file size. I'm trying to find a balance between size and quality but this too leads to problems. Because I want to get as efficient as possible with space I need a small file size but I also do NOT want to lose quality. You can have the best of both worlds but it takes a very, very long time to do ( see pic below) and a lot of expertise I'm kind of lacking. I also did some size comparisons with the RPi for portable hard drive shopping and I have to say I'm really liking the look of the Seagate 2TB Backup Plus Slim. It's the first ever 9.5mm 2TB 2.5" drive and is extraordinarily small/closest to the RPi in size. Encoding is extremely computer intensive, while maxing out my computer it still takes 19 AND A HALF HOURS PER.  Comparisons:   |
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Post by greenb on Feb 22, 2014 19:49:26 GMT -6
Your experiencing an issue that is plaguing Netflicks. It is very difficult to download a high-def video in a reasonable amount of time, in that case, it is the network supplying the data. However, in your case, you just want to store the data. Last week I got a new laptop charger. These new laptop chargers can supply enough power to charge my laptop and another device at the same time. It might take some modifications but that should be more than enough power for several hard drives and a pi. It is going to be extremely painful to compress all those Blu-Ray dvd's but your going to have to find another way (i.e. add more hard drives). If you have a more direct plan of what you want to accomplish, I could be of more help. Computer Science is my field so I can help you out.
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Post by PatrickG on Feb 27, 2014 19:22:28 GMT -6
After too much waiting my parts are finally here! Shortly after I did the size comparison above the Seagate Backup Plus Slim went on sale at Newegg so I had to snatch one up while the gettin' was good. With the portable hard drive I bought a couple adapters (to make sure I really can connect to any TV/monitor I want) and a 7 port USB hub that was confirmed compatible with the RPi and provided steady, clean power. I just set up the new stuff and everything seems to be working fine so I just started the reformat on the hard drive to wipe all of Seagate's bloatware. Now that I have everything I can also start planning my case for this whole system, I've been thinking of laser cutting a case out of some really nice red oak or cherry wood. I'll follow that up with some cool engravings when I get there. What really blew me away was the size of this hard drive. This thing is insane, for anyone who has worked with internal hard drives use this comparison: this thing is smaller than my Galaxy S3 phone (w/ small Otterbox) in every dimension. Also some good news: after further research it looks as if the USB hub I bought can supply 3A. Been hard to find power specs on the hard drive but it seems the average portable hard drive (powered through USB) draws about 800mA - 1A (and hopefully this one will be less due to the small size). With this in mind I should be able to use two of these portables for 4TB total while still having plenty of juice for the RPi and the other peripherals. Taking my movie collection that averages out to approximately 5GB allowed per movie. This file size target for encoding/compressing my movies should be MUCH easier to reach than my previous goal of 2GB per. This is due to the kind of exponential difficulty in compression, where it gets a helluva lot harder when you really shrink it down. Either way I figured a single USB hub that could power AND connect everything was too simple/elegant to pass up, not to mention it holds with the idea I want a very small and very convenient box I can just plug in and play. Another problem popped up too: the RPi is having difficulty (read: being a POS) with playback of .mkv's I've made from DVD's. This has been so far extremely annoying, it can play Blu-Ray source HD .mkv's but not plain old DVD video? Something whack is going on here, I'll update this later. Hoping by the club projects meeting next week I'll have a rough case cut out, a couple of bugs fixed, and plenty of movies to show. Also considering getting one of these or one of these. The new setup (looks messy but will shrink down a lot in a case)  This hard drive is tiny!  |
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Post by greenb on Feb 27, 2014 20:30:17 GMT -6
I have a Seagate drive, it is awesome. When is the last time you updated the firmware for the raspberry pi? Maybe there is a bug in the pi OS that has decided to mess with your files. I recommend having a backup of your files if your going to connect these hard drives to the raspberry pi. If you plan on putting the pi in a case, I recommend putting a fan in there to keep the pi cool. The raspberry pi will turn down the clock if it starts to overheat, which would suck if your watching a movie and then it suddenly cuts out. This is just my 2 cents, your doing a great job
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Post by PatrickG on Mar 11, 2014 18:28:04 GMT -6
Haven't updated in a while since I was planning on showing off the FunBox at last Friday's meeting. I couldn't get the projector to work (or so I thought) at the time so unfortunately I never had the chance. I assumed it was the projector at the time since I was using the FunBox to play movies on one of the big TV's in the Kopp Student Center (more on that later) earlier the SAME DAY. However, after bringing it home and playing with it for a bit it seems either the RPi or SD card has burned up. I know it's not rare for these but it's still frustrating as hell. I'm going to to try reformatting and reinstalling the OS on the SD card to see if it helps. Some good news is that last Friday I hooked the FunBox up to one of the large HD TV's in the Kopp Student Center and it was working flawlessly. I was able to watch movies for two hours with a buddy and we were actually able to draw somewhat of a crowd from passersby. I'd be lying if I said I feel bad that I had the gory opening scene from Saving Private Ryan playing in glorious HD when one of those middle school tours was walking by. I thought it was funny as hell. Now that I have confirmed/tested movie playback I'm also planning on moving on to installing and configuring emulators. Luckily for me, there's a guy who beat me to the punch and is developing a PC emulator for the RPi called rpix86. I'm hoping to use this, among others, to be able to play oldskool games from any number of platforms (PC, Sega Genesis, etc.) while connected to any TV/monitor/projector/etc. just like with my movies. If you plan on putting the pi in a case, I recommend putting a fan in there to keep the pi cool. The raspberry pi will turn down the clock if it starts to overheat, which would suck if your watching a movie and then it suddenly cuts out. This is just my 2 cents, your doing a great job Yes definitely, I forgot to mention this earlier. A short time ago I did some 'stress testing' on the RPi by playing HD movies with HD audio for around 12 hours and while the RPi didn't get hot per se, it got a lot warmer than I was comfortable with if I'm going to be cramming this thing into a box. My plan so far was to get a USB to 4-pin Molex cable and use my USB hub to power one of my spare computer case fans I have lying around. On top of this I was considering getting one of the heatsinks they specifically have for the RPi chip as well as designing ventilation holes into my case that I'm going to cut on the laser cutter |
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Post by PatrickG on Mar 17, 2014 21:52:15 GMT -6
Well spring break is over and I'm getting back into the swing of things. I've spent the solid majority of the last couple days working on the RPi and trying to determine what in the hell is going on. At first I thought I fried either the RPi or the SD card (which has the OS on it) but I don't see how I could have since it was working perfectly early in the day then died only a couple hours later when I tried to boot it up (at the showcase last meeting no less). After everything else failed I reformatted the SD card and reinstalled a fresh copy of the entire OS. At first I didn't think this solved my problem because while the RPi would now boot up, I wasn't able to do anything. No matter what settings I tried I couldn't play any videos or movies, they would play for about 5-8 seconds then cut out and the RPi would crash. If I tried to mount any hard drives (portable or internal in a docking station) it would crash. If I tried to configure the wireless it would crash. I spent hours upon hours and long nights looking into and researching this problem online as well as just experimenting and trying everything I could think of. Just as I was about to give up on the whole project and chuck the RPi out my window I remembered reading a single line from the user's manual of the USB hub when I first bought it that talked about switching modes. After going back into it and reading up again (good thing I saved it) it seems the USB hub I got has two different modes of operation: normal and fast charging. In normal mode everything works fine and dandy just like you would expect from a USB hub (sort of, more below) but it also has a fast charging mode to quickly charge the large batteries on smart phones and tablets using two 'fast charge' USB ports. It seems when you enter this fast charge mode the only way to keep normal USB functionality is to download and install software from the manufacturers website. I doubt I would ever be able to get this to work on the RPi so for now I'm just resetting the hub every time it enters the fast charging mode. It enters fast charging mode whenever you turn the RPi (or whatever it's connected to) off before the USB hub, this is rather annoying and I'll be looking for a permanent fix. I wanted to break the damn USB hub in half after discovering this. Moral of the story: read and keep your user's manuals (I tell everybody to do this).After researching dual booting on the RPi with an SD card the whole process seems light years ahead of my expertise level. Doing so it seems would require programming a custom boot loader specifically for the RPi with SD card to load both OS's (one for multimedia and the other for games/general purpose). Dual booting on a PC is rather straightforward so I may come back to this if I can find someone online who has done this first. I figure I can just buy another SD card for cheap and save myself a lot of hassle/long nights for now though. I'll just switch them out depending on what I want to do. Another small note is the OS I'm using refuses to boot up with any hard drives mounted for some reason. This means to access any of my videos or such I have to disconnect then reconnect the hard drive to the USB hub. The OS auto-mounts the hard drive when I plug it in so I don't know why booting up with it mounted would be an issue. Either way I'm trying a workaround to see if I can't get rid of this minor inconvenience. When is the last time you updated the firmware for the raspberry pi? Maybe there is a bug in the pi OS that has decided to mess with your files. The DVD video playback issue was another source of endless frustration/annoyance. I started looking into all the gritty details of the video encoder on the RPi trying to figure out why it couldn't play simple MPEG-2 DVD source video. The clue that led to my salvation is the fact the RPi could play any of the audio tracks in the .mkv just not the video. It seems the OS I use only uses hardware to decode video streams (opposed to software decoding). It's much more efficient this way which is probably why the small RPi can play full HD video. The downside is to enable the hardware acceleration you have to purchase a MPEG-2 license key. I've never run into this before so I'm not sure if this is a simple money grabbing move or if the license is required for all capable hardware (RPi, DVD players, etc.). After all, the RPi supports hardware accelerating H.264/MPEG-4/AVC by default (which is why my HD Blu-Rays work flawlessly) so I'm not sure what to make of this. Going to try and find a crack for this regardless. UPDATE: The above also applies to a couple of my Blu-Rays, I'll need to buy a VC-1 license or find a crack as well. |
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Post by PatrickG on Mar 24, 2014 18:18:06 GMT -6
I've been working on several different areas of the Funbox since my last update. First, I've been giving myself a crash course in all things linux. As I try to get my emulators working I've been getting more and more in depth into linux. I've never touched it before (actively avoided it in fact) so this whole thing is somewhat of a struggle but definitely a learning experience. So far I've been working completely in the terminal on the RPi itself but hopefully I can get PuTTY working soon so I can connect to it and work in the terminal remotely from my desktop PC. For some reason my nano USB WiFi dongle can't connect to my WiFi so I'm going to have to sort that out before I can start on PuTTY. In other news, just for fun and possibly a performance increase I've moderately overclocked the RPi. Overclocking is where you force a CPU/GPU/etc. to run at a higher frequency and voltage than it was designed for in order to increase performance. It's generally pretty safe at moderate levels but pushing it too hard can lead to severe system instability (crashing, freezing, unexplainable errors) and potentially physical damage. It was a lot easier than I expected and extraordinarily easy compared to overclocking a desktop. I'm waiting for a USB voltmeter/ammeter before I continue so I can measure the power draw of the RPi so I don't give it too much juice and blow out my USB hub. For anyone looking for the gritty details the RPi is seemingly stable at the following: 855MHz ARM Core (700MHz stock - 22.1% increase), 375MHz GPU Core (250MHz stock - 50% increase), 450MHz SDRAM (400MHz stock - 12.5% increase), all on stock voltage (over_voltage=0). I love overclocking so I'm hoping to come back to this in the future and see how far I can push this little chip but for now I'd rather not break it and spawn another problem. I've been reading about people who have been able to push it to nearly double stock values! I'm also currently working on the enclosure for this whole project, I still intend to cut the case out on the laser cutter. I feel this would look better but it is also much, much more complicated than just shoving everything into a cardboard box and calling it a day. Since this IS suppose to be an educational project I've been learning Autodesk Inventor over the past couple weeks so I can design the entire enclosure by way of CAD before physically building it. Inventor is nice since you can create 3D models of each part then create an assembly where you piece them together and configure just how each piece interacts with the others. So far it's incredible the mechanical assemblies you can make (although mine is one simple rigid assembly) and I recommend people check it out, see my post here on getting Inventor for free. Below are some 3D modeled parts I drew up compared to their real world counterparts. I tried to model them as accurately as possible with an emphasis on sizing rather than details, I know they're ugly as hell but the sizing on every dimension is within 0.005" of the real world value (this is engineering not art). Unfortunately, I'm waiting on a few more parts to arrive before I can starting drawing up the walls/supports of the enclosure since I have some custom wiring I need to finish before I can get an idea on the actual dimensions I'm going to need. By doing my own wiring instead of using the stock cables/connectors I'm hoping to cut the size roughly in half which goes back to one of my main objectives in this project: small and portable. USB Hub:  Raspberry Pi:  Seagate HDD:  |
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Post by nkotbBek on Mar 4, 2019 4:01:35 GMT -6
New Kids on the Block is my favourite band of 90s. NKOTB had so many hit songs! The ones I remember are 'Tonight', 'Baby, I Believe In You' and, of course their hit 'Step By Step'. These are real songs, not garbage like today! And it is sooo good they have a tour in 2019! And I'm going to attend New Kids on the Block concert this year. The concert setlist is here: <a href=https://newkidsontheblocktour2019.com>New Kids on the Block tour setlist</a>. Click on it and maybe we can even visit one of the performances together!
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Post by BBoysBek on Mar 4, 2019 17:23:29 GMT -6
Backstreet Boys BSB are an American rock boy band. The band was founded on April 20, 1993 in Orlando, Florida, by Lou Pearlman. Now this is the most successful rock boy bad with more than 130 million records sold all around the world. The band was named after a flea market in Orlando, the "backstreet flea market". In 2019 Backstreet Boys has more than 50 concerts in the US with their tour. Check all concerts at <a href=https://backstreetboystourdates.com>Backstreet Boys concerts</a> site. Full list of tour dates & concerts!
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