Wednesday, November 13, 2013

Digging into Raspberry Pi: Part 2

So, further into my quest to build a control system with the Raspberry Pi, I've been looking around at ways to have simple input from the user for a simple system. The first thing that came to my mind was using an Xbox controller to provide input from the user:

  • It's simple for the user to use, and given that many people grew up with game consoles, it'll be intuitive and not require retraining the user.
  • The Xbox controller plugs into USB and should therefore provide an easy way to integrate a controller for my system.
  • The command to download joystick support for the Raspberry Pi was dead simple: 
    • sudo apt-get install joystick
The post located here also shows some options for the joystick on the Raspberry Pi. I'll post more information as I learn how to use the library to access the device.

Sunday, November 10, 2013

Digging into Raspberry Pi

I've recently purchased several Raspberry Pi boards so that I could use them with the RasPlex distribution to run Plex clients and connect them to my TVs and stream media from a central box in my house. However, I've now realized that with their ability to output to HDMI by default, I can use them as video controllers for projects at work. On my blog I'm going to document my experiences with the Pi, mostly as a list for me to follow if I ever have to recreate my work.

Today, I started off by doing the following :
1. Running NOOBS
2. Installing Raspbian
3. Used 'sudo apt-get install fluxbox' to install the Fluxbox window manager.
4. 'touch ~/.xsession' and 'vi ~/.xsession' and appended 'fluxbox' to the end of the file to start fluxbox when X starts.