My 16 year old son wanted to go to a party. I told him that if he could get the raspberry pi to email his request to me, using python, that he could go.

He went to the party.

There’s quite an active Raspberry Pi subreddit (handy if you want to avoid all the cat memes*) http://www.reddit.com/r/raspberry_pi/

*only because it’s very easy to get distracted by the many pictures of cats

This may sound strange but I like this remark: “I have plenty of ideas but I don’t seem to get around to doing anything with it, Thank God it is so cheap I can throw it away in a few years when I still have not done anything with it.” To me that shows exactly what a good product it is.

Yeah, this is a weird one:
ADULT MATERIAL
http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1f607z/owners_of_a_raspberry_pi_what_do_you_use_it_for/ca7an5w

I won’t mention any of the details, but in general terms what did the RPi team think of the reddit post on that thread that could NEVER be posted on this blog, even though it was quite ingenious? :)

If anyone here would like to send their Raspbrery Pi to space, email me and tell me some kind of awesome research your Pi will conduct at the edge of the atmosphere and I will include it in my prototype hobbyist (although I’ve sold quite a few to research companies at cost, and given free rides to researchers everywhere saving them millions in hyperinflated fees making ‘space’ far more accessible (my academic objective)) suborbital spacecraft.

Also, add me on Twitter, @bashpr0mpt, you can tell me about your cool science experiment there too. The limit will be 3 Pi’s in cargo, and should we get enough interest to warrant terms these will be negotiated ad hoc to try and let as many people cash in on this opportunity as I humanly and financially can.

Just added my project to the list.

Its getting ridiculous, far too many posts to read! Even when you don’t read any of the comments!

off topic, now Liz Will KILL me.

Since it can be left on all the time it is the perfect administrative console, with instant access anytime.

Love the comment about turning the Pi into a time travel machine by applying 1.21GW to GPIO pin 27 – wonder how long it’ll be before Adafruit bring out a flux capacitor add-on board :)

I’ve been working on building my own retro game console around it, I have it booting AdvanceMAME and I have two USB Classic joysticks hooked up to it from this place:

http://www.syzygycompany.com/store

Would like to try putting everything into a home built arcade cabinet next.

I can’t believe how far the Raspberry Pi has come. I remember just over a year when my computer teacher showed my your website. I was amazed and had to get one when it came out.
Oh, and I laughed at the last part of this post. Somebody claimed to have disassembled the pi and built a better one? That doesn’t even make sense. First, the Pi is just a PCB with parts soldered on and some BGA mounted chips. There’s nothing to disassemble! Also, sure you could make it better with a faster processor and more RAM, but that’s not the point of the Pi. The Pi is perfect just as it stands.

PI-nas.
I have it running Samba and serving up 2 TB of video files to a hacked AppleTV running XBMC.
A pair of 2TB USB hard drives, one serving up files, and a cron job to rsync to the other USB drive once a day.

Works even better than I hoped.

My pi is running ubuntu connected to a 1TB hdd. Basically I use it as a media server and for downloading stuffs as I can put a script or download stuffs from torrents.

It primarily serves as cheap network storage device in my case. The only thing I am bit concerned about is the wireless network, as all my data can be accessed if my wireless is compromised.

I’ve been doing a fair few things with mine, but mostly the usual stuff:

http://edwinjones.me.uk/rants/minecrafted.aspx

I’m sorry I missed this post. I think I can get close to that guy.

I ended up using one to build a custom replacement for our hot tub controller. The tub is a typical six seater portable model with a 2.2 kW massage pump, 2 kW heater and an air blower. It’s about 10 years old, and had a pretty bare bones controller which ran an hourly filtration and heat cycle. It had no clock, no scheduling, and basically just sucked electricity down at a fixed and increasingly alarming rate pretty much all day and night.

The controller eventually died, and rather than pay a whole stack of cash to get one that was going to cost a whole stack more in energy bills, I built an energy efficient two tiered control system.

The low level controller is an arduino clone using one of the excellent state machine libraries, and is piggy-backed onto the old controller’s sensors (dallas 1-wire temperature sensor, opto-coupled current sensing etc), as well as driving the relays. I re-implemented the original controllers safety features verbatim – although it was a power hog, it was designed extremely well.

The arduino also handles all the scheduling, and I optimised the filtration duty cycles etc. to make the best use of off peak rates, and keep the pump and heater running times to an absolute minimum.

The arduino is connected to a Pi running Arch Linux, which acts as a high level supervisor to the arduino. It is running a reactor style server written in ruby, which enables direct communication between the arduino and an iPhone. The tub is in a gazebo in the middle of the back yard, so is connected via Wi-Fi, although this can be a bit dicey as the pump causes massive current inrush which can ‘disorient’ the Pi pretty easily. The two tiered system ensures that if the Pi freaks out for any reason, the arduino will continue on, blissfully unaware.

The iPhone App has a simple interface which displays the current temperature, relay states, error codes, and enables you to change the various operation states, and set the desired temperature. It’s not ideal, because the iPhone’s not exactly designed to be used under water, but I haven’t gotten around to building a water friendly interface. We’re a Mac household, so it broadcasts its ssh service using avahi, using the hostname, “bubbles.local” ;)

The Pi also provides an RTC service to the arduino, because I haven’t gotten around to adding one of those either. The arduino will not start running the pump etc., until it has received a valid time sync command from the Pi. The Pi doesn’t have an RTC either, so it needs to have a valid time from an NTP server before it issues the command. This thing is expensive to run, and so a 12 hr offset thanks to a spontaneous reboot (a Pi specialty) would make it very, very expensive to run.

Now, I don’t think I can best that guy with all the feedback stuff (might be difficult to get a reading in the water), but I have actually achieved very similar results ;)… mine’s got venturi action you see. I also have the whole “come to clean the pool” thing going on, but no moustache.

So where’s the sauce?? I was originally going to post the code, as these sorts of things are notoriously closed and black-boxy, but I think that would be extremely unwise. I really can’t emphasise this enough… DO NOT, under ANY CIRCUMSTANCES try this sort of thing at home. This is not a 5V, 100mA sort of project, which you can usually lick without feeling even a tingle. This is bunch of high current devices pushing large amounts of water around, and – if you’re not extremely careful – potentially directly into said high current devices.