The story starts with family wanting to watch streaming TV
as Digital terrestrial TV is not the best with us. I read an article about using Kodi on a
Raspberry Pi. Raspberry Pi 3, Noobs MicroSD and old USB keyboard with
a few hours and I had one media
player. Exhalent but it got me intrigued….
After a bit of searching on the net and I found £4 for a Raspberry
Pi zero and I was sold what could go wrong?
Well a lot really first one I ordered would not work checked the microSDs in the Raspberry Pi 3 ok. Ordered a replacement (impatient me) and was about to send back the first so started checking simple stuff like power and clocks. I work in the trade so have access to equipment. Power was coming up and then dropping from 3v3 to 2v8 odd?
Well a lot really first one I ordered would not work checked the microSDs in the Raspberry Pi 3 ok. Ordered a replacement (impatient me) and was about to send back the first so started checking simple stuff like power and clocks. I work in the trade so have access to equipment. Power was coming up and then dropping from 3v3 to 2v8 odd?
When I looked under a microscope, I could see filaments of
solder around the regulator chip. Wiped them off and it booted. Second Zero
booted first time.
But the zeros would not boot off some microSDs that worked
on Raspberry Pi 3 anything bigger that 16GB in my collection of microSDs would
not boot. I even ran Raspbian Jessie Lite on a 4GB from an old phone. If anyone
knows a source of 32GB microSDs that work in zeros let me know.
The zero only has one USB port so you need a hub, I also
have a collection of these. It does not have WIFI or Ethernet so to make it
connected you will need a hub. Odd
things happened here I used one of those OTG shims to connect to USB hub
flashed the light on the hub and showed the wifi icon on the screen but no
working keyboard or mouse. Keyboard worked without hub?
To set stuff up I used the serial terminal see this link http://elinux.org/RPi_Serial_Connection.
Now I could go in and set up USB WIFI dongle got two different ones working but
that’s a different story. Now I had
network I could use VNC (https://www.raspberrypi.org/documentation/remote-access/vnc/)
works sometimes and not others. I can now do stuff with it, via serial
terminal and VNC.
You can do so much. I have for example:
You can do so much. I have for example:
·
Programed Arduino boards.(http://openenergymonitor.blogspot.com/2013/12/developing-for-arduino-remotely-on.html
, http://pblog.ebaker.me.uk/2014/01/uploading-arduino-sketch-from-raspberry.html
)
·
Set up PHP web servers.
·
Samba file and media servers.
·
Connected sensors ( acceleration, magnetic,
humidity, air pressure and temperature)
On the whole a very useful box but
if you want a desktop get a Raspberry Pi 3.
