Categories
Raspberry Pi

New Raspberry Pi model released

Raspberry is adding a new model to their collection. The Raspberry Pi 3B+ (yes, they added the โ€˜+โ€™). Since 2016 the 3B model has been the go to for most people. This new version is visually exactly the same as the 2016 model, the change is done under the hood.

It has a somewhat faster quad core CPU of 1.4 GHz, Bluetooth 4.2 (upgrade from 4.1) and dual-band Wi-Fi. The latter is the exciting part of the upgrade. Now it is also possible to connect to the 5GHz band (no longer just the 2.4 GHz). The Wi-Fi also has the modular compliance certification which is good news for developers that want to get their products based on the Pi to get certified.

Price for this new Pi is still in the same price range as we come to expect from Raspberry. Still $35 or so.

Categories
How to Raspberry Pi

Setting up static IP on your Pi

In order to set a static IP address on your Pi we will have to go into the configuration of your network adapter. So start the command line (or a terminal window) and start typing the following commands.

sudo nano /etc/network/interfaces

Once the configuration file is open delete all the content by holding down CTRL + K

Now copy and paste the following text into the configuration file.

allow-hotplug eth0
iface eth0 inet dhcp

allow-hotplug wlan0
auto wlan0
iface wlan0 inet static

address 192.168.2.21
netmask 255.255.255.0
gateway 192.168.2.254

dns-nameservers 8.8.8.8 8.8.4.4
wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

In this configuration the ethernet port will stay on DHCP (dynamic IP address). The WiFi adapter (wlan0) will get a static IP address. In my example this will be 192.168.2.21 with a class C subnet (255.255.255.0) and my gateway is 192.168.2.254. Feel free to use your personal IP ranges instead.

The DNS addresses are from Google. Also feel free to replace them with other DNS name server addresses.

Save and Exit Nano by typing CTRL + X then press Y followed by ENTER.

sudo reboot now

After the reboot your WiFi IP should read 192.168.2.21 (or the ip you choose).

To check this use the command

ip addr

 

Categories
Projects Raspberry Pi

Bartop Arcade (part 2) – Bill of Materials

Because of my previous post (part 1 of this series) people have asked me where I bought my electronics. So in this post I will give you my current bill of materials and I will update this post as I go along with this project.

I hope you will find this helpful and some comments would be greatly appreciated.

Tested and work
Joysticks and buttons
VGA to HDMI adapter
I’m thinking of adding an old VGA monitor instead of the Pi screen

Not received yet (so not tested)
Pressure fit USB case mount
Small USB speakers

Last update 20th of February 2018

 

Categories
How to Raspberry Pi

Configuring WiFi on your PI (CLI)

While you can configure WiFi via the Raspi-config method, it can be usefull to do it ‘by hand’. This is how you do that.

From the command prompt give the following commands.

sudo nano /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

At the bottom of the tekst add these lines and replace the network name with the name of your WiFi network (SSID) and password with the password of your WiFi network. Leave the quotation marks before and after both the name and the password.

network={
ssid=โ€network nameโ€
psk=โ€passwordโ€
}

Save and close the file with CTRL + X, Y and ENTER and reboot your Pi for the configuration to take effect.

sudo reboot now

Categories
Crypto currency How to Raspberry Pi

Mining crypto with a Raspberry Pi

Did you ever wanted to try your hand at mining crypto currency? I did. And I even got it to work on a Raspberry Pi. Okay I did not get rich overnight, but it worked and for a nerd like me that is really fun. If you want to try this yourself, follow the instructions below and watch my Youtube video for details on mining pool setup and even how to send your coins to an Exchange to buy Bitcoin. Ha! who said you can’t mine Bitcoin with a Raspberry BUYAH!

Okay the starting point of these instructions is a freshly installed Raspberry with either Raspbian Stretch (Lite version will do fine) or Pi64. Both work, but I found that Pi64 got a little higher Hashing rate. You can follow my instructions on how to install an image and configure a Pi via this link if you need to and I forked the Pi64 image location to my Github page here.

So you booted up your Pi and are looking at the command prompt. Let’s first update everything and get that out of the way.

sudo apt-get update -y && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

Now install all the dependencies to get your mining rig running.

sudo apt-get install autoconf libcurl4-openssl-dev libjansson-dev openssl libssl-dev gcc gawk wget unzip make

Download the mining software and unzip it

wget https://github.com/conan-equal-newone/yenten/releases/download/1.1.0/yenten_minerd_source.zip

unzip yenten_minerd_source.zip

Do some configuring

cd yenten_miner

sudo chmod 700 *

sudo touch ChangeLog

sudo ./autogen.sh

sudo ./configure

sudo make -j4

If all went well we are now able to mine the Altcoin named Yenten. It is a Japanese coin and will become the world only currency in about 10 years or so I’m told. But for now it is almost worth 2 cents at the moment of writing this post.

Be sure to watch my video in order to understand how to get a wallet where all your mining spoils will be send to from the mining pool. Oh and you will also see how to create and configure your miningpool account. So be sure to check it. The video isn’t my greatest work (yet) but it is my first step on my very own Youtube channel.

[embedyt] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pkXI19YPm7Q[/embedyt]

Once you have done the wallet and the miningpool thingy, you are clear to mine some coins. Just give the following command (and replace my account, workername and password with yours).

sudo ./minerd -a yescryptr16 -t 4 -o stratum+tcp://yenten.luckypool.org:3344 -u jiltednl.pi001 -p password

Oh and if you become a miljonair with this great tutorial, email me for my bankaccount number. Thank you.

This is my own mining rig by the way. Impressive right?

 

Categories
Projects Raspberry Pi

Bartop Arcade (part 1)

One of my first Raspberry Pi projects was creating a retro gaming console. I started with Retro Pie at first but almost a year later I see myself using Recalbox instead. Both options are great, but I found an image based on Recalbox that had over 49 different consoles and more than 11.000+ games ready to play.

As I write this post my Windows PC is working on copying that image its content, so I can strip it down to a smaller version (and in English, it is now in Portugese) so you can install it on a smaller (cheaper) microSD card than the 60 euro 128GB microSD I had to buy to use this image.

all praise go toย Andrรฉs Jimenez Galisteo Jr.ย who greated this image. As said it holds almost 50 different consoles from all the populair ones like NES/SNES, Playstation and Sega systems to the lesser known Vectrex, scumm VM to even handhelds like Gameboy, Lynxx even the first Watch&Game handhelds but even Mame roms and Apple, PC and MSX homecomputer games. Yes people, it is one hell of an image!

My main goal is to build a bartop Arcade machine with Mame games using the image of Andrรฉs Jimenez as the base system. The project combines not only Raspberry Pi stuff, but some small woodworking and maybe even some light soldering. All and all a fun little project.

On my blog I will report back to you what my progress is with as much detail I can give you. This is part 1.

Getting extra inspiration
I usually start with watching Youtube video’s on the subject but in this case Pinterest is also a great place to look for idea’s and helpful tips. I started a mood-board on my Pinterest page to bundle all those idea’s.

I ordered buttons and joysticks via Aliexpress to connect to my Pi. I found an old TFT screen especially for the Raspberry and harvested some speakers from an old broken TV.

On Pinterest I found the button layout for the bartop. Sure, you can just drill some holes and insert the buttons, but putting the buttons in the right distance from each other is not only more ergonomic, it is also more beautifullerderder.

The templates I found were all images and printing them would not give the correct measurements. Therefore I made a .pdf file from the template I am going to use so that you can download it and just print it to get the correct size immediately. Your welcome. You can download it from my Github page here.

So for now I have printed the template, downloaded the image, installed it on a Pi and connected all the hardware (excluding the speakers for now) in order to test and making sure all is working properly. And enjoying some Donkey Kong in the process.

The coming days I will look for video’s on building the bartop, shopping for some materials to build it and further editing the image for use in the bartop Arcade.

 

 

 

Categories
How to Raspberry Pi

Setting the time on your PI

Because Time is money I will keep this short and sweet.

From the command prompt (or a terminal window) give the following two commands

sudo apt-get install ntpdate

sudo ntpdate -u 0.nl.pool.ntp.org

Reboot your Pi and that is it.

sudo reboot now

Categories
Domotica How to Raspberry Pi

Monitoring your power consumption

Here in the Netherlands most houses are equiped with a so called ‘Smart-meter’. This device makes it possible to register the in- and outtake of the power used. While this is mostly confinient for the powercompanies for sending you the powerbill, it can also be read with the right equipment and monitor your energy consumption for yourself.

I myself do this with a ‘Smart-meter cable’ that connects to my Raspberry Pi running Domoticz.

All you need is a ‘Smart-meter’ cable and a Pi running the latest version of Raspbianย and install Domoticz. Any Pi will do for this particular use, but if you want Domoticz to do more than just registering your Power consumption a Pi 3B is adviced. The footprint of Domoticz isn’t that big, so a 8 GB SD card should be enough (I used a 16 GB card).

You can follow my guides to install Raspbian if this is your first time.

From the command prompt (or from a terminal) you give the following commands.

sudo curl -L install.domoticz.com | bash

After the installation is finished be sure to reboot your pi.

sudo reboot now

Now your Domoticz server is running on your network you can connect to it by using a webbrowser to the ip address of your Pi. If you do not know the IP address use the following command to get it.

ip addr

Your <IP address> should look something like 192.168.2.123 in my case for instance it’s 192.168.2.23

In a webbrowser type the follwing and be sure to replace my IP address with your address.

http://192.168.2.23:8080

Your browser will show the Domoticz admin page where you can add all sorts of domotica devices like Nest, Netatmo, Hue, etc. But also your smart-meter cable.

To do this go to the top right menu item named Setup and choose Hardware

Than add a new device called P1 smart meter USB and configure like it is shown in the image below.

Now go back to the Setup menu and select the Devices option.

Now look for the green dot with the white arrow in it an click on it. A pop-up will appear where you can give the device a name. Leave it default or type something you would like to name the device in Domoticz and click Add (the example is when I was adding my Rain meter from Netatmo, just so you know).

When you have added the device, Domoticz will start registering the power intake and report it back to you in various graphs. Starting with the 24 Hour graph a Weekly graph, Monthly and even a Year view. So this time next Year all graphs will be filled ๐Ÿ˜‰

If you are using solar panels in combination with a smart meter Domoticz will also show how much energy you have produced in regards to your power consumption.

As a nerd these figures and graphs are not only usefull, but fun to watch if you ask me.

 

Categories
Domotica How to Raspberry Pi

Domotica Hub: Domoticz

As a domotica enthousiast a domotica hub is a must. This is due to all the ‘standards’ that are used that do not communicatie with each other. There is Zigbee, Z-Wave, Bluetooth, WiFi, etc, etc. A pain in the butt if you ask me. Guess that’s just the way these things work (or don’t work actually).

But here come the domotica-hubs and all the various protocols just suddenly talk with each other. Because the domotica-hub is the universal translator so to speak (pun intended).

There are a few hubs you can choose from and some good ones are even free. Just install them on a computer and plug them into your home network. One of the first hubs I tried is Domoticz. Simply running on a Raspberry Pi. Totally free, super easy to install.

Just get a freshly installed Raspberry with a fully updated Raspbian connected to your home network and the Internet and run the following command.

sudo curl -L install.domoticz.com | bash

Now you have your own domotica hub.

Just start a webbrowser and connect to the Domoticz installation using the IP address of your Pi. My Pi for example uses 192.168.2.23

http://192.168.2.23:8080

And voila! All that is left to do is configure your various devices and you are done. Okay, there are better solutions that are also running on a Raspberry Pi, but as I said this was my first experiment regarding the domotica hub software extravaganza.

Adding devices is done by these three steps.

First go to the Setup menu (upper right of the screen) and choose Hardware

The first drop down menu you see is called Type. Here you must choose the device your want to add. For example Netatmo.

Click Add and go back to the Setup menu. Now choose Devices.

If the device you’ve added under Hardware has more than one function or several attached other devices they will probably all show up here. In my case I use multiple Netatmo devices such as indoor temp, outdoor temp, rain, wind, and so on. They all show up in the Devices menu.

By clicking on the green dot with the white arrow of each device I can actually add them to my Domoticz server. After which I can use them from the various other menu options (Temperature, Weather, etc.).

Just go through all of the other menu options to see if a device is added. Once you have found one you can click on the little star icon in the bottom left corner of each device to make them a favourite and they will be added to your Dashboard.

Do this for all your other domotica devices if you wish. Add your Hue lights, Logitech Harmony remote, Nest thermostats, what ever is presented in the Type dropdown menu.

This is just the basic setup. If you look in the Setup menu you will find more advanced options to automate and even script all of the devices triggers and values into a complete automation Walhalla. But that is for another post…

 

 

featured image source: techpulse.be

Categories
How to Raspberry Pi

Basic installation steps (part 2)

You probably just finished my tutorial on configuring your Pi with raspi-config and are have rebooted your Pi. If not, check that post in order to enable all the features you need to update and upgrade your Pi.

After that you can follow these final steps to make sure you are running the latest versions of the installed software and dependencies.

from the command prompt (and if you booted into the graphical user interface (GIU) start a terminal window) type the following command en press enter.

sudo apt-get update -y && sudo apt-get upgrade -y

This will update all the latest software locations and also install the newest versions of the already installed software (dependencies).

When the installation is done (this can take a while) make sure to reboot your Pi before moving on to the next step.

sudo reboot now

The next step is optional and is only needed if your Pi isn’t brand new to start with. It updates the Pi’s firmware (the software on the Pi itself, not on the SD card).

sudo rpi-update

When this is finished be sure to reboot again, so that the new firmware is active and your Pi feels brand new. Enjoy!