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abarbarian

The new Pi works fine and so does the wi-fi dongle. Can not say about the Pi camera as I can not get it set up.

 

I have used the firmware update hack, just last week as it happens. I had to do that to get the wi-fi working as well as update and upgrade for the os.

 

Today update and upgrade run but call errors on some web addys then tell me the system is up to date apart from three programs. The firmware upgrade hack complains it can not find a webb addy and refuses to run.

 

Spent hours doing initial reading to make sure things ran smoothly. Read loads of post about how goody the camera was and loads of I'll show you my vids I made.

Checked re checked everything I did and the only conclusion I can come up with is there is something wrong with the servers I am trying to access. Maybe they are down for maintenance or something.

Anyway I'm hacked of. The bunch of lilies I bought at the bud stage are now almost fully open. Great. No blooming timelapse video of them.

:'(

Edited by abarbarian
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abarbarian

Still the same old rubbish.

 

Tried "update" "upgrade" "rpi-update" and then,

 

sudo raspi.config

 

I get (not typing everything)

 

 

Could not resolve "mirrordirector,raspbian.org"

Could not resolve "archive.raspberrypi.org"

Failed to fetch ---etc etc etc

Some index files failed to download.

raspi.config is already the newest available

 

"raspi.config is already the newest available" which is a load of cobblers as mine does not have an option to activate the camera.

 

My version of Raspbian should upgrade. I did a firmware and system upgrade last week to get the wi-fi working.So I have no idea what is wrong.Am now super hacked off.

 

:breakfast:

Edited by abarbarian
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abarbarian

Full size

 

bxhS79Pl.jpg

 

There you are pictures as promised. Taken with my Cannon not the Pi.So I told a porky about all the flowers being opened and the planned shots ruined. Call it poetic licence. The kitchen smells divine and will only get better as more buds open. Life eh. :breakfast:

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abarbarian

Pi camera Day Three

 

Still the same old same old.

 

Came across this chap who had a similar problem over at the pi forums. Seems he solved his problem by using a different card. What madness is that !!! You have a sd card that works fine with Raspbian but does not work with Raspbian and the camera.Freaking madness, especially as there is no official announcement about what I would consider to be a rather important bit of information.Nice introduction for the kids to the world of linux.

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/viewtopic.php?f=43&t=44204

 

Greetings! Model B user, downloaded the latest version of the OS this morning, went through the instructions, did the following :

 

sudo apt-get update

 

sudo apt-get upgrade

 

rebooted

 

Expanded FS

 

rebooted

 

Doesn't show the camera as an option in the configuration when it reboots. I've formatted the SD card 3 times now and started from scratch, and I can't get it to show the camera as an option. It's plugged in the right direction, it's all been handled very carefully. I did get some errors on an update, telling me that it failed to contact InRelease on a number of things.

 

B)

 

Can you tell that I am even more hacked of than yesterday. :breakfast:

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abarbarian

This is really neat!

 

Voice Command v2.0 for the Raspberry Pi

 

Velly interestin.

 

Meanwhile back to the marathon,

 

Pi camera Day Four

 

It was only on my third try at dd'ing between cards that I realised that one card was 4 GB and one 8 GB. So no wonder they did not work. I was trying to do a backup of the present setup in case things went crazy.

So I downloaded the latest Raspbian, only to subsequently find it was the same as the copy I already had stored. Guess I should open me eyes or read the fine print more often.

I tried to dd the .img to the 4 GB card. No joy. Ah ha I remembered that after having an image on a card I had to wipe the card and make anew partition before dd'ing an .img. Don't know why but that wa show it worked for me.

I'll use gparted whilst in Arch, quick and easy. Well for some reason gparted starts, gives a gui and looks like it is searching for partitions but that is all it does, I left it to run for ten minutes or so but it never seems to find any partitions. Tried three times and gave up.

I'll try parted then from the cli and hope I do not bomb out. After studying parted -help I wrote the commands and, and, "parted will not allow partitions outside the disk" What !!! tried again and gave up as I did not want to bork me Arch.

Used Parted Magic to wipe and create partition on 4 GB.

Am now dd'ing .img, Will have to wait over half an hour to see if it works.

As xterm does not show any output as to progress this could be a guess and see affair. However I remembered that you could use "dcfldd" as given here at the official Pi site,

 

http://elinux.org/RP...g_on_a_Pi.21.29

 

and here

 

http://www.linuxques...se-mode-313420/

 

Well whoopee for them as it does not work on my Arch 64.

 

[10:23][root@longship bloodaxe]# dcfldd bs=1024 of=/home/bloodaxe/Documents/Linuxstuff/raspbian/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img if=/dev/sdc
bash: dcfldd: command not found
[10:31][root@longship bloodaxe]# dd bs=1024 of=/home/bloodaxe/Documents/Linuxstuff/raspbian/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img if=/dev/sdc

 

If you are wondering why it took me 8 mins to wwrite the new command, well that is how long it took me to double check at two sources, that I had input correctly. Thats 8 more minutes I have wasted on this nightmare.

 

Luckily for me the £1 usb reader I bought has a flashing light on it so at least I can see that something is happening. Mind you I did spend ten minutes or so trying to get the card reader on me monitor to work before I realised that I should have remembered that it only read sd cards not sdhc cards.

 

SO will it won't it work ? Time will tell. :breakfast:

Edited by abarbarian
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abarbarian

Looks like

 

dd bs=1024 of=/home/bloodaxe/Documents/Linuxstuff/raspbian/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img if=/dev/sdc

 

does not work.

 

Hmmm maybe if I did

 

dd bs=1024 if=/home/bloodaxe/Documents/Linuxstuff/raspbian/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdc

 

which may give a pointer as to why dcfldd did not work for me.

 

So yet another attempt at dd'ing.

 

I do wish I had not lost the man pages for the brain when I was a child. :bangin:

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Looks like

 

dd bs=1024 of=/home/bloodaxe/Documents/Linuxstuff/raspbian/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img if=/dev/sdc

 

does not work.

 

Hmmm maybe if I did

 

dd bs=1024 if=/home/bloodaxe/Documents/Linuxstuff/raspbian/2013-02-09-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdc

 

which may give a pointer as to why dcfldd did not work for me.

 

So yet another attempt at dd'ing.

 

I do wish I had not lost the man pages for the brain when I was a child. :bangin:

The second dd command you listed should be the correct one. "if" being the file you downloaded and "of" the SD card. Three suggestions. First, use gparted to make sure sdc is the SD card, two use "sudo" to run the dd command and three, omit the bs=1024 from your command.

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abarbarian

The second dd command you listed should be the correct one. "if" being the file you downloaded and "of" the SD card. Three suggestions. First, use gparted to make sure sdc is the SD card, two use "sudo" to run the dd command and three, omit the bs=1024 from your command.

 

Ta fer your hints.

 

Spacefm helps me with getting the right "/dev/sd?"

 

Why omit " bs=1024 " ? Almost all the guides say to use it apart from a few that mention using " bs=4M". I know think bs = is something to do with file transfer size but it is all a bit too geeky for me this week.

 

We don't need no steenkin sudo here in Arch land we is real men an don't need no steenkin forin sudo. (bends over and does a moonie) :harhar:

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abarbarian

As an aside a day ago,

 

 

So to relive me frustration I sent this e-mail to RS who had sent me a Pi with a "Made in China" sticker on it. I really do despair of this modern way of doing stuff.

 

 

Hi I placed an order for a Pi and a camera unit invoice no. 1010272329 and they duly arrived. I was pretty disgusted to find that the Pi had a "made in china" sticker on it. I thought that with Pi's being made in Wales by Sony since last September I would get a made in England Pi.

Can you assure me that the Pi you sent me is the latest model and not some old stock.

To me it seems like madness that Pi's are made in my country yet I am being sent one that is made halfway across the world.

Thanks, E

 

Their reply which came lickety split

 

 

 

Thank you for your enquiry.

 

We are currently responding to all enquiries within three working days, and will be back to you as soon as possible

 

 

Thank you for your email.

 

 

RS Raspberry Pi team.

 

I wonder if the reply has to be sent via China rolleyes.gif

 

RS sent me a human reply this morning,

 

 

 

Good Morning E,

 

I apologise for the delay in responding to your enquiry.

 

Our model A boards are currently made in the UK but the B board is currently being made in china, I can assure you that the board you received is the latest model and not old stock.

 

I apologise for any inconvenience that this may have caused.

 

 

Kind Regards,

Raspberry Pi

 

so I wrote back,

 

 

 

Hi Thanks for the reply. No inconvenience caused just puzzlement. Thanks E.

 

 

Don't you just love progress. laughing.gif

Edited by abarbarian
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Ta fer your hints.

 

Spacefm helps me with getting the right "/dev/sd?"

 

Why omit " bs=1024 " ? Almost all the guides say to use it apart from a few that mention using " bs=4M". I know think bs = is something to do with file transfer size but it is all a bit too geeky for me this week.

 

We don't need no steenkin sudo here in Arch land we is real men an don't need no steenkin forin sudo. (bends over and does a moonie) :harhar:

The bs= is used to specify the block size but it isn't really needed and can cause problems with some devices. You "real men" might not need sudo but you do need root priviliges for the dd command. If you do want to use a partition manager to verify which drive is which, you can just use

 

#fdisk -l

 

But specifying the wrong /dev/sd* or the wrong file location for the image or not having root privliges are about the only things that can cause the dd command to fail. That or having a corrupted image file.

Edited by lewmur
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abarbarian

Thanks for the tips lewmur. As they say though there is many a slip twix cup and lip.

 

Just for now here is my first ever Pi camera picture.

 

Full size

 

T9BCCsml.jpg

 

Not a very exciting subject but the best I could do with the short cables. Picture taken with natural light, not a great deal of it, and hand held. The result is not too bad at all considering the lighting conditions and the possibility of camera shake.

I'll post later about all the trials and tribulations.

:breakfast:

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abarbarian

Looking ahead. I was thinking of using the camera as a car cam and also powering the Pi by either a car battery or a rechargable battery pack from a power tool.

 

Power conversion via something like these,

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/5V-60V-1-25V-26V-LM2576HV-Converter-Module/dp/B00BX7ZJ64/ref=pd_sim_sbs_ce_6

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Adjustable-Converter-Step-up-Circuit-BuyinCoins/dp/B0092KS1MI/ref=pd_sim_sbs_ce_1

 

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Converter-Module-convert-adapter-DCCON-5U-0/dp/B00BMIY2GC/ref=pd_sim_sbs_ce_2

 

:breakfast:

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abarbarian

So I finally have a working Pi camera. I am sure going to have some gentle fun with this over the summer.

 

Along with the list of mistakes I mentioned earlier I also,

Formatted the card to FAT32

Formatted the card to ext2 once

The psu (only 6 months old) powering the Pi died -- I have it in the same power block as the usb hub and only noticed when I tried to use the old Pi - I swapped cables as it was easy - this may or may not have caused some problems.

BT it seems were messing around with either the cables or exchange for two days - this led to intermittent/very slow/dead internet for varying lengths of time - it took 6 hours to do a update on the pi at rates of 469 b/s to 5 Pb/s and for the last ten minutes a massive 10 Kb/s.

Mouse froze on reboot - this led to three reboots before I twigged the usb plug had moved just a teensiest fraction in its socket.

 

An I still can not place an image on a sd card. I'll have to try again tomorrow.

 

Operator error may have been caused by stress as I had to see the specialist about me dodgy knee on Monday. Luckily he told me it had not miraculously healed and that it was proper done for and that I was still too young for a replacement. Phew that was a relief. Bad news would have been it has got worse and we are operating. So the jolly nice man is going to do the huge needle with cortisone in the knee joint. Which should give me four or five month, knee what knee summer.

 

:breakfast:

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abarbarian

http://www.linux-magazine.com/Online/Blogs/Productivity-Sauce/Build-a-Portable-Android-based-Raspberry-Pi-Station

 

The Android device in this setup acts both as a wireless hotspot and a display for Raspberry Pi. The latter is configured to automatically connect to the Wi-Fi network created by the Android device.

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4062

 

Back in the 21st century, Derek Knaggs has made the thing of my dreams: a low cost, low maintenance, general purpose car computer. There are other Pi-based car computers about but we especially liked this one because it’s simple, cheap and it looks like a factory fit. Very smart.

 

Thought these might be of interest to folks.

 

Now if only I had a posh car and a modern smart phone I'd have a go at the above. :whistling:

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abarbarian

NOOBS

 

Yeah I know you do not like noobs or newbies here, the terms that is, but,

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/4100

 

 

If you’re a beginner with a Raspberry Pi, things just got a whole lot easier.

We started this project with the premise that throwing people in at the deep end and making them jump hurdles, to mix my sporting metaphors, is a good way to get them to learn stuff. It is: but it can also put some people off, sometimes terminally. And we don’t want people to put their Raspberry Pi down in horror after five minutes. So with this in mind, we’d like to introduce you to NOOBS.

 

As I am a nummpty at times I thought I better try it out. Downloading now. o:)

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