The Raspberry Pi

[abarbarian]

https://hylobatidae.org/?action=articleinfo&id=52

 

 

Timezones. It's live radio, but all the timing is wrong. Namely, the written-in-stone Radio 4 schedule must not, under any circumstances, be allowed to become misaligned from the rising and the setting of the sun. How could anything (or anyone) remotely British even think of operating normally if the Friday evening comedy gets broadcast on Friday morning, or if the Book at Bedtime arrives early in the evening? Or heaven forbid, if Woman's Hour escapes from its usual 10am ghetto?

 

Cue the Radio-4-Matic.

 

 

http://www.everydaylinuxuser.com/2013/02/using-your-raspberry-pi-to-rip-music.html

 

 

In the 1980s a good number of teenagers and children obtained their music by playing the charts on Radio 1 through a portable stereo.

 

With a 90 minute TDK cassette at the ready we would sit and wait for each song to come on from 40 down to 1 and every time a song we liked came on we would hit the play and record button.

 

Great care was taken to make sure we hit pause before the DJ ruined it all by speaking over the top and a pen was at the ready to write down the artist and song on the tiny lines made available on the inlay card.

 

If you were lucky enough your stereo had a counter which would tell you where in the tape each song started and finished so that you could fast forward and rewind to the songs you liked the best.

 

If you are lucky enough to have a Raspberry PI then this guide will show you how to do the modern day version of recording off the radio. Now though you don't have to worry about the adverts because the software is clever enough to strip the adverts and the voice of the DJ.

 

 

Several things to do when you win the contest Pi.

[ross549]

I do not know the legality of downloading music this way and it is up to each individual to check that ripping music does not violate any copyright laws.

 

Good advice.

[Temmu]

i would think that ripping music from your cd falls under "backups"

no one only has a single copy of important data.

[ross549]

Ripping your own CD is a completely different matter than ripping an Internet radio stream.

 

Though I suppose ripping a stream is equivalent to recording a radio broadcast. The bitrate is lower, after all.

 

Adam

[ichase]

I plan on turning it into a simple ncurses-based chat box running debian or whatever with weechat.

 

Adam

Was boored so I decided to read through this thread.

@Adam,

You hit the nail on the head as to what I have used mine for. Also, with using gnu-screen hitting F-7 I have access to multiple screens. Running weechat-curses, MC on both my server and R-Pi, glances for both. Love it!!!!!

[abarbarian]

 

Create a VPN with the Raspberry Pi

 

The Raspberry Pi is cheap enough to leave on a network you’d like to connect to remotely, so let’s learn how to set it up to do just that…

 

http://www.linuxuser.co.uk/news/create-a-vpn-with-the-raspberry-pi

 

I am constantly amazed by the uses the Pi can be configured for.

[abarbarian]

 

NetBSD on RPi: Minimizing Disk Writes

 

I recently installed NetBSD on my RaspberryPi. Although not all the hardware is fully supported, enough is there to make it a usable system. It's nice to have my RPi provide the same system experience (configuration, organization, etc.) as other NetBSD machines I maintain. A big "Thank you!" to the developers that made this possible.

 

http://rich-tbp.blogspot.co.uk/2013/03/netbsd-on-rpi-minimizing-disk-writes.html

 

Neat article on speeding up a Pi and increasing the longevity of the sd card by limiting writes to the Pi.

I wondered if it would work with Raspbian etc ? The guide is for NetBSD which I know nothing about.

[sunrat]

Using noatime and mounting browser cache in tmpfs goes a long way to reducing writes. Most of the tweaks for SSDs will work, but not TRIM.

siduction wiki - Optimizing SSD-based System Performance (scroll half way down the page)

Arch wiki - Tips for Minimizing SSD Read/Writes

[Guest LilBambi]

Just was reading about using the Raspberry Pi for a DOS emulator and running Doom, Duke Nukem 3D, Jill of the Jungle, etc.

 

Sounds like fun!

[abarbarian]

I recon the Pi is the buy of the century Buck and Bang wise.

[abarbarian]

This is pretty neat

 

It got me wondering if there existed a laptop that was designed for hacking in direct sunlight... something that had a ridiculously long battery life and was still readable in high brightness situations. Instead I stumbled upon a more awesome solution: the kindleberry, a combination of the Raspberry Pi and the Amazon Kindle.

 

http://maxogden.com/kindleberry-wireless.html

 

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3621

 

Will that be coffee and pi to go sir,

[Guest LilBambi]

A hikin' we will go, a hikin' we will go... hi, ho, the derry o, a hikin' we will go.

 

Great stuff!

[abarbarian]

Looks like Pi's are popular in the states.

 

http://linuxgizmos.com/raspberry-pi-model-a-arrives/

 

 

The Raspberry Pi’s $25 “Model A” made a brief appearance this week on the website of Allied Electronics, its U.S. distributor. Compared to its $35 sibling, the lower end Linux-fired SBC (single board computer) sports half the RAM, one USB port instead of two, and lacks an Ethernet spigot.

 

It’s unclear when (or whether) additional low-end models will become available, based on a statement on Allied’s website, saying: “Due to limited supply of the Raspberry Pi Model A, we are not offering preorders or backorders on the product at this time. The Raspberry Pi Model A will only be available for purchase when we have inventory on hand to fill the order.”

Although Allied also shows the $35 Model B as being out of stock, the distributor is currently accepting preorders for that model, with the caveat that “delivery times will vary and may exceed 6 weeks.”

 

Must be the first time in a hundred years or so that we (UK) have something that you (USA) want and find difficulty getting your hands on

[Guest LilBambi]

I've got my Raspberry Pi here in the States.

[lewmur]

I've got my Raspberry Pi here in the States.

I ordered my first one on day one and waited four months for it. But I ordered a second one from Element 14 in South Carolina and got it in about a week. I'm pretty sure the ones shipped from there are made in the Sony plant in the U.K.

[abarbarian]

Yeah you folks have the " B " version. These were the " A " version which were making a first appearance in the USA> Seems like you americans just love Pi

[abarbarian]

http://www.linuxandl...-raspberry.html

 

Now you definitely need to get a Pi for a couple of these projects for the home.

 

 

2 - A bartending robot

 

Bartendro is a precision cocktail dispensing robot! It makes tasty drinks quickly and repeatably without the mess. The combination of BrewPi and Bartendro will create an everlasting party for everybody.

 

 

 

1 - Make beer

 

BrewPi, created by a German guy who loves drinking beer, is an open source fermentation controller that runs on an Arduino and a Raspberry Pi. The Arduino board gathers data from sensors, adjusts temperature controls on the refrigerator, and runs an OLED display. There’s also a web-based interface for viewing and controlling temperatures. This runs on a web server loaded onto the RaspberryPi, which also runs Python scripts for communicating with the Arduino.

 

 

 

3 - A beer keyboard</strong></span>

 

Seems Raspberry Pi goes so well with alcohol and parties, thats why the third project in this list relates to beer as well. This is a keyboard made of beer cans instead of keys. It is controlled by a Raspberry Pi connecting to large plasma TV.

 

Cheers folks

Edited April 7, 2013 by abarbarian

[burninbush]

I hope someone here can help me with my RaspberryPi problem ... i.e., configuring a usb wifi dongle.

 

This is an old part, has a ZD1211 chipset inside, known to work on win2k and some linux distros that I have tried it with a few years back. The Pi knows it's there, an #lsmod shows 5 -6 related items added when I plug it in.

 

BUT .. the only config util that I can see is wpa_supplicant, and it completely refuses to 1) admit the dongle exists, and 2) won't let me declare that my home wifi uses a WEP key. That last might be related to the first problem.

 

Any help? Basically I need to know how to get it to request an IP address. I have fooled with iwconfig wlan0 a bit, no success so far.

[ross549]

It could be the chip is drawing too much power from the power supply, and cannot operate properly. What kind of USB power supply are you using? TP1 and TP2 on the board need to be at 4.875VDC or higher (measured with a voltmeter) in order for everything to function properly, or you will have strange issues.

 

Adam

 

http://elinux.org/RPi_VerifiedPeripherals#USB_Wi-Fi_Adapters

[abarbarian]

http://www.slblabs.com/2012/09/27/rpi-wifi/

 

This section is dongle dependent. I had an old Digicom USBWAVE54 Dongle, which is based on a Zydas ZD1211 chipset, so here’s how I proceeded to install the correct drivers for my dongle:

 

 

Holger Leusch, Benjamin Reichel and Karina Hochstein have found themselves with a similar problem. Worse still, Holger travels to Cambodia a lot, and his German phone provider doesn’t even have a roaming agreement with any of the Cambodian telcos, so he’s not able to use his phone there at all. He found VoIP unusable in Cambodia, with patchy calls, lousy bandwidth, delays and dropouts. Like us, he needed to be in constant touch with his office.

Enter (you knew this was coming, didn’t you?) the Pi.

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/archives/3679

 

Neato

[Temmu]

posted tomorrow, 5:02am

 

that is cool that the pie overcomes backwater barriers like that!

[burninbush]

It could be the chip is drawing too much power from the power supply, and cannot operate properly. What kind of USB power supply are you using? TP1 and TP2 on the board need to be at 4.875VDC or higher (measured with a voltmeter) in order for everything to function properly, or you will have strange issues.

 

Adam

 

http://elinux.org/RP..._Wi-Fi_Adapters

 

 

Thanks for the reply and link. I have ordered a dongle that is known to work with the Pi.

 

I found the problem [?] in dmesg; unable to load the firmware that mine requires. Updated everything related to wifi and the zydas 1211, without success.

 

I have two of these old zydas 1211 dongles; today I verified that they work perfectly on Porteus2 and mint14, so rather than struggle further with the Pi I'm buying a new adapter [off the list] that is said to work straight out of the blister pack.

 

My power supply is a wall wart type that I found in my bag of hardware leftovers -- 5v regulated at 1.2amps. So far it has not blinked, actually measures 5.1volts. While I'm waiting for the dongle I'll try to decide on some sort of box to put it into.

[abarbarian]

Burninbush was my info of no use ? It shows how to use a Zydas ZD1211 chipset powered dongle with the Pi.

[burninbush]

Burninbush was my info of no use ? It shows how to use a Zydas ZD1211 chipset powered dongle with the Pi.

 

 

Hi, and thank you again for the link which was definitely useful. I used apt-get update, and then got the latest firmware for the zd1211, but it still refused to load onto my dongles, failed at the first dmesg step repeatedly. It clearly worked on his dongle, but won't on mine. But I did learn what files and commands to use. I anticipate that the one I ordered will come up automatically.

[burninbush]

Well, the tiny usb dongle arrived today, and it [with some work] solved the problem. What the company shipped is not the Airlink part they advertised, rather it's unmarked as to brand. Inside it has a Ralink rt2800 chipset. After some net searching I found a post from someone who had gotten a rt2800 dongle to work on his Pi after editing a /etc/networks file to add his WEP setup; I did the same here and on reboot it went to the router for an IP address, working. The Pi already had current firmware for this dongle [as it also had for the zydas dongle]. Wpa_supplicant on the Pi also refuses to admit that the new dongle is present -- not sure what's going on with that app.

 

After getting it to work I had to go back and retry the zydas dongle, but it still doesn't work. Too old, maybe, for the current firmware?

 

Good news: the new dongle is approximately 2x as fast as the zydas when I run it on one of my 3ghz AMD desktops; speedtest.net has it downloading at a sizzling 20megabits /second -- while the wired link on the same box tops out at 27 megabits/second -- I call that a good dongle. Not sure yet how it'll work over a distance -- hard to see how they could put much of an antenna in that tiny package.

[abarbarian]

WEP ??? Thats not very secure.

Have you joined the Rasp forums and asked for help over there ??

 

http://www.raspberrypi.org/phpBB3/posting.php?mode=reply&f=30&t=9875

 

[lewmur]

WEP ??? Thats not very secure.

 

If that's all the router he's trying to connect to handles, then that's what he has to use. But, personally, I think the WEP vs WPA security is irrelevant. Anyone capable of breaking WEP is also capable of breaking WPA. Just takes a little longer. If you are really concerned about security on a WLAN, then the type of encryption you use should be way down on the list of things you need to worry about.

 

Sure, if you have WPA, then use it. But I wouldn't rush out and spend money on a new router and dongle just to get WPA for a home network.

Edited April 18, 2013 by lewmur

[Guest LilBambi]

WPA2 PSK AES is still safer than WEP by a long shot. Particularly in a city or large town environment. Maybe if you live in the boonies, it's not as necessary because there are not has many trying to hit the router, but even there I always recommend WPA2 AES.

 

But go as high as one can based on the lowest common denominator in computer hardware. Get the hardware up as high as it can go. Then consider replacing older hardware if possible. If not do the best you can.

 

How To Crack WPA / WPA2 - SmallNetBuilder

 

WPA hashes the key using the wireless access point's SSID as a salt. The benefits of this are two-fold.

 

First, this prevents the statistical key grabbing techniques that broke WEP by transmitting the key as a hash (cyphertext). It also makes hash precomputation via a technique similar to Rainbow Tables more difficult because the SSID is used as a salt for the hash. WPA-PSK even imposes a eight character minimum on PSK passphrases, making bruteforce attacks less feasible.

 

Doesn't mean it can't happen. It has happened at least partially if the hacker/cracker has enough time. In a brute force attack on 256 AES...

 

Theoretical limits

 

The resources required for a brute-force attack grow exponentially with increasing key size, not linearly. Although US export regulations historically restricted key lengths to 56-bit symmetric keys (e.g. Data Encryption Standard), these restrictions are no longer in place, so modern symmetric algorithms typically use computationally stronger 128- to 256-bit keys.

 

There is a physical argument that a 128-bit symmetric key is computationally secure against brute-force attack. The so-calledLandauer limit implied by the laws of physics sets a lower limit on the energy required to perform a computation of kT · ln 2 per bit erased in a computation, where T is the temperature of the computing device in kelvins, k is the Boltzmann constant, and the natural logarithm of 2 is about 0.693. No irreversible computing device can use less energy than this, even in principle.[2] Thus, in order to simply flip through the possible values for a 128-bit symmetric key (ignoring doing the actual computing to check it) would theoretically require 2128 − 1 bit flips on a conventional processor. If it is assumed that the calculation occurs near room temperature (~300 K) the Von Neumann-Landauer Limit can be applied to estimate the energy required as ~1018 joules, which is equivalent to consuming 30 gigawatts of power for one year. This is equal to 30×109 W×365×24×3600 s = 9.46×1017 J or 262.7 TWh (more than 1/100th of the world energy production).[citation needed] The full actual computation—checking each key to see if you have found a solution—would consume many times this amount.

 

However, this argument assumes that the register values are changed using conventional set and clear operations which inevitably generate entropy. It has been shown that computational hardware can be designed not to encounter this theoretical obstruction (seereversible computing), though no such computers are known to have been constructed.[citation needed]

 

As commercial available successors of governmental ASICs Solution also known ascustom hardware attack, today two emerging technologies have proven their capability in the brute-force attack of certain ciphers. One is modern graphics processing unit (GPU) technology,[3][page needed] the other is the field-programmable gate array (FPGA) technology. GPUs benefit from their wide availability and price-performance benefit, FPGAs from their energy efficiency per cryptographic operation. Both technologies try to transport the benefits of parallel processing to brute-force attacks. In case of GPUs some hundreds, in the case of FPGA some thousand processing units making them much better suited to cracking passwords than conventional processors. Various publications in the fields of cryptographic analysis have proved the energy efficiency of today’s FPGA technology, for example, the COPACOBANA FPGA Cluster computer consumes the same energy as a single PC (600 W), but performs like 2,500 PCs for certain algorithms. A number of firms provide hardware-based FPGA cryptographic analysis solutions from a single FPGA PCI Express card up to dedicated FPGA computers.[citation needed] WPA and WPA2 encryption have successfully been brute-force attacked by reducing the workload by a factor of 50 in comparison to conventional CPUs[4][5] and some hundred in case of FPGAs.

 

AES permits the use of 256-bit keys. Breaking a symmetric 256-bit key by brute force requires 2128 times more computational power than a 128-bit key. A device that could check a billion billion (1018) AES keys per second (if such a device could ever be made - as of 2012, supercomputers have computing capacities of 20 Peta-FLOPS, see Titan. So 50 supercomputers would be required to process (1018) operations per second) would in theory require about 3×1051 years to exhaust the 256-bit key space.

 

An underlying assumption of a brute-force attack is that the complete keyspace was used to generate keys, something that relies on an effective random number generator, and that there are no defects in the algorithm or its implementation. For example, a number of systems that were originally thought to be impossible to crack by brute force have nevertheless been cracked because the key space to search through was found to be much smaller than originally thought, because of a lack of entropy in their pseudorandom number generators. These include Netscape's implementation of SSL (famously cracked by Ian Goldberg and David Wagner in 1995[6]) and a Debian/Ubuntu edition of OpenSSL discovered in 2008 to be flawed.[7] A similar lack of implemented entropy lead to the breaking of Enigma's code.[8][9]

Edited April 19, 2013 by LilBambi

[ross549]

Not to mention that WPA is very different than WPA 2.

 

Adam

[therock247uk]

/me hates wifi hackers!!