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corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

I'm still waiting for mine to arrive, but I'm curious how hard it is to interface with the I2C bus. I found a bunch of low-cost 16 channel LED drivers that use I2C for control, and would love if they have basic "send 'blah' to 'address'" drivers so I could do all the work in userland without having to write any kernel-mode drivers.

The appeal of having my own personal (monochrome/low resolution) jumbotron is too much to pass up. :v:

corgski fucked around with this message at 16:10 on May 25, 2012

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corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

Cunning Plan posted:

Which led drivers are you looking at? I'm looking at some led projects, am on the lookout for some cheap drivers!

I settled on the NXP PCA9635. 16 independent 8-bit channels, with additional functions for easy 4-color mixing, plus an 8-bit master and strobe effects. Nice little chip for $2.50 each, although it's only available in a TSSOP surface mount variant which isn't the easiest thing to work with at home.

v True, but SMD soldering takes a bit of practice and a good pencil-tip soldering iron.

Here's a cheap 28-TSSOP to DIP board: http://store.nkcelectronics.com/tssop-to-dip-adapter-28pin-065mm-28065.html

corgski fucked around with this message at 03:14 on Jun 7, 2012

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

Your Merchandise Total $35.00
Your Freight Total $6.55
Your Tax Total $2.49
Your Order Total $44.04

It would be more expensive to have them reshipped from anywhere else than it would be to just buy them locally, it seems.

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

And mine arrived just now, only three months after I had ordered it!

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

doritos posted:

You're advocating a programming language nobody has ever heard of and has zero real world use. But I'm stretching for arguments?

Hell, I didn't even mention C specifically. Just that getting things to build on linux is a horrible nightmare from beyond unless you've already got a neckbeard.


"because it cost pennies" yes I covered that, pennies that have a better use.


So both debian outdated and debian unstable.


Personal grudge. Against an inanimate object. Because I point out the flaws. OK.


I googled that just now (because it's an also-ran) and it looks like kismet. This is just drawing flowcharts. Psudocode.

So basically you're advocating a learning experience that's equivalent to a copy of the free UDK installed on every computer at school, except it costs 20/student, and there's no "this is how videogames work" learning incentive. Yay?

The only valid flaw you've come up with is that the composite port probably wasn't worth the $0.35 it cost to put it on there.

Please enlighten me on the "up to date" release you seem to think is between Debian stable and testing.

So if you don't like scratch, you must not like LEGO Mindstorms, PureData, Max/MSP, BASIC, or any visual programming language that doesn't adhere to strict standards of being loving inaccesible for non-coders. Once again, nobody is using GCC. If you're using scratch, you're using its interpreter, and when you step up to python or ruby, you're using the interpreters again. No GCC. Period.

Actually, I'll just C&P this over to the Raspberry PI thread so they can have a go at you.

corgski fucked around with this message at 02:03 on Jul 26, 2012

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

"Testing" isn't unstable. Unstable is unstable.

Django sure isn't serious work, huh guys? Amirite? Ruby on Rails? Hobbyist level, at best.

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

doritos posted:

You can't retroactively drop things into the conversation and say I've made a statement about it when I haven't.

I'm sorry, I figured you read what you quoted where I said that they'd step up into python and ruby. That was in the original post pre-edit.

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

Django is a framework on top of python. Grats for not knowing your web technologies. :)

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

Tell me more about how having a background in a high-level language is irrelevant when working with a direct superset of said high-level language. :allears:

Also look at you thinking that schools have computers for every kid and the money for expensive IDE packages from their approved vendors.

corgski fucked around with this message at 02:14 on Jul 26, 2012

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

Okay, back to basics.

The RPI allows schools to get a computer for every kid that has an IDE pre-installed along with several high-level languages that are useful in the real world, and a couple that simply serve to teach programming concepts. The cost of getting a comparable package with a full Windows PC from an approved vendor (i.e. Microsoft) would be several orders of magnitude higher than the $35 they're asking for the Pi.

Why again do you think it's a bad platform and/or an overpowered audrino?

corgski fucked around with this message at 02:18 on Jul 26, 2012

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

Visual Studio is $400+. A PC is $600-ish. Schools don't just go and install random OSS packages without a support contract.

A Raspberry Pi is $35 and includes an IDE, hardware, and support. (Granted, it will probably cost the schools slightly more for their support contracts, but it will still come in far under the $1k+ a seat that a PC would.)

E:

quote:

2) it's only actually having success with people using it as an embedded board for gimmicky poo poo.

Because it's still in limited release and they haven't opened up sales to schools yet. :psyduck:

corgski fucked around with this message at 02:26 on Jul 26, 2012

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

MagneticWombats posted:

So my Raspberry Pi just arrived and I realized I don't know what to do with it. I'm mostly looking for something that would involve a bit of low level programming and I've sort of glommed onto the idea of making a simple OS for it.

Beyond that, I also thought I'd like to try to take advantage of the fact that the Raspberry Pi is so small AND has a GPU on board. I was thinking of taking advantage of it for things that require a lot of parallel computations and would benefit from the small form factor but what such a thing is is currently escaping me.

You can't do GPGPU stuff on the PI at all. It's a proprietary chip, and broadcom's binary blob doesn't expose any general processing functionality at all.

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

It's a little short on console tools that I'd think would be close to mandatory, (e.g. screen) but it's nothing a quick apt-get can't fix.

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

Make them pulse smoothly.:v: That'll get you writing a driver for whatever i2c-controlled PWM LED driver you use if nothing else. Set one up with a camera to monitor a coffeepot and alert you via SMS when the coffee drops below a certain level. Build a PI-powered digital picture frame.

corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

TVarmy posted:

I'm still not 100% clear on if i2c needs root.

As long as you add your user account to the i2c group, no, you don't need root.

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corgski
Feb 6, 2007

Silly goose, you're here forever.

Powdered Toast Man posted:

Mine is coming tomorrow, as well. My eventual goal is to use it as a media player...I'm guessing that's going to churn the processor pretty good, so am I likely to need any kind of cooling?

Nope. Not unless you're going for a massive overclock, and you don't need that for media playback.

If it makes you happy, you can glue a ram heatsink to it, but it wouldn't accomplish much.

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