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On Wed, 7 Nov 2012, Brown Richard wrote:
Hi GuysReading the last few emails reminds me why I enjoyed this list. A random selection of topics and one or two that I understand!!!So I'm back. I bought a Raspberry PI and saw that Paul Sutton is offering PI training. At the same time I thought I ought to catch up with all on the list once again. So here I am back again. I am looking to use the PI as a media centre and to power webcams and upload the pictures. I mention the laptop because I would like to install Linux on it but I actually cannot remember the name of the laptop and it isn't that close.
Well - if Paul isn't offering training, then I am ;-)
So, let's deal with the PI. Firstly will the PI mount the webcams as is or will I need to add packages. What webcams would you suggest please?
The Linux distro that most peopel are running right now is Raspbian - this is Debian Testing (aka Wheezy) specifically compiled to match the Pi's FPU. The Pi architecture doesn't fall neatly into Debians ARM releases, so if you do with standard Debian, it's software floating-point.
On the webcam front - You can connect a webcam up, but the issues you'll face will be to do with coding/transcoding the video stream from the camera into something usable. Unless you can use the GPU, then it'll be done in software on the ARM. That's the slow 700MHz ARM (or 1.1GHz overclocked if you're lucky)
Then there's the issue of getting the data somewhere else - lets stream it over the Ethernet - Ah. Slight issue there - maybe - the Pi only have one USB interface and the Ethernet is a peripheral on that USB... USB is half duplex. So reading from a camera and writing over Ethernet may be challenging. Same for writing to a local USB stick...
Sending it to the screen - sure - maybe... Make sure it's a codec the GPU understands..
Now there are some new commercial codecs avalable for purchase to allow you to use the GPU to do some encoding as well as decoding, but it's not an area I'm very familiar with.
Back to your media center - There are other distros avalable and I have actually tried one - and amazingly it worked - I was able to play 45 minutes of video & sound at 720p (that's the best I have). The one I tried was Raspbmc. http://www.raspbmc.com/ it takes a while to install - you download the installer, then it downloads the rest. I found it a bit "clunky" but there you go.
Other than that it's a cheap little Linux box! Does most Linuxy things relatively well - it is a little slow at times, but what do you expect for 30 quid?
There's some intersting stuff on my projects website - but it's mostly about hardware interfacing and stuff..
https://projects.drogon.net/ Cheers, Gordon -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq