Phil’s Adventures with his Raspberry Pi: Part Three

Following part one of my story - http://it-is-phil-time.blogspot.com/2012/06/phils-adventures-with-his-raspberry-pi.html - and part two - http://it-is-phil-time.blogspot.com/2012/06/phils-adventures-with-his-raspberry-pi_04.html - it’s time to pick up the story.

Having failed to successfully connect my Raspberry Pi up to a standard VGA monitor, which is very disappointing, and then having purchased an adaptor that failed to work (thankfully Amazon have refunded me) I have dived into the deep end and purchased a cheap – but still £120 – monitor that accepts a HDMI input and – voila – I now have a monitor that accepts the signal of the Raspberry Pi and works in my parent’s music room. Problem overcome even at a financial cost of four times what I paid for the computer.

To bring everyone up to speed my plan is to replace my parent’s aging PC in the music room with this to play out music quickly and easily. Sadly at the moment it’s turning out to be neither. I am still waiting for the Pi case I ordered a few weeks ago which is now in the processing stage so hopefully should be here soon but I have come across an even bigger problem: I can’t get any sound of it.

I’ve tried playing both MP3s and WAVs through its inbuilt LX Music player, both from files on an external hard drive, USB stick and the SD card itself but all to no avail. I’m not getting any sound out of the HDMI – though I don’t think the monitor has speakers so that’s not surprising – but neither am I getting it out of the 3.5mm jack port into my stereo.

Now it’s a cheap computer and I’m no expert in this side of computing but it’s frustrating me that six weeks on its been nothing but a struggle to get images and sound out of the device, which is surely the very basics you’d expect from a computer. I fear that it’s just too problematic compared to the BBC Micro and Acorn computers I used as a youngster and I question whether it’s really the platform to be a good starting point for young people hoping to get into the world of computer programming. Or maybe I’m missing the point and all these struggles are actually a realistic recreation of the world of software development?

If anyone can point me in the right direction of where I’m going wrong regarding the lack of sound output I’d be very grateful. In the meantime I shall soldier on with trying to get it to work in a project that has turned from potential to frustrating disappointment...

Help please!

Phil’s Adventures with his Raspberry Pi: Part Two

So, the story so far from part one is that I’ve got the actual Pi itself, the power cable, sound cable and, hopefully, a working HDMI > VGA cable but the only thing missing from starting the Pi up was an SD card.

So, one trip to Argos and purchase of a SanDick SDHC Class 4 8 Gb card later (£14.99) I now have everything I need – I hope – to get it working.

Firstly I need to install the boot information to the SD card. Heading over to http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads. For my Windows PC I firstly needed to download and install http://www.softpedia.com/get/CD-DVD-Tools/Data-CD-DVD-Burning/Win32-Disk-Imager.shtml (avoiding the misleading RAR extraction tool advert at the top).

As I am a beginner to this I went for the Debian “squeeze” download available on the Raspberry Pi website and installed using the second edition of the useful MagPi magazine as help.

Opening the Win 32 Disk Imager I located the image file and selected the device to right to (in my case ‘D’) then pressed ‘write’. Make sure you don’t make the mistake I did and have the SD card open in Windows Explorer at the same time as you’ll get an error.

With the software installed it was time to get it to work!

Now the first stumbling block was, as feared, the HDMI > VGA connector was a dud and didn’t work. So, with a bit of a change of plan, connected it to the flat screen TV using HDMI and this worked fine, booting up and allowing me to log-in using the log-in details provided on the website and then entering ‘startx’ into the command prompt to open up the GUI. And there was the Raspberry Pi in all its glory.

Now to test the other elements.

The next stumbling block was the keyboard and mouse. The ones downstairs are PS/2 connections so I had to use the USB ones from another PC so two converters need to be purchased to connect them to the USB hub we already had (though for cost I’m just going to buy a cheap USB keyboard and mouse), plus a USB A > USB B cable as I had to cannibalise another one. Problem solved for that.

I tried putting in the Western Digital hard drive I had into the Raspberry Pi and after a few error messages and a ten minute wait it finally mounted successfully and I could access the drive. My memory stick, thankfully, loaded quickly.

I am pleased to see that the Linux software is very like Windows and intuitive to use and even comes with its own music player, which is good, though for some reason I cannot get any sound out of it even though the website confirms that sound through HDMI works (and removing the HDMI gave the familiar noise of sound being pulled out) but none of the music would play even when I plugged in the headphone out > phono cables so this is the second problem I need to solve.

So some progress and though not as smooth an installation as I would hope there has been progress.

Problems to solve:
Connecting up the Raspberry Pi to my ordinary VGA monitor
Working out how to get sound of it
Waiting for the keyboard, mouse and USB cable to turn up
What to do with my spare SD card

Stay tuned as I try and solve these problems!

Total cost spent so far:
Raspberry Pi £29.46
Power Cable £03.94
3.5 Jack > dual phone £00.75
VGA Converter (Dud) £06.07
USB Keyboard £06.07
USB Mouse £04.24
USB A > B £00.81
TOTAL £51.34

Phil’s Adventures with his Raspberry Pi: Part One

Many months ago I pre-ordered my Raspberry Pi – a small, one-PCB computer capable of doing some amazing things for a very low price tag. And then, after many e-mails regarding many delays including unexpected demand and the need to slap a CE label on it to make sure it was safe, my Pi turned up in a rather unassuming white box.

The purpose of these articles will be chart my progress of working with the Raspberry Pi, in an attempt to replace a hulking old computer connected to my parent’s hi-fi that, though fit for playing music, takes ages to load up, with a smaller, more stream-lined version using the Pi as the basis.

Along the way I’ll be talking about problems, solutions and compromises. Having never built a PC or worked with Linux I expect it to be a challenge so we’ll see how it goes!

Now the first challenge would be to buy the cables and kit necessary to get it working. Out of the box you literally just get the circuit board and nothing else to get it to work so, when it arrived a week ago I began ordering everything I needed.

Firstly, power. As I’d recently purchased a new mobile phone in the shape of a HTC One S I tried its power cable and found it fitted so ordered a new one from Amazon in the shape of “Micro USB Mains Charger For HTC ONE X, HTC ONE S, HTC ONE V, HTC Sensation XL” costing me £3.94. Plugging this in found the red light symbolising power came on onboard the circuit board so a success there.

Next was sound, which was straight forward, as that was just a standard headphone jack out to dual phono, coming in at a bargain 75 pence.

Then there would be the SD card onto which the files are loaded and the device boots off from. It has to be at least 4GB, class 4, preferably a brand name. I’ve ordered one and it’s yet to turn up so I’m going to pop into town in a couple of days to get another one to make sure I have time to test it. Until I can get this card the Pi shall remain unused.

Onto visuals and this is where it gets murky. The Pi has two outputs: HDMI and yellow composite out, both of which are fine if you are plugging into a television. Sadly, however, in my case I’m going to be plugging into a monitor via VGA which is not supported, and I’m paraphrasing here from the official website, because VGA is an old technology.

Now to me 100% of the computers I use connect the main PC to the monitor by VGA though chatting to my friends they keep mentioning DVI, but in my experience it’s VGA all the way. It seems from mooching around on the internet that this is a grey area of information and a hot bed by buying cables that doesn’t work. The upshot is that I have to connect it to a monitor so need some way of converting so for £6.07 have bought a “1.5M HDMI HDTV Male to VGA Male 3RCA Converter Cable” and I wait nervously to buy the SD card to see if this has been a worthwhile purchase or a useful piece of tech.

The Pi is not a problem if you are connecting to a flat screen television as they tend to have HD inputs and composite in, but not if like me you are using a traditional VGA monitor.

Total cost spent so far:
Raspberry Pi £29.46
Power Cable £03.94
3.5 Jack > dual phone £00.75
VGA Converter £06.07 TOTAL £40.22

Next up on my list is to get the SD card so in the next part I’ll be taking you through the process of installing the software and getting it working, and seeing if I can get the visuals to my monitor, plus dipping my foot into the world of getting a case. Then after that it’s attaching the keyboard and mouse and hard drive via USB and exploring the world of installing software like a browser, music player, Spotify and audio editing software.

It’s going to be an interesting time I think!