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Posts tagged Raspberry Pi

Accessing your Raspberry Pi Zero W

Apr 12th

Posted by David G. Simmons in IoT

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Pi zero w board

If you’ve been lucky enough to get your hands on a Raspberry Pi Zero W, then you might enjoy this. If you’re still waiting for one, bookmark this. Unless you happen to have extra HDMI monitors, keyboards and mice lying around. I don’t, so configuring mine was a pain in the ass. I’ve solved that pain for you, so read on.

First, of course, you’ll need to download and install the latest Raspian-OS. I don’t know if Noobs works or not, so YMMV there. Next, burn the SD Card with the card-writing software of your choice. Read up on that here. Now, once your SD Card is complete, here’s how to easily make your Raspberry Pi Zero W show up on your wireless network and let you login to it without having a monitor, keyboard, etc. 

First, mount the SD Card, then, you’ll want to create 2 files in the /boot partition. The first one will get your Pi Zero W on your wireless network. 

$ cat spa_supplicant.conf
network={
    ssid=<Your SSID Name>
    psk=<Your WiFi Password>
}

Again, that file should be placed in the /boot partition of the Raspian SD Card. Next, you’ll want to be able to login to the thing, so 

$ touch /boot/ssh

 You actually put anything you want in that file, or nothing at all. As long as it exists, you’ll be fine. 

Now you can unmount and eject your SD Card, and pop it into your Pi Zero W, plug that little thing in, and it should boot up and join your WiFi network. Once it’s up, you can ssh into it (username ‘pi’, password ‘raspberry’ of course) and you’re ready to go!

I like to make things easy and go ahead and install a VNC Server on the Pi Zero W so that I can get a full desktop on it from my Laptop, but the main thing, for me, is to be able to bring the thing up without a monitor, keyboard and mouse! Maybe someday the Raspberry Pi folks will just enable one of the USB Ports as a terminal out of the box so we won’t have to do this. A guy can dream. 

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Using Raspberry Pi for a Dedicated Pandora Player

May 23rd

Posted by David G. Simmons in Gadgetry

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Raspberry pi logo

Let’s call it a Pandora Pi, shall we? 

Anyway, I have a (non-technical) friend that was always envious of the music setup I have in my house. I have a bunch of Bose Series III speakers set up around the house, connected to Airport Express Basestations so that I can broadcast music throughout the house. There’s always music playing around here, usually throughout the whole house — kitchen, living room, office, etc. Works great for me!

Anyway, she wanted a similar setup in her house, but only in one room, and for Pandora. At first I set her up with Pandora, a set of Bose Speakers, an Airport Express, and Airfoil on her PC (she’s not a Mac shop, like I am) and that worked reasonably well. Mostly. 

But her PC was always crashing, or Airfoil would just quit, or her PC would lose network connectivity, or some other shenanigans would cause the music to stop. It was driving her crazy. 

So I decided to build her a dedicated Pandora Player that she could keep in the kitchen and use to play music without all the headaches she was having. It was actually easier than I thought it would be!

Here’s the basic list of components:

That’s it for hardware! Only about $100USD for the whole setup.

Software was just as easy. I used Raspian Jessie, and added Pithos for Pandora playback. Easy. 

Setting up Pithos on the 3.5 inch screen wasn’t possible, of course (I guess it was possible, had I attached a keyboard) but instead I just started a VNC server on the Pi and remotely displayed it to do the setup.) Once that was all set, I added a default application setup to auto-start Pithos on login, and it all started to play as soon as you turn the thing on. 

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