I’ve created a thread for anyone interested in this kind of thing

I can put some thoughts / questions out there and see what comes back (if anything comes back )

interesting thing, I found that the monitor image was slightly too big for the screen it meant that I couldn’t quite see what was going on top/bottom

I discovered an icon “lx terminal”, this appears to be the same as getting into the cmd function on a windows machine eg you get into a dos type display and you can type in commands to the machine eg ipconfig

anyway

so first I typed raspi-config to see what it would do

it suggested try sudo raspi-config and then took me straight into the menu screen, I then enabled overscan , rebooted and the screen is a little smaller but now manageable.

the lx screen must be how you access stuff in the raspi pi when you are in GUI mode

http://www.themagpi.com/

The website of their Hong Kong distributor is a complete dud for customer usability.

It looks smart and modern, but…

No pricing

No order form

No info on quantities available/permitted per order

No info on payment methods

A ‘download’ area which requires you to enter a ‘code’ which you get via e-mail, but no instructions on how to get that code, and no place to enter it even if you do have it.

I think that most customers would consider it to be too secretive, no informative, and too much work. Can’t imagine how they expect to do much business with this.

Marks – 3 out of 10. Could do MUCH better.

Hong Kong distributor:\

http://www.egoman.com.cn/%20target=

captain_spalding said:

The website of their Hong Kong distributor is a complete dud for customer usability.

It looks smart and modern, but…

No pricing

No order form

No info on quantities available/permitted per order

No info on payment methods

A ‘download’ area which requires you to enter a ‘code’ which you get via e-mail, but no instructions on how to get that code, and no place to enter it even if you do have it.

I think that most customers would consider it to be too secretive, no informative, and too much work. Can’t imagine how they expect to do much business with this.

Marks – 3 out of 10. Could do MUCH better.

i’d just use farnell, site to get it

http://downloads.element14.com/raspberryPi3.html?isRedirect=true

I did, it came two days later

it might be good to buy the hardcopy of the book for it here
http://littlebirdelectronics.com/collections/raspberry-pi?page=2

or you read the online book for free here
http://it-ebooks.info/book/1354/

I just bought it as well so I could flick through when away from the computer.

the farnell site guarantees it only uses the welsh made boards

no chinese rubbish sneaking in

the raspberry pi boards price is practically set so no one will really be making much money from it

the other thing they mentioned is that its not going to change too much too soon because this causes problems and kind of disenfranchises previous buyers

the other thing to note is that you should have the monitor on before powering on the board

I found that is the monitor wasn’t on it didn’t send anything to the screen, you had to reboot to see the thing boot up and show the GUI screen

wookiemeister said:

But, the Egoman site in HK has other stuff i might be interested in.

It’s a dumb sales site that allows no way of buying anything.

wookiemeister said:

the other thing to note is that you should have the monitor on before powering on the board

I found that is the monitor wasn’t on it didn’t send anything to the screen, you had to reboot to see the thing boot up and show the GUI screen

That’s a good feature, IMHO. It means it doesn’t waste resources driving a monitor if it doesn’t detect one at boot-up.

PM 2Ring said:

wookiemeister said:

the other thing to note is that you should have the monitor on before powering on the board

I found that is the monitor wasn’t on it didn’t send anything to the screen, you had to reboot to see the thing boot up and show the GUI screen

That’s a good feature, IMHO. It means it doesn’t waste resources driving a monitor if it doesn’t detect one at boot-up.

ahh right

seem to be able to access internet with Rpi

I can ping the rpi with my laptop

I can ping the laptop with my rpi

it turns out you can run the rpi “headless” ie without a monitor, laptop,mouse using a laptop elsewhere but connected to the internet (and LAN?)

the next step would be understanding how to control the input/output pins and then using the laptop speak to the rpi and make one of the pins go HIGH making an LED light up

I wonder if you need to have the laptop on Linux???

the rpi seems a little easier than the arduino, I was listening to someone tell me that it was simply too hard and complicated with the arduino to do complicated stuff

the rpi seems kitted out to allow it to talk to another computer because its a computer itself

I can ping the rpi with my laptop

I can ping the laptop with my rpi

it turns out you can run the rpi “headless” ie without a monitor, laptop,mouse using a laptop elsewhere but connected to the internet (and LAN?)

the next step would be understanding how to control the input/output pins and then using the laptop speak to the rpi and make one of the pins go HIGH making an LED light up

I wonder if you need to have the laptop on Linux???

the rpi seems a little easier than the arduino, I was listening to someone tell me that it was simply too hard and complicated with the arduino to do complicated stuff

the rpi seems kitted out to allow it to talk to another computer because its a computer itself

I can ping the rpi with my laptop

I can ping the laptop with my rpi

it turns out you can run the rpi “headless” ie without a monitor, laptop,mouse using a laptop elsewhere but connected to the internet (and LAN?)

the next step would be understanding how to control the input/output pins and then using the laptop speak to the rpi and make one of the pins go HIGH making an LED light up

I wonder if you need to have the laptop on Linux???

the rpi seems a little easier than the arduino, I was listening to someone tell me that it was simply too hard and complicated with the arduino to do complicated stuff

the rpi seems kitted out to allow it to talk to another computer because its a computer itself

wookiemeister said:

I can ping the rpi with my laptop

I can ping the laptop with my rpi

it turns out you can run the rpi “headless” ie without a monitor, laptop,mouse using a laptop elsewhere but connected to the internet (and LAN?)

the next step would be understanding how to control the input/output pins and then using the laptop speak to the rpi and make one of the pins go HIGH making an LED light up

I wonder if you need to have the laptop on Linux???

the rpi seems a little easier than the arduino, I was listening to someone tell me that it was simply too hard and complicated with the arduino to do complicated stuff

the rpi seems kitted out to allow it to talk to another computer because its a computer itself

start on the dais platform and work out.

Stealth said:

Stealth said:

wookiemeister said:

does anyone know what the ip address of the holiday forum is?

72.72.187.187

opps
72.14.187.187

will get serious when I get back and clear all the junk and ants off the table and put the rpi next to laptop

at the moment its balanced on a packing crate

so it turns out that to get real world output you need to write a programme in python and save it as XXXXXXX.py, the .py allows the machine to know it is dealing with a python programme

now the interesting thing is this

you need to go back to the LX screen and become a superuser to run the output programme you’ve written

so you change directories and call up the programme you’ve save

its then that the brain of the machine recognises that you want to run this programme and the output then happens

other news

this seems to be a good way to learn, it makes you use it – that’s how you learn, no digesting whole volumes of explanations

http://www.codecademy.com/learn

wookiemeister said:

so it turns out that to get real world output you need to write a programme in python and save it as XXXXXXX.py, the .py allows the machine to know it is dealing with a python programme

now the interesting thing is this

you need to go back to the LX screen and become a superuser to run the output programme you’ve written

so you change directories and call up the programme you’ve save

its then that the brain of the machine recognises that you want to run this programme and the output then happens

other news

this seems to be a good way to learn, it makes you use it – that’s how you learn, no digesting whole volumes of explanations

http://www.codecademy.com/learn

when you have written a programme to create real world output eg an led flashing rather than a screen output eg “hello world”

I have been a games fan for a long time now. One of my favourite games was F-117. It was set at night which was cool operationally but meant that the programmers didn’t need to build landscapes.

I am astonished at modern games and it must take a lot of work to get one done.

Never been interested in programming though, the books alone scared me.

Skunkworks said:

I have been a games fan for a long time now. One of my favourite games was F-117. It was set at night which was cool operationally but meant that the programmers didn’t need to build landscapes.

I am astonished at modern games and it must take a lot of work to get one done.

Never been interested in programming though, the books alone scared me.

Very creative. “Lets create a game set at night , so we don’t need landscapes, and use an aircraft you can’t see either…”

Stealth said:

Skunkworks said:

I have been a games fan for a long time now. One of my favourite games was F-117. It was set at night which was cool operationally but meant that the programmers didn’t need to build landscapes.

I am astonished at modern games and it must take a lot of work to get one done.

Never been interested in programming though, the books alone scared me.

Very creative. “Lets create a game set at night , so we don’t need landscapes, and use an aircraft you can’t see either…”

Worked though, I played that goddamn game for hours. Then flight sims got heavy, 1942 Pacific Air war was a bugger. Doesn’t seem to be that many combat flight sims anymore. I have started to play Xbox bit admit I am finding the repetition of FPS games and not much else to be a bit boring.

Stealth said:

Skunkworks said:

I have been a games fan for a long time now. One of my favourite games was F-117. It was set at night which was cool operationally but meant that the programmers didn’t need to build landscapes.

I am astonished at modern games and it must take a lot of work to get one done.

Never been interested in programming though, the books alone scared me.

Very creative. “Lets create a game set at night , so we don’t need landscapes, and use an aircraft you can’t see either…”

LOL yes remembering now, you spent most of your time looking at a dashboard. They did have good manuals though back in the day, the F-117 was about 300 spiral bound pages.