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A slice of Pi...

tonyh66

By tonyh66
in DIY Astronomer

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Spikey

Spikey

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I've been trying to get one all day so far. More demand than anticipated so I guess I'll be waiting a while longer.

Early days to say what will happen but it looks a promising piece of kit. How about an on mount total solution? I suppose it could already be done now with some of the smaller via boards etc.. but for 20 odd quid I'm looking forward to having a play with one.

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Spikey

Spikey

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I think I'll wait for the kit with the keyboard to come out as I'm in no rush to be one of the first to purchase. Even though I've made a living from computing I don't get down to the barebones very often, better dust of my slackware/assembler skillz (or lack of them).

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ncjunk

ncjunk

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With the Raspberry Pi being launched at £22 do you think there will be a move away from Arduino for astro hardware mods?

BBC link

it looks promising

As far as I am concerned they are different beasts the Arduino gives you Inputs and ouputs with control over these using a programming language (that is already installed) whereas Rasberry PI is a mini PC so you would need to install and configure the programming language and buy the Input/output hardware, configure the drivers and then program it.

Ones a PC and the other is a control system (effectively).

A more iteresting thought for me is if I can use the two together to create a low power always on device that can post information to the internet and log data to a hard disk.

Should be fun linking the two :p

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Stephen

Stephen

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I think I'll wait for the kit with the keyboard to come out as I'm in no rush to be one of the first to purchase. Even though I've made a living from computing I don't get down to the barebones very often, better dust of my slackware/assembler skillz (or lack of them).

This board is intended to run Linux kernel based operating systems.[2] It supports the Python programming language,[12][13], BBC BASIC,[14] C[12] and Perl.[12]

Leave your assembler where it belongs, with the scary dark room type programmers :p

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ncjunk

ncjunk

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I think I'll wait for the kit with the keyboard to come out as I'm in no rush to be one of the first to purchase. Even though I've made a living from computing I don't get down to the barebones very often, better dust of my slackware/assembler skillz (or lack of them).

I have a sheevaplug and I imagine this will work the same in that you don´t need a keyboard you can ssh in from another pc over the network and work off of the command line.

I love the sheevaplug its great so to have something like the rasberry PI, which is very similar, for 1/4 the price is very interesting...I can put them all over the house!

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Spikey

Spikey

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This board is intended to run Linux kernel based operating systems.[2] It supports the Python programming language,[12][13], BBC BASIC,[14] C[12] and Perl.[12]

Leave your assembler where it belongs, with the scary dark room type programmers :p

LOL it's still there mate with all the BCS members.........hang on I am in the BCS :) but I don't have a beard or wear sandals with socks.

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Flying Eye

Flying Eye

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Interesting of course. I'll wait until it matures a bit. I've been following it on Google+ for quite a few months now.

Something about it isn't quite right, but I can't put my finger on what it is yet. Got a feeling that adding effective comms and storage could be somewhat proprietary and quite possibly not cheap.

I also sense there might be a gaggle of older "hacks" waiting in the wings to bring out rewritten old books to flog to people who are new to the old school side of this thing. Perhaps less a step forward and rather more a "digitally remastered" pension for the few quite possibly.

Obviously I'll really be looking forward to being dead wrong about these misgivings. And in which case it'll be getting a solid +1 from me.

BBC basic and assembler sounds like bringing back some long missing usefulness and fun in computing.

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themos

themos

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I see a GPIO section on the Pi board. Surely that's there to directly control hardware?

I can imagine this making the astro-laptop unnecessary, although we would still need some display unit and user input device, maybe the smartphone will provide those.

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ncjunk

ncjunk

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I see a GPIO section on the Pi board. Surely that's there to directly control hardware?

I can imagine this making the astro-laptop unnecessary, although we would still need some display unit and user input device, maybe the smartphone will provide those.

It won´t be powerfull enough to touch an astro laptop but linked with other devices could record and control some of the background observatory tasks like Weather information, control of roll off roof, powering up the rest of the devices i.e. astro computer, mount, roof motors. s

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Gina

Gina

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Seems it has only one USB port. Still I think it could be used for the control part but we'd really want EQMOD ported to Linux. I think I might be able to run my weather station software on one. That would free up an old laptop for other uses. I suppose I could even put XP back on it - groan :p

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Stephen

Stephen

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Seems it has only one USB port. Still I think it could be used for the control part but we'd really want EQMOD ported to Linux. I think I might be able to run my weather station software on one. That would free up an old laptop for other uses. I suppose I could even put XP back on it - groan :p

No, the UK version (£22) has two. We've got/getting the B model :)

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