Raspberry Ripple

.. a series of Raspberry Pi applications for use at sea

 

 

The following are links to information about how I've set up my Raspberry Pi for use when afloat. The notes are intended as personal aide-memoires in the event that I have to rebuild anything, they are not intended to be comprehensive guides.

The Pi is a great little platform for tinkering; no doubt the applications could all be squeezed onto a flashy tablet, but it wouldn't be nearly so much fun. Also, my primary goal has been to create a low-cost and, above all, low power solution that I can use on a yacht for many hours at a time without having to worry about discharging the boat's batteries.

The projects:

Pi Chart - OpenCPN, Wefax (fldigi) and Grib (zyGrib) on Raspberry Pi

Stargazy Pi - running a Planetarium on Raspberry Pi

Piffle - Raspberry PI wiFi and email aFLoat

Pirotechnic - trickier stuff like GPS -> RS232 -> GPIO

 

Pilot - Control the Raspberry Pi with a touchscreen monitor

Pibald - I've been pulling my hair out over this stuff

 

My setup comprises:

256MB Pi
7 port USB hub
12v to 5V/3A converter to power the hub
USB Nano Wifi adapter
USB Audio (because the Pi doesn't have audio in)
mini wireless keyboard with nano dongle
10" 12V touchscreen monitor with HDMI
RS232 to TTL connected to the Pi's GPIO port for GPS (an ancient but reliable Garmin 48)
8GB SD card

The starting point is:

Latest Raspbian Wheezy image (from http://www.raspberrypi.org/downloads)
You've put the image on an SD card (using something like Win32 Disk Imager)
You've booted your Pi and done the following, either on first boot or by running raspi-config from the comand line:
- expand_rootfs (to access the full SD card memory)
- you've maybe overclocked a little 
- startup is probably to the desktop rather than the command line
- Memory split - 16MB to GPU
- ssh server enabled (assuming you want remote access)

run the following to ensure that your system is up to date:

sudo apt-get-update

sudo apt-get-upgrade

 

 

 

 


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