[peternewman]

richard, on 23 December 2011 - 03:13 PM, said:

just saw this http://www.raspberrypi.org on the BBC site and looks like it could be quite useful - a £25 linux machine with a USB port that can run from either batteries or a small supply.

I wonder who will be the first person to bundle it with a usb>dmx adaptor and some kind of artnet client, would give you a very cheap artnet node on a network.

The BBC site claims £22 for the Ethernet version, although I think you'll need an SD card on top of that.

Brian, on 23 December 2011 - 03:17 PM, said:

It's a bit overpowered for an Artnet node. MagicQ anybody?

It may be overpowered, but its sooo cheap, I don't think anything else compares, even an Arduino (with Ethernet) is more expensive.

I was going to say you would just need to recompile Open Lighting Architecture, but I see they already support ARM, so it just needs installing really. If you wanted out the box stuff, adding an Enttec Pro Dongle would still put it £30 below Enttec's ODE ArtNet node and do Tx/Rx. Or adding a bare board Open DMX USB gives a Tx only node for only £55. That's all just sticking together out of the box components, so following some step by step instructions. As others have suggested, if you do a bit of hardware work and can implement DMX locally, it should work out a lot cheaper.

So who's going to be first to get the above stack working and post instructions?

As others have said, the graphics looks amazing too, given what its coming from, apparently its got a h264 chip onboard or something.

[J Pearce]

I'd like to see it doing remote media serving. Artnet or telnet in, hdmi or composite out. Sit it with the screen/projector and control with MagicQ.

I'll have a play when I get my hands on a couple, but finding software ready for arm will be hard.

[timd]

J Pearce, on 24 December 2011 - 03:45 PM, said:

I'd like to see it doing remote media serving. Artnet or telnet in, hdmi or composite out. Sit it with the screen/projector and control with MagicQ.

I'll have a play when I get my hands on a couple, but finding software ready for arm will be hard.

Looks like there's an XBMC port in the pipeline, so combine it with a MythTV backend and you've got a really capable home entertainment setup, with independent set top boxes with every TV.

[J Pearce]

I've already got mythtv lined up for it. I run a mythtv system at home and one in the kitchen and one in the bedroom with cheap 7" screens from ebay would be a very nice setup for not very much money at all. There's no reason at all for them to struggle with mythfrontend.

It might actually fulfil its mission and give me the kick I need to make the step from assembler into proper code and make them work as remote media servers.

[richard]

was just investigating it for mythtv and apparently the limited on board memory will be a struggle for it, I assume the buffering from the network to the client is quite hungry. Hopefully someone will make it work though!

[J Pearce]

I ran a mythtv server on a 1.8Ghz P4 box with 256MB of ram for a few months (before sanely investing in more ram), it wasn't snappy but ran fine, and that was the server with 2 tuners and file serving to run.

I think with a lightweight distro you'd be fine, the hardest bit is video processing which is offloaded to the GPU. Id stick with wired Ethernet. USB wireless seems to introduce a big memory overhead.

[timd]

I'd probably use XBMC as a frontend since it's much more mainstream and therefore will be better supported. If you don't have one already, I'd get the Hauppage Nova-T 500 for your server, it can record two whole freeview multiplexes at once and produces an MPEG2 stream so drops the processing required by the server.

[dbuckley]

If you are looking form something as the endstation for a DMX512 project, then the Parallax Propellor chip is a good choice, particularly the "system on a chip" style variant, the Spin Stamp variant.

I've done a few projects with these now, the one pictured being a driver for a chunk of WS2801 digital LED strip. The chip is very powerful, and has many unique facilities an quirks, in partticular is has 8 CPUs on-board, and no hardware interrupts, so many of the things that are hard on typical processors become easy on the Prop. The software is modular, and there are many modules of useful stuff available on the prop exchange.



Ok, these aren't in the same power league as the Raspberry Pi, but they are not dissimilar in price point ($25 USD), and for DMX-y type projects the Prop has oddles of power to spare.

[Cupboard]

Raspberry Pi has UART outputs, this takes a UART stream and converts it to RS 485
http://www.sparkfun.com/products/10124

Can't be beyond the realms of possibility to make a basic console with one at its heart

[bigclive]

sleah, on 23 December 2011 - 06:25 PM, said:

*looks round waiting for BigClive to comment*

He's bound to have some real off-the-wall ideas for it

It's pretty impressive. Nice to see a budget controller with a video output. Here's a clip of a raspberry pi running quake.

Quake demo.

[dbuckley]

bigclive, on 25 December 2011 - 11:47 PM, said:

Nice to see a budget controller with a video output.

Propellor chip has video output. Not gonna run quake though

[DrummerJonny]

Well I clicked that link expecting the original Quake....

Think I'm going to have to get me a couple of these, want to try one with Puredyne, Which I came across the other day....

[peternewman]

DrummerJonny, on 26 December 2011 - 05:00 AM, said:

Think I'm going to have to get me a couple of these, want to try one with Puredyne, Which I came across the other day....

Its worth pointing out that the Rasberry Pi is an Arm chip, and very different from the Intel/AMD ones you're used to, either 32 or 64 bit. While most of the packages on that might be able to work, they'll need recompiling as a minimum. I believe Rasberry Pi aren't using Ubuntu now, as they couldn't guarantee the support, but will have a Debian based option. Hopefully that will have a lot of the packages you're looking at compiled and available for download anyway, but perhaps not in the same simple USB stick format as Puredyne. We'll have to wait and see a little until its released.

[timd]

peternewman, on 26 December 2011 - 12:58 PM, said:

DrummerJonny, on 26 December 2011 - 05:00 AM, said:

Think I'm going to have to get me a couple of these, want to try one with Puredyne, Which I came across the other day....

Its worth pointing out that the Rasberry Pi is an Arm chip, and very different from the Intel/AMD ones you're used to, either 32 or 64 bit. While most of the packages on that might be able to work, they'll need recompiling as a minimum. I believe Rasberry Pi aren't using Ubuntu now, as they couldn't guarantee the support, but will have a Debian based option. Hopefully that will have a lot of the packages you're looking at compiled and available for download anyway, but perhaps not in the same simple USB stick format as Puredyne. We'll have to wait and see a little until its released.

Given the broad appeal of the device, I can't see it taking long for most if not all of the important linux packages to be recompiled to work. I'd also hazard a guess that it won't take long for the distribution makers to provide SD card images to download and dump and from there have a fully working Rpi.

[peza2010]

Surely the fact the project is based around getting computer skills for people in education will make it worth while to be on the supported list for a lot of companies