Raspberry Pi Rocking India Challenge: Project Overview

I got the package from element14 delivered to me today, unpacked the box and found the following things.

Raspberry Pi Model B

Pi-Face Control and Display

Wi-Pi USB Dongle

So a little bit about the components.

Raspberry Pi

“The Raspberry Pi is a credit-card-sized single-board computer developed in the UK by the Raspberry Pi Foundation”- wikipedia

Pi-Face Control and Display

Pi-Face allows you to display status information, messages and menus, and also control the Pi with an IR remote control or onboard buttons.

Wi-Pi USB

“Wi-Pi is a high performance, cost effective WLAN USB module which connects the Raspberry Pi low cost computer, to a Wi-Fi local area network.” – element14

Now let’s move on to the project.

NAME OF PROJECT: A KAROKE MACHINE WITH RASPBERRY PI

PROPOSED FEATURES

1. Design a module for Karaoke
2. Design a Web App that can interact with it, which will be higher abstraction that can be the user interface.
3. Pi-Face can be used for manual interaction with the device.
4. Software level changes for sound enrichment and control.
5. Efficient sound output with minimum energy usage.
6. Additional enhancements like LED, status display and visualization on Video Devices

Preparing SD Card with Raspberry.

* Formatted the SD Card.

* Downloaded the latest release of Rasbpian : http://downloads.raspberrypi.org/raspbian_latest

* Download the Win32DiskImager: http://sourceforge.net/projects/win32diskimager/

* Burn the ISO to SD Card with Win32DiskImager.

Configure the eth0 and wlan0 interface and connect to Pi.

* Opened the SD Card in Ubuntu
* Replaced the contents of the file interfaces located at  “/etc/network/interfaces” with the following lines so that I can set an IP for the eth0 interface and configure wlan0.

auto lo



iface lo inet loopback



iface eth0 inet static

address 192.168.137.137

netmask 255.255.255.0

network 192.168.137.0

broadcast 192.168.137.255

gateway 192.168.137.1



allow-hotplug wlan0

iface wlan0 inet manual

wpa-roam /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

iface default inet dhcp

* Save it and put the card back to Pi and boot it.  

* Now configure an IP address in the range 192.168.137.XXX to your Host OS.
* Download and Run Putty.

* Take the sessions tab and give PI’s IP, ie 192.168.137.137

* Press open, provide the credentials as
   username: pi
   password: raspberry

* Now you are connected to the device via ssh.

Connecting to GUI of Raspbian

* For Later use if we want the GUI, then we can install xrdp. For that issue the command

sudo apt-get install -y xrdp

* xrdp will allows you to connect to Remote Desktop. And will be auto started at every boot up.
* You can use any Remote Desktop utility to connect to the GUI of Raspbian.
* Connect to the GUI of Raspbian by providing the IP Address and Credentials.

Configure Pi-Face Control and Display

* Connect to Pi, and issue the following commands

   sudo apt-get update
   sudo apt-get upgrade

This will update and upgrade your Raspbian OS.
* To Enable the SPI Port, issue the command.

sudo nano /etc/modprobe.d/raspi-blacklist.conf

* And comment out the line by adding a slash before the line
   “blacklist spi-bcm2708”.
* Now the SPI Port is enabled so that Pi-Face Control and Display can communicate with your Pi.

* To install Pi-Face Control and Display Software issue the command

sudo apt-get install python-pifacecad

*To start the Pi-Face display, issue the command

python /usr/share/doc/python-pifacecad/examples/sysinfo.py

* To Enable Pi-Face Display on every boot up, add the following entry to your rc.local file.

sudo nano /etc/rc.local

   Add an entry. 

 python /usr/share/doc/python-pifacecad/examples/sysinfo.py &

That's all for now.

Thank You