Months later, I’ve started working with my Raspberry Pi. With electricity and Ethernet ports a hot commodity in my office, I’ve had to unplug some things to make room for it at my desk for the moment. I’m borrowing the outlets for the office display computer (both electricity and Ethernet) as well as the display itself and the wireless mouse and keyboard. So it is almost like I’m just using that PC, except it isn’t a PC, it’s the Pi. And there are more cords running over my desk.

 

Tadge and I met today to talk about some of the things that we have to get done. He was able to get a VNC (I hope that is the right thing) set up on his Pi, because Dr. Bull wants the NSF Einstein Fellows to be able to see the Pi over a network connection. So we’re going to meet tomorrow for him to teach me how to do that as well.

We talked about one of the difficulties of working with the Raspberry Pi (and the SparkFun PicoBoard for that matter) is that they’re so vulnerable and out in the open. So I’ve decided to get case for the Pi off the Internet and 3D print it. I found one with Google that I’m going to

try. Looking at it, as the first design I found, I like it. I already know one problem though, that it doesn’t include any gaps to run the camera or our other sensor peripherals. But that is OK, maybe I will try to design one that has some extra slots, after I see how this works out.

What is really bothering me now is that the clock isn’t correct. I have the thing plugged in to the network, and it is authenticated through UVA’s network so that I can access the web, but the clock isn’t working. I’ve done a quick web-search for solutions, but the code that I’m finding isn’t basic enough for me. It says things like “edit your etc/ntc.conf file,” and I don’t know how to do that. I will keep looking but this may just be something that I ask Tadge how to do.

Otherwise, this thing already has Scratch installed. But I have Scratch installed on my other computers, so that isn’t novel.

On October 17, 2013   /   CED Academy   /   Leave a comment