The Embedded Angle

The wait is over. The thoughtful and slim costume for the Raspberry Pi called SweetBox finally arrived in my mail box and what can I say ... The guys managed to pull it through. This is one of the successful projects in the large basket of Kickstarter . The pack included the carefully designed case, three heat sinks and a camera holder.  Well enough with the words and enter the pictures ... So with this versatile set-up it seems the only feature left out is ... say water resistance for instance.  

First of all I must mention that this post is practically not Raspberry Pi related. Nevertheless the book reviewed here has instructions on installing OpenELEC on the Raspy and that is all. Some time ago I made a review on another of PACKT Publishing's books . It was about RaspBMC, and I complained in it about why there was no additional information for competitive systems like OpenELEC for example. So here it is - a separate book dedicated solely to it - Instant OpenELEC Starter by Mikkel Viager . The quickest OpenELEC intro The book comes as part of a series entitled INSTANT (Short | Fast | Focused) . This mantra sets the writing in a pretty tight frame of size (maximum number of pages) and allowed topics. That leaves almost no ground for criticizing the book's contents. Despite that I'll make a few points that came to my mind. All those small books that are a hundred and something pages or less (in this case they are just fifty), always tend to make me fee

Part II - In search of solution     The task The questions posed in the situation explained in part I  are related mostly to how can be achieved an optimal performance. In order to measure the strength of the WiFi signal and its throughput I already had a tool good enough for the job - my Raspberry Pi equipped with its Wi-Pi module. But I also needed something else - a benchmark - a device with inherently good performance in terms of WiFi reception. Luckily my laptop has proven to be pretty good in this and I have this axiom in my mind, that it has a very capable antenna. This is kind of biased opinion but for my small experiment I guessed such bias could've been neglected. On the other hand I already had a second Raspberry Pi unit, which could make a proper second WiFi-meter.  The two measuring device prior to powering up At that point it was clear to me that with three WiFi-meters I was going to test four devices. This means that the task has two dimensions: Test and

Prepare to dive deep Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents . Trendy title. While I wondered how serious it could be, the author's name got my attention - Stefan Sjogelid . Now that is already promising. This is the guy behind the idea, that if you're eager enough, you can build your own Linux distribution targeted at the Raspberry Pi architecture. The whole process is thoroughly described on his dedicated web site . And expectations slowly started to rise. Now with this book we're in for a treat. At least we don't get the usual starter point of view, and get some trickery instead.  The book is very educating on an operating system level. Reading it, I was able to fill some large gaps in my modest but constantly expanding Linux knowledge. Once the reader starts, it quickly becomes clear that the installments built up are simple enough, yet powerful and effective. And I wouldn't be surprised if such tools are employed in a real-life espionage activities. The layout

Well  it   finally arrived. Just got it from my local supplier. Now what?  The official site describes it very clearly. Firstly Raspbian must be prepared. I'll give a quick summary with the shell commands and some screens. The following pair of commands must be issued in order to get the new camera option in the raspi-config menu: pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get update pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get upgrade The second one can be replaced with the more powerful: pi@raspberrypi ~ $ sudo apt-get dist-upgrade I actually typed all three in a row before realizing (after googling the difference and reading through the ubuntu forums mostly) that the last one is an extended variant of the update , and it might trigger installing new packages upon existing dependencies. To be absolutely positive that nothing is missing I even updated the firmware according to a procedure from a book I'm reviewing at the moment (the book is  Raspberry Pi for Secret Agents an