The Embedded Angle

I just read  Raspberry Pi Media Center  by  Sam Nazarko . How should I describe it?  In short - this book is too short .  It feels a bit thin, a bit rushed to be finished. The info is exact, but at places not quite enough. Media-center with Raspbmc To be honest, I expected something different. It is just wrong on some levels and here is how it all intersects. Generally all software starts living in the same manner:  Install;  Boot;  Dive in.  This scheme is omnipresent.  There are certain specifics of course: installation media, execution space, configurations, execution process, etc. but the structure stands and  Raspbmc is no exception from this common factual rule set.  Sometimes details might be tricky, but it is not a common situation where you get stuck and without any support. In that sense Raspbmc is a little dream - it is very self-sustained and even ... OK, I'll say it - self-conscious at some level. But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself. After the f

It's been roughly two months that I spent around Raspberry Pi. For that time I've been tweaking it (primarily on software level), read two books (and started three more), browsed tens of articles, project and auxiliary components sites. Now it is hard for me to say that all the initiatives I've read about are strictly Raspberry Pi projects. Although the Pi inhabits the heart of any single one of them and most of the development revolves around it, it feels like the small computer gently steps away in the background, so the unique features of the specific project stand out. Still they can fully be dubbed Raspberry-Pi-Driven . Take TARDIS for example - the Pi is running the show, but it actually is a stratosphere traveler . Or any installment similar to what is built in  this tutorial  or the RaspBMC project - Raspberry Pi is utilized, but these are a NAS solution  and a   media center . In that sense, it is a bit incoherent to define what the Pi needs in order to make i

From all the books I came across recently, the current one deserves a special attention. This is  Raspberry Pi Home Automation with Arduino  by  Andrew K. Dennis .  Start automating with Arduino shield As a newbie in the field of not only Raspberry Pi, but of electronics as a whole, I needed a lot of background to catch up with. All of these resistors, thermistors, bread-boards, shields, wire-color-codes, etc. - the book is not a theoretical guide in the filed but give just enough explanations for all the hardware involved. The book's chapters are typically organised as a set of tutorials. This makes it comfortably structured, and allows for quicker reading and jumping directly to your level or particular sub-theme of interest. So lets be a bit more specific and see what is in the book. The first chapter is introductory in sense of providing historical background to the both platforms - Raspberry Pi and Arduino, and automation of the home environment. In the end we are co