Raspberry Pi Geekery

Good and geeky with the Raspberry Pi

On account of the fact that my iMac has been away getting fixed today I decided to connect the extra monitor to use with my Raspberry Pi. Previously, I had been using the Raspberry Pi connected to the television which is not quite so good and not very comfortable to use.

In the Raspberry Pi operating system I opened up terminal. Then I started putting in commands to download and install applications onto the Raspberry Pi. They were quite easy commands but you do have to make sure you get them exactly right for them to work. I added a VNC server so I would be able to connect to the Raspberry Pi from another computer even if I haven’t got any monitor connected to it. This is so I can use the Raspberry Pi completely headless for making a security video camera. The other possibility I am considering is to use the tiny computer to make a home-made version of the Amazon Echo.

Everything was going mostly okay except for the last bit I did today when something didn’t get properly installed. I was running short of time, so I’ll have to to have a look and see if I can try once more to get the job done right. With the home-made version of the Amazon Echo you connect a small microphone to it and a speaker. When you have an account with Amazon developer you can ask the Amazon Echo questions. It is a bit like using Siri on your iPhone, but it ties into the Amazon services. 

Pine 64

I have another tiny computer which will do something similar, a Pine64. Maybe I can get that to work in some sort of good and geeky project. It’s the sort of thing which us nerds love to do and increasingly the general public. It’s great fun to play with these technical devices and bend them to our will with code and will power.