My cables have arrived and I’ve made my first Raspberry Pi hardware demo. If you press the button the computer will send the voltages to the GPIO pins to simulate a traffic light system (red, red & amber, flashing amber, green). I noticed that a few tutorials seemed to leave out the 10K pull-down resistor, 3.3V line and 1K protective resistor (just connecting the button to GND and GPIO) and so the voltage change wasn’t detected on the input pin, also without the 1K resistor you could damage the pin if you accidentally configure the GPIO connected to the switch as an output rather than an input.

I’ve just received my Raspberry Pi miniature computer and some SD cards to go with it to experiment with. First off I inserted the Raspbian (Debian Wheezy for ARM) SD card, which I’d written to disk in 8mins using the following as root: dd if=2012-12-16-wheezy-raspbian.img of=/dev/sdc bs=4M Or for RISC OS (2Gb took 7mins): dd if=ro519-rc6-1876M.img of=/dev/sdc bs=4M Or for Chameleon (4Gb took 15mins): dd if=chameleon_v02.img of=/dev/sdc bs=4M Next I plugged in all my cables – HDMI to the TV, powered hub to the micro-USB port and a regular USB port on the Pi, then into the hub my Logitech EX100 wireless keyboard and mouse transmitter.

I’ve actually just been considering buying a 4Tb hard drive. Its crazy how data has grown. I remember my first hard drive was a 44Mb IDE that plugged into an external enclosure on top of my Acorn A3000. I never even half filled that – I’ve got USB sticks that are 16Gb now and they’re considered pretty small! I still remember going mad and buying half a dozen 80Gb drives between myself and a mate when they were on special offer at Fry’s, that must have been under 10 years ago.

I’ve updated my website www.chaillac.com

As Debian Wheezy beta1 got released the other day I thought it was high time I updated my netbook from Fedora14. I was pleasantly surprised how little tweaking was needed to get to Sid, even Gnome 3.4 only needed a few extensions and CSS tweaks. For the sake of speed I only encrypted my /home partition, chosing not to bother with a swap partition, and as /tmp is on tmpfs these days, the only permanent storage that’s not encrypted is the OS like /bin, /sbin /etc and so on.