Pi

[The Duke]

The only time I have ever used bing, is on fresh installed of windows, getting the chrome download. Ie is set to bing I presume.

It may be the best search engine out there, but no one has bothered to check. Lol.

I was planning on butting my retro pi nes together this afternoon. The girl realised I had a few hours, and now we are about to head off on a driving lesson.

May do it tonight while watching the footy.

[Ed P]

Steve, my Nintendo-like Pi enclosure arrived – it is extremely well designed with ‘working’ buttons that connect up to most full-blown Pi’s (not the zero without some effort). If I wasn’t busy trying to get the official  7 inch screen touch screen working for my ‘school’ demo. I’d be at it like a rat down a drainpipe.

I’ve decided to base my show and tell on “Adventures in Minecraft” by O’Hanlon/Whale. Lots of good projects in there which could cover a lot of the TEM parts of STEAM. Some Science could be cobbled up with ball rolling, and a cannon game, and I guess Minecraft makes ‘pretty’ terrains for the Arts bit.Ditto maybe a bit of geology could be cobbled up but I don’t think I have the time to do it!

However I’m totally stuck on any Chemistry demos as all the fun (bangs, stinks and an element of danger) have been totally removed by the Elf &Safety Mafia. Ditto Biology. I’m not sure that I would ever have gravitated towards my degree courses in today’s zero risk environment!

[The Duke]

Yes the nini case is excellent. With 4 USB poors, internet pass through,working buttons and a fan header. And excellent build quality.

I’d be happy with this at £30.for £14 it feels like I ripped someone off.

I’ve got a single USB nes clone controller. Think ill get a snes one too and get my Mariocart on.

I have a few pi cases,one official one (from china, very nice, one crappy £2 one, and now this one. I may get a couple more just for the reset button,and the space for a small fan. May be perfect for the 3 3b+ given there thermal throttling

Im defo going to attack it tomorrow. I’d do it now, bit my tea was huge, carbs on carbs on carns with Rogan josh.currently sat watching footy, holding my eyes open. Once the carbs pass I may may give it a go.

 

[D-Dan]

I’ve switched from official cases to a stacking case from ModMyPi. I have to say, it’s not just a space saver, but the ventilated build allows the Pis to run cooler and it looks nice, IMO, too. Best of all, it can be added to. I’m aiming for a 100 Pi tower 😉

 

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[Ed P]

Could you make a Blender render farm from such a build?

[The Duke]

All the pi clusters I’ve seen use the open stack system used above, with short cat5 cables connecting them.

[D-Dan]

Ed P wrote:

Could you make a Blender render farm from such a build?

 

Sadly, probably not. Whilst they can be clustered for some things, such as folding, there’s currently no mechanism to combine the processing power for a single task. Not to mention, there would be severe memory limitations for rendering.

Arch Linux, on a Ryzen 7 1800X, 32 GB, 5 (yes -5) HDs inc 5 SSDs, 4 RPi 3Bs + 1 RPi 4B - one as an NFS server with two more drives, PiHole (shut yours), Plex server, cloud server, and other random Pi stuff. Nice CoolerMaster case, 2 x NV GTX 1070 8GB, and a whopping 32" AOC 1440P monitor.

[The Duke]

I forgot. I installed retro pi last night. Totally screwed it up, ended up with a few emulators but not nes! Not sure what I done wrong, but I’m gonna reformat and start aging tomorrow while the footy is on.

I did end up with an Amega 500 emulator, so I’m going to have to make shire that’s back on, and relive Cannon fodder.

[wasbit]

Thought I ought to try Pi-Hole out – thanks to Drezha & Dave.

Word of warning, when completed it issues a log in password. If you don’t keep a record of it then you can’t log in to the Admin Dashboard. DAMHIK. I had to format the micro SD card, reinstall Raspberry & then Pi-Hole.
Apparently you can log in via SSH but you have to have SSH enabled before installing Pi-Hole.
That means having to format the micro SD card, reinstall Raspberry, allow SSH then reinstall Pi-Hole yet again.

After all that, rebooted the router, connected the Pi & everything works.

I can’t get VNC Viewer to find the Pi & PuTTY opens a session screen with no title & won’t accept any input. I’m getting there gradually by trial & error but any helpful suggestions?

--
Regards
wasbit

Rig 1: Optiplex 3050 SFF
Rig 2: Asus ROG G20CB (rebuilt wreck)
Rig 3: HP Elitebook 8440P

Dear Starfleet, hate you, hate the Federation, taking Voyager. - Janeway

[Dave Rice]

There is no local GUI for PiHole, it’s all on the command line. Resetting the password, type: pihole -a -p

You don’t have to reinstall Raspian to enable SSH or VNC. From the main menu you want Preferences then Raspeberry Pi Configuration.

Both VNC and Putty connect via the IP address of the Pi. With Putty you will be asked to confirm the security keys at first connection. After that you’ll be asked to login, user = pi password = what_ever_you_set

Updating the PI: from a terminal of course 😀

sudo apt-get update followed by sudo apt-get upgrade takes care of most things, but a better way is to use Pimroni’s script by typing curl https://get.pimoroni.com/uptodate | bash

Pimoroni is an absolute RPi guru and his scripts update everything on the Pi, including the firmware and apps like VNC that apt-get doesn’t. It takes a while!

[Ed P]

VNC is very picky and seems to be very dependent on wifi quality. I’m afraid the onboard wifi is Pi’s poor especially if you are using internal Bluetooth as well. I found that a cheap TPLink adapter improved things together with switching off the internal wireless services. Add the following to /boot/config.txt:

dtoverlay=disable-wifi
dtoverlay=disable-bt

Then add the external adapter.

[Drezha]

I also think if you’re running the Pi headless, you now also have to set the resolution for VNC within the config file as well (at least, I have had to for the last two times I’ve set the Pi up), otherwise it doesn’t boot a GUI up if not connected to a HDMI cable (or you could use one of these, which I have left over from running a Mac Mini server headless, as without it, it wouldn’t give me the full display options!)

You can also enable ssh by creating a file called ssh on the fat portion of the microSD card (i.e. flash the card, then when it’s complete, Windows will mount the microSD section it can write to and you create the ssh file there).

"Everything looks interesting until you do it. Then you find it’s just another job" - Terry Pratchett

[Dave Rice]

I like the idea of the display emulator, will save me mucking about with my headless VM server. Just ordered a 3 pack as I have a couple of headless PC projects coming up.

The Pi 3B I have do fire up a GUI, but at some silly low resolution. It’s rare I use the GUI these days though, but I do still use the full fat Raspian just in case.

I forgot about the SSH file method.

[Ed P]

Although both SSH and VNC offer good hands-on control, do not forget about the possibility of using Samba file sharing, it also has the merit of being OS independent.

[wasbit]

Started again with a new 16gb micro SD card.
Although I’ve read that the class of card shouldn’t make much difference, a Samsung class 10 was a much faster overall than a Kingston class 4. Both using ethernet, not wi-fi.
I forgot that the Pi has to be connected to the LAN & KVM to access Raspbian to get to the Preference/Configuration settings – doh.
Presume it’s something to do with HDMI port occupation that decides whether Raspbian or Pi-hole is opened.
Putty connected straight away to the new updated install of Raspbian with SSH enabled.
Thanks for the help.

--
Regards
wasbit

Rig 1: Optiplex 3050 SFF
Rig 2: Asus ROG G20CB (rebuilt wreck)
Rig 3: HP Elitebook 8440P

Dear Starfleet, hate you, hate the Federation, taking Voyager. - Janeway

[Author]

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