Tag: Raspbmc

Net Killing RPi – SOLVED!!

With my troubleshooting exhausted, I turned to the Raspberry Pi forums in hope of some new ideas on how to fix it.

I was not disappointed. I quickly got answers pointing towards RF issues around the HDMI cable or grounding of the Pi/TV.

Ferrite clips along the HDMI and power cables failed, and initially grounding failed due to the fact I was using the whole 10 metres of cable I purchased to ground the Pi. Thinking this may be causing a lot of resistance for the low current used, I shortened it to around 50cm and…

Hooorah!

 

DIY solution to ground the RPi.
DIY solution to ground the RPi.

The Raspberry Pi and my internet working in close proximity and perfect harmony. The solution is to attach one end of a short wire to the HDMI port of the Pi, and the other end is attached to the ground pin of a standard socket plug.

This has been an expensive problem for me, 2 HDMI cables, a shielded RJ11 cable for the ADSL connection and a bunch of ferrite clips/rings when all I needed was a £2.39 piece of wire from Maplin. At least one benefit of this expense is the increased broadband speed, provided by the shielded RJ11 cable, taking my connection from 2.5Mbps to 3.2Mbps.

Its all working now, taking its place tucked behind the TV and providing me with a great media player solution, the abilility to control XBMC with my Bravia TV remote is an excellent feature.

My forum thread on the RPi forums can be found here.

Its Alive!

Finally, 4 days after delivery I finally get my Raspberry Pi powered up and functioning!

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First off, Debian Squeeze was installed, Samba added and worked out what is could, or could not do. Then it was about deciding what to do with it, first thoughts were a web server to host this Blog, but that was quickly solved by my other purchase of 4GB RAM for my Server.

The second choice was a media server, initially this looked dubious considering its performance when running Debian. But a bit of research yielded a program called xbmc, which in essence is a Linux version of Windows Media Centre. Further searching revelled a new project called Raspbmc, I thought I’d share this:

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Xbmc running on a Raspberry Pi

Raspbmc is built on a custom Linux platform that boots straight into xbmc and so acts as a purpose media player exclusively for the Raspberry Pi, and is tailored to new users not up to scratch with *nix. So much so it installs to a SD card via a single click of a program running in Windows or Mac OS X.

So far it is in Beta stage but stable, it is clear that the xbmc software on which it is based is designed for more powerful hardware than a RPi, the menus can slow and seem jerky if requesting menus in quick succession, but video playback is unaffected and is just as smooth as my Intel Core i7 laptop.

For now it suits me fine, the Pi as a media player is excellent for my needs. The fact that a quick swap of the SD card changes it from media player to desktop means I still explore Linux through Debian without messing with my current setup.